🚀 ETH Staking Deposits Skyrocket: DeFi Week of May 7

This week, Camila Russo was joined by Taylor Monahan. Taylor is the the founder of Ethereum wallet, MyCrypto, and contributes to the popular MetaMask wallet today.

She’s the first one who alerted us to the fact that in the past several months, a mysterious hack has taken over crypto wallets, draining $10 million worth of ether from OGs in the space. We begin our conversation with Taylor breaking down the hack from the beginning and also the latest in this saga. Then, we go over her own, long history in the space, she gives risk management advice for crypto users and developers, and ponders some deep questions on whether code is law and whether DeFi should really be immutable.

Samuel Haig looked at the Aragon Association’s contentious decision to use its $177M treasury for grants funding.

ANT holders expected the funds to be brought on-chain per a proposal to subject the assets to token-based governance that Aragon’s community passed last year. But the association said it “repurposed” the assets to safeguard the funds against an emergent governance attack.

Owen Fernau reported on the latest quarterly audit report for the top centralized stablecoin issuer, Tether. The document showed surplus reserve assets of $2.4B, with USDT’s supply up 25% since the year began. The market cap for USDC, Tether’s top rival, is down over the same period.

And Tarang Khaitan covered MakerDAO launching Spark Protocol, a DAI-focused fork of Aave v3. The protocol plans to send 10% of the profits generated in its first two years to Aave’s DAO in exchange for using the code.

BRC-20 is a new token standard on the Bitcoin blockchain, named after Ethereum’s ERC-20. And the idea of BRC-20 is to create fungible tokens via the Ordinals protocol. However, instead of using smart contracts, BRC-20 tokens instead require a Bitcoin wallet to mint and trade tokens.

Binance topped PEPE, AI charged TURBO, BRC-20 clogged Bitcoin

The speculative frenzy driven by memecoins appears to have plateaued, with PEPE down over 50% from its all-time high. PEPE briefly boasted a billion-dollar capitalization after being listed on Binance. Despite its recent losses, PEPE still enjoys a larger market cap than DeFi bluechips like Synthetix, Curve, and Rocket Pool.

Weekly Recap: Markets Cool Off, ETH Staking Deposits, MakerDAO's Spark Protocol, Tether's Reserves

A livestream of the biggest news of the week, every Friday at 12pm EST.

• Staked Ether Deposits Up 500% Since Shapella The queue for staked ETH withdrawals has steadily decreased since Shapella, ConsenSys’ Michiel Milanovic told The Defiant that daily staking deposits are up 500%
• Memecoins Continue to Dominate DEX Volumes As Crypto Market Slides While early buyers of memecoins have enjoyed a great start to the month, the broader market is losing ground with BTC, ETH, and BNB shedding more than 5% in the past seven days.
• Elon Musk Sends Milady NFTs Soaring The floor price of the Milady Maker NFT collection nearly doubled after a tweet from the Tesla CEO.

• Aragon ‘Repurposes’ $177M Treasury Into Grants Program The Aragon Association has nixed a governance proposal seeking to transfer control of the project’s $177M treasury to its tokenholders, claiming the move will protect Aragon against a governance attack.
• ParaSpace Team Alleges CEO Embezzled $1.7M Users of ParaSpace, a collateralized lending protocol, withdrew over $36M worth of NFTs on May 10 as allegations of embezzlement against the project's CEO came to light.
• Litecoin Transactions Up 500% On LTC-20 Token Hype Users of ParaSpace, a collateralized lending protocol, withdrew over $36M worth of NFTs on May 10 as allegations of embezzlement against the project's CEO came to light.
• Tether Reports Record Surplus Reserves Tether Holdings Limited, a company which provides operational support for the stablecoin, reported a record reserve surplus of $2.4B as of March 31.

• Markets Pull Back As Memecoin Mania Cools Crypto markets are off to a shaky start this week, with sellers defending the $2,000 price level for Ether and confirming resistance at $30,000 for Bitcoin, driving to 7.5% losses for both assets.
• MakerDAO Launches Spark Lending Protocol MakerDAO, the issuer of DAI, the leading decentralized stablecoin, launched Spark Protocol, a new lending platform that aims to bolster DAI's capabilities.
• Chronos DEX Attracts $230M With Modified ve(3,3) Tokenomics Chronos, a newly-launched decentralized exchange, is now the third-largest dApp on Arbitrum with $230M in total value locked (TVL) after just one week.
• Bitcoin Forks Rally As Fees Spike On World’s Most Valuable Blockchain Bitcoin SV (BSV), the product of a 2018 hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, is up nearly 40% in the past 24 hours.

• ETH Staking Deposits Exceed Withdrawals After Shapella Upgrade Ether staking has been outpacing withdrawals, with investors depositing 192,000 ETH while only withdrawing 29,000 ETH in the past 24 hours.

• Deloitte Taps Polkadot’s Kilt Protocol For KYC Credentials Deloitte Consulting AG, a subsidiary of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firm, Deloitte, has tapped the Polkadot-based Kilt protocol for digital identity services.