🐻Weekly Recap: Bears In The Driver’s Seat

This week, our resident DeFi degens dive into advanced strategies for yield generation on KyberSwap BaseSwap. In addition to providing ETH and stETH for cross-chain swap settlement, upcoming support from Pendle for Kyber’s yield-bearing tokens will offer additional returns for farms.

Sean Li is the CEO and Co-founder of Magic Labs, a wallet supporting passwordless login without seed phrases. Magic Labs recently raised $52M from PayPal Ventures, onboarded mainstream brands like Mattel and 7-Eleven, and boasts more than 25 million wallets installed by users.

In this week's podcast, we dive into Magic Labs’ enterprise-friendly focus, their major business collaborations, Li’s vision for driving mainstream adoption of DeFi and web3, and much more!

• Digital Asset Markets Shaken By Hawkish Fed Outlook Digital assets tentatively sold off this week in response to the Federal Reserve indicating another rate hike may come this year, despite deciding to keep interest rates steady on Wednesday. Projections released by the central bank show median rates of 5.6% before year’s end, up from the current range of 5.25% to 5.5%.
• ApeCoin Community To Acquire Top NFTs Through New DAO The ApeCoin DAO will soon launch a sister DAO tasked with acquiring influential NFTs after a governance proposal that passed by a narrow margin. The plan includes securing 750,000 APE tokens from the ApeCoin treasury to fund a community-governed NFT vault.

• Prisma Finance Pulls In $30M With LST-backed mkUSD Stablecoin DeFi traders are -piling into Prisma Finance, a new lending protocol offering a liquid staking token-backed stablecoin. Prisma’s debt ceiling was filled within two hours after its limit was raised from $20M to $30M on Sept. 15.

• Trading Volume On Social App PostTech Crosses $5M Inspired by the recent success of friend.tech, social media users are now flocking to its fresh-faced rival PostTech. The upstart app attracted more than 30,000 users over just the past week.
• Ethereum Developers Debate New Standard For On-chain Audit Reports Ethereum developers have proposed a new smart contract standard, ERC-7512, intended to help users look up smart contract audits for DeFi protocols. “To provide strong guarantees about security and allow better composability, it is important that it is possible to verify on-chain that a contract has been audited,” its authors wrote.

• Grab Launches Web3 Wallet For Singaporean Users Grab, Southeast Asia’s “super app,” launched a web3 wallet for Singaporean users supporting select NFT collections and SGD stablecoin payments. “Grab has shipped a Polygon-based Web3 Wallet for digital payment vouchers and collectibles,” Polygon said.
• Nouns NFT Holders Opt To ‘Rage Quit’ Through New Fork Nouns, the prominent NFT project, split in half following contentious governance maneuvers. When the dust settled, a third of holders had voted to break away and form a new DAO and take half of the project’s treasury with them.
• Native USDC Rolls Out Across Polkadot Ecosystem Circle has launched USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market cap, natively on Polkadot. Ecosystem parachains can now access the stablecoin, with Polkadot celebrating the integration as bolstering liquidity and facilitating institutional onboarding.

• Hackers Compromise Balancer Website In Ongoing Exploit Balancer’s front-end interface was compromised after suffering a Domain Name Server. Hackers seized control of the balancer.fi interface, resulting in unaware users losing around $250,000 in crypto to the incident.
• Market Rally Stalls Following Latest SEC Filing Against Binance Crypto markets started off the week in the green, but bullish momentum plateaued following the latest filing from SEC in the agency’s ongoing legal spat with Binance. The SEC requested access to internal Binance communications.
• Ethereum’s New Holesky Testnet Delayed After Launch Failure Ethereum’s new Holesky testnet is expected to go live next week after a technical misconfiguration resulted in a botched launch on Sept. 15. Holesky will replace the long-running Goerli testnet once Goerli depreciates next year.

• One Year After The Merge: ETH Supply Shrinks But Challenges Remain While Ether has traded sideways following The Merge 12 months ago, much has changed for Ethereum’s network fundamentals. New Ether issuance is down more than 80%, staking participation is up 87%, and nearly 1M ETH has been permanently burned from supply.
• friend.tech Trading Volumes Cross $220M Friend Tech, an application that offers token-gated chat rooms, appears to be catching a second wind, with trade volume rebounding to post fresh highs. The resurgence in activity also propelled Base back to the top of the Layer 2 throughput rankings.