🤼Weekly Recap: Uniswap Labs Enrages Community With Front-End Fee

In this week’s alpha, our resident DeFi degens guide you through how to take advantage of Frax’s long-awaited staking vault! The protocol aims to outperform the U.S. Federal Reserve Rate on Reserve Balances, which currently sits at 5.4%.

Cami Russo spoke with Lucas Vogelsang, the founder of Centrifuge, a credit platform that brings Real World Assets on-chain.

Real World Assets (RWAs) have been a growing sector in DeFi over the last year. Vogelsang discusses how RWAs bridge the gap between tradfi and DeFi, dives into the nitty-gritty of matching institutional asset managers with real-life borrowers, what protections are in place in case of loan defaults, and what the future looks like for this sector.

KYC and DeFi: an unsettling pairing that sends shivers down the spines of many in the world of crypto. And yet, last week it was seen on uniswaphooks.com.

The discovery of community-created ‘hooks’ to enable KYC and whitelists for transactions on Uniswap V4 raised some eyebrows. Are we actually getting KYC checks in Uniswap? Let’s dig in.

• Uniswap’s New Fee Heightens Token/Equity TensionTensions have manifested between UNI holders and Uniswap Labs after the company imposed a 0.15% on transactions executed via its front-end interface. With the move projected to gross $30M in fees annually, UNI holders believe they should also receive a share of the profits.
• Yearn Overhauls YFI Tokenomics Yearn Finance, DeFi’s oldest yield aggregator, has revamped its tokenomics to embrace a Vote Escrow mechanism funded by its buy-back program. Stakers accumulate voting rights for allocating how protocol rewards are distributed under the new system.
• Bitcoin Hashrate Continues To Hit All-time Highs Bitcoin miners continue to invest in upgraded hardware and new facilities despite the world’s most valuable digital asset trading sideways since March. The network’s hashrate hit an all-time high of 455 exahashes per second on Oct. 12 and has doubled since January.
• Infinex Kicks Off Governance Farming Campaign Infinex, the new perpetuals exchange from Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, launched a farming app to distribute ‘governance points’ to crypto exchange users. InfinexDAO members can provide input into the design for the new exchange’s interface.

• SEC Drops Securities Lawsuit Against Ripple Executives The SEC dropped its December 2020 complaint against Ripple chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse, and co-founder, Chris Larsen. Oct. 19 court filings indicate that both parties volunteered to dismiss the case with prejudice, preventing the SEC from rehashing the charges at a later date.
• Consensys Founder Joe Lubin is Being Sued by Ex-Employees in Equity Dispute Early Consensys employees are alleging that the firm’s CEO, Joseph Lubin, cheated them out of equity in the company. The former employees allege that Lubin persuaded them into taking lower salaries while promising they would receive equity at a later date.
• Taproot Assets v0.3 Enables Issuance Of Stablecoins On Bitcoin Network Lightning Labs has launched the mainnet alpha of Taproot Assets v0.3, which introduces a feature-complete developer experience for issuing, managing, and exploring stablecoins and other assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. “We believe this new era for Bitcoin will see a myriad of global currencies issued as Taproot Assets,” said Lightning Labs.
• Lido Token Holders Discuss Whether to Leave Polygon Lido token holders are discussing whether to exit Polygon just days after they voted to leave Solana. A Lido community member proposed exiting Polygon due to concerns over lackluster revenue, brand risk, and Polygon's uncertain roadmap.
• Reddit Mods Accused of Selling Subreddit Tokens With Inside Information Three moderators of the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit are being accused of using insider knowledge of Reddit’s decision to sunset crypto-based Community Points to sell their own tokens ahead of the community. The MOON token started selling off about an hour before Reddit announced its decision to kill the points program.
• New York AG Sues DCG, Genesis, and Gemini for Massive Investor Fraud New York's Attorney General Letitia James is launching an aggressive lawsuit against crypto titans Gemini, Genesis, and Digital Currency Group. The lawsuit alleges the firms caused $1B in losses for 230,000 investors by misrepresenting the risk profile of the Gemini Earn product.
• ZkLend Completes Mainnet Launch On Starknet ZkLend, the decentralized money market protocol native to Starknet, an Ethereum Layer 2, completed its mainnet launch on Oct. 19. Users can now permissionlessly deposit assets to earn yield or borrow tokens via zkLend’s retail-focussed platform, Artemis.
• Circle Brings Gasless Transactions To Grab Wallet Users Grab, the Southeast Asian ‘super app’ servicing 180M users, is offering fee-free NFT experiences for Singaporean Web3 wallet users. Announced on Oct. 19, Grab’s wallet will pilot Circle’s new Gas Station product, which allows developers to offset the gas fees incurred by user transactions.
• Vitalik Says He Hasn’t Sold Any ETH Since 2018 Vitalik Buterin said he hasn’t taken any profits on his personal stash of ETH since 2018. The pronouncement follows on-chain researchers spotting $4M worth of ETH sales from wallets closely associated with Buterin last month.

• Yuga Labs CEO Addresses Community Criticism Yuga Labs, the company behind top NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, plans to restructure its operations. CEO Daniel Alegre took to X to address some of the recent concerns raised by the community.
• Hope Lend DeFi Platform Loses 526 ETH in Hack The Hope Lend DeFi protocol suffered an exploit leading to a loss of 526 ETH. Crypto analyst Spreek identified the breach, suggesting the attacker may have exploited a vulnerability relating to how WBTC decimals were rounded in its contracts.
• EtherFi's Liquid Staking Token Live On Goerli Ahead Of Mainnet Launch eETH, the highly-anticipated liquid staking token from EtherFi, is now live on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet ahead of its Nov. 6 mainnet launch. eETH differentiates itself from competitors by also offering holders exposure to restaking yields via EigenLayer.
• Avalanche-Based Stars Arena Resumes Trading Post Audit Stars Arena, a social finance platform on the Avalanche blockchain, has resumed trading following an audit by blockchain security firm Paladin. Thetwo medium-risk issues identified in the audit were left unchanged at re-launch.

• Scroll TVL Triples In A Day As Layer 2 Ramps Up Marketing Scroll overtly declared its mainnet deployment is open for business on Oct. 17, prompting a surge in deposits to the network. Scroll’s total value locked rose 260% to nearly $3.1M on Oct. 17.
• Reddit To Discontinue Community Points Within Weeks Reddit will be phasing out its use of crypto-based Community Points by early November. The MOON token — linked to r/CryptoCurrency — crashed 80% in the wake of the news.
• dYdX Trading is Converting to Public Benefit Corporation dYdX Trading Inc. announced it has transitioned into a Public Benefit Corporation. As part of the company's new charter, it won't generate trading fee revenue from dYdX v4.
• There is No Mention of Crypto in Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Essay Marc Andreessen's "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" doesn't mention crypto or any directly related term. Given that a16z has poured billions into the industry, it was puzzling to try to find some hint of how crypto fits into the manifesto and come out empty-handed.
• Fantom Foundation Wallets Hacked and Drained in Exploit The Fantom Foundation lost $550,000 in an exploit attack targeting its wallets. While the foundation said more than 99% of its funds remain secure, one of its employees lost $3.4M to the incident.
• Cointelegraph Publishes Post-Mortem After Inaccurate Tweet Sends BTC Flying A tweet from Cointelegraph falsely claiming U.S. regulators had approved BlackRock's proposed ETF triggered violent volatility in the markets. On Oct. 16, Bitcoin abruptly rallied from $27,700 to $29,400 in one hour, before giving back most of its gains over the following 60 minutes.
• Blur Season 2 To End In November Blur, the leading NFT marketplace by volume, is set to end its Season 2 airdrop campaign on November 20, nine months after launching the open-ended program. Its inaugural airdrop campaign was highly effective in capturing market share from the then-leading marketplace OpenSea.

• Uniswap To Charge 0.15% Swap Fee On Website and Wallet Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange by trade volume, announced it will start charging a swap fee for a select group of tokens on its web app and wallet. Starting tomorrow, Uniswap Labs will implement a 0.15% swap fee on certain trades made through its front-end interface.
• Lido Exits Solana Following Community Vote Lido, the largest liquid staking provider, decided to exit the Solana blockchain as revenue that was expected to come in from the operation didn't offset its development and marketing costs. Around 93% of votes were cast in support of the proposal.
• Scroll Suffers From Weak Adoption One Week After Mainnet Launch Scroll, the long-awaited Ethereum Layer 2, is suffering from poor adoption roughly one week after discretely executing its mainnet launch. On-chain data shows 720 unique wallets have deposited just $700,000 worth of ETH and ERC-20 tokens on the network.
• Ethereum's Validator Waitlists Are Now Empty Ethereum’s validator queues are empty, meaning no prospective ETH stakers currently waiting to come online. The metric indicates demand from new validators no longer exceeds the churn-rate for onboarding, with 12 validators able to come online every epoch (6.4 minutes).
• Ferrari Rolls Out Support For Crypto Payments In The U.S. Ferrari, the renowned Italian sports car manufacturer, now accepts payments in the form of cryptocurrency for its vehicles in the United States. On Oct. 14, Ferrari announced it tapped BitPay, a leading cryptocurrency payment processor, to support purchases using BTC, ETH, or USDC.