📈 Weekly Recap: DeFi & NFTs Rebound

Cami Russo spoke to Brendan Malone of the newly launched Policy Lab from Paradigm, a leading venture capital firm active in the web3 space. The Paradigm Policy Lab is designed to offer a collaborative space for academics, policy experts, lawyers, and technologists in the crypto sector, focusing on research and analytical thinking applied to policy in the crypto world.

Over the last year, Paradigm has become a policy leader, involved in legal battles, hosting discussions, and publishing research. The Policy Lab, guided by three principles, aims to impact the crypto policy landscape through evidence-based advocacy, interdisciplinary research with technical depth, and a commitment to humility, iteration, and crypto expertise.

The Defiant sat down with Michael Wagner, the CEO of Star Atlas, a Solana-based web3 game, to learn more about his project and the experience of building on Solana. Wagner touches on navigating the bear, Star Atlas’s tokenomics, and the broader blockchain gaming sector.

• Polkadot is About to "Fundamentally Change," Said Web3 Foundation's New CEO Fabian Gompf, Web3 Foundation's new CEO, told The Defiant that Polkadot is planning to overhaul its fundamental parachain mechanism. The upcoming Polkadot 2.0 upgrade will facilitate a marketplace for blockspace and other parachain resources.
• dYdX Suffered ‘Clearly Targeted Attack’, Founder Antonio Juliano Said DYdX suffered a targeted attack resulting in the manipulation of its YFI token market. The team used $9M from the dYdX v3 insurance fund to rectify shortfalls related to YFI liquidations. "No user funds were affected and our team is working to investigate the event," dYdX tweeted.

• THORchain Volumes Surge On Success Of ‘Streaming Swaps’ THORchain, a decentralized network that enables swaps of native assets across blockchains, has processed over $1.7B of trades in the past week, making it the third most active DEX. the THORChain attributed the surge in activity to the launch of its new “streaming swaps” feature.
• Smoothly Launches Gitcoin Campaign To Bolster Rewards For Solo Stakers Smoothly Protocol, an MEV protocol, has launched a Gitcoin campaign soliciting donations to bolster the performance of solo stakers. Announced on Nov. 16, the Social Layer Incentives for DEcentralization (SLIDE) campaign will accumulate rewards to distribute to solo and independent stakers.
• Trade Volume For Rocket Pool’s rETH Outpaces stETH By 430% Rocket Pool’s rETH is dominating trading volume among liquid staking tokens, accounting for more than half of LST volume over the past three weeks. The token drove $28.8M worth of trades, beating out stETH’s $6.7M despite Lido’s total TVL outpacing Rocket Pool by eight times.
• Bitcoin Spot ETFs: Why Do They Matter? Over its 15-year history, Bitcoin has transitioned from a niche form of digital settlement into a $700B asset tracked by the largest asset managers in the world. The very firms that many early Bitcoiners disparaged are knocking at the front door, with the SEC reviewing 12 spot Bitcoin ETF applications — sending the crypto markets surging.

• ENS Challenges Unstoppable Domains to Open its Blockchain Domain Name Patents Nick Johnson of Ethereum Name Service and Matthew Gould of Unstoppable Domains engaged in a heated debate over the patenting of blockchain domain names. Johnson criticized Unstoppable Domains for patenting its blockchain domain resolution method, a move he argued is contrary to the principles of open innovation.
• Aave Companies Rebrands as Avara to Reflect the DeFi Giant's Multiple Holdings Aave Companies is rebranding as Avara to reflect the multiple brands and services now housed under the Aave umbrella. The rebrand aims to bring a host of projects together under one umbrella, including the Lens social graph protocol, GHO stablecoin, and Aave lending protocol.
• BlackRock Submits Filing to List Spot Ether ETF BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, filed for a spot Ether exchange-traded fund with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Nov. 15. The ETF, named the iShares Ethereum Trust, is designed to reflect the performance of the price of Ether.
• Spark Protocol TVL Breaches $1B Spark Protocol, a DAI-focussed fork of Aave and MakerDAO’s first subDAO, has surpassed $1B worth of total value locked. Spark’s TVL briefly crossed $1B for the first time on Nov. 14, before firmly reclaiming the ten-figure threshold the next day.
• Vitalik Advocates For Renewed Exploration Into Plasma-Based Scaling Solutions Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder and chief scientist of Ethereum, penned a blog post advocating for greater exploration into Plasma-based scaling solutions. Buterin argued advances in validity proofs allow developers to overcome many of the issues previously encountered with Plasma.
• DYDX Token Surges Ahead Of Massive Unlock dYdX’s eponymous governance token is up 60% in the past seven days after the perpetuals DEX unveiled a staking mechanism for DYDX holders. Stakers will earn trading fees generated by the protocol.

• DeFi Rebounds as Aave v3 Loan Volume Spikes to Record Decentralized finance is snapping out of its sideways crawl. This past week, DEXes posted their highest-volume week since March, the combined TVL of DeFi protocols is at the highest since June, and Aave v3 hit an all-time high in daily assets borrowed.
• JP Morgan’s Onyx Teams Up With Avalanche To Streamline Portfolio Management JP Morgan's Onyx digital assets unit and $500B asset manager Apollo Global have joined forces with the Monetary Authority of Singapore for a proof-of-concept demonstrating how tokenization can streamline and automate portfolio management.
• Infura Taps Microsoft and Tencent For Decentralized Web3 Infrastructure Network Infura, the web3 infrastructure firm from Consensys, announced it will team up with 18 prominent internet technology firms including Microsoft and Tencent to launch a Decentralized Infrastructure Network. Infura announced the initial cohort of launch partners on Nov. 15 at the Decentralized RPC Summit at the DevConnect conference in Istanbul.
• Solana's Saga Phone is Vulnerable to Critical Exploit, Certik Says Solana’s phone is vulnerable to an attack that can put any digital assets stored on it "at extreme risk," according to analysis from the blockchain security firm, Certik. However, Solana said an authorized user must explicitly allow such changes to be made to their device, dismissing the risk posed by CertiK’s findings.

• PayPal Takes a Stance and Says Blockchains Are the New Financial Rails PayPal described blockchain as a critical new financial rail enabling payments through stablecoins in a new blog post. "Blockchain technology is the only technology that offers a fundamentally new way of doing payments," the company said.
• NFT Trading Volume Hits 4-Month High NFT trade volume tagged a four-month high on Nov. 10. Most popular collections have posted double-digit percentage gains over the past month, with Cryptopunks seeing an influx of buyers after Yuga Labs co-founder Wylie Aronow shelled out $1.1M for a rare punk.
• Uniswap Labs’ Android App Releases to 430,000-Person Waitlist Uniswap Labs launched its Android app to a waitlist of roughly 430,000 users. The company hopes to bolster its non-American user base, with Android devices boasting a smartphone market share of more than 70% worldwide.
• New Stablecoin Issuers Embrace On-Chain U.S. Treasuries As Collateral Real-world assets continue to garner adoption in web3, with a cohort of newly-launched stablecoins leveraging on-chain treasuries to support their value. On Nov. 14, Verified USD Foundation launched USDV, a fully-collateralized stablecoin backed by tokenized U.S. treasury bills. Midas also plans to integrate its treasury-backed stUSD token with top DeFi protocols in the coming weeks.

• Ripple Rallies 12% And Back In One Hour On Fake ETF News Ripple’s XRP token surged 12% before giving up all of its gains in roughly one hour after the circulation of fake news claiming that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, had filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF.
• GameFi Tokens Outshine With Sharp Recovery GameFi tokens are continuing to rally, with many of the sector's leading projects posting double-digit gains for several consecutive weeks. Data from CoinGecko shows that half of the ten largest GameFi projects gained more than 10% in the past seven days.
• Terraform Labs Acquires Data Company Pulsar Finance Terraform Labs, the developers behind the Terra blockchain, has acquired Pulsar Finance, a cross-chain portfolio manager and data infrastructure provider. The news serves as a reminder that the Terra ecosystem is striving to emerge from the rubble of its collapse.
• Aave Assets Are Still Stuck Over a Year After $100M Harmony Bridge Hack Aave users affected by last year’s $100M Harmony hack are still trying to work out how to recoup their assets. Aave users lost roughly $1.2M to the incident.
• Ether.fi launches their Liquid Staking Token Ether Fi launched its liquid staking token on mainnet, offering native restaking yields for holders. The protocol attracted more than 17,000 ETH in deposits prior to launching their LST.
• Animoca Partners With Chiliz To Boost SportFi Animoca Brands has partnered with Chiliz Chain. Animoca acquired an undisclosed amount of CHZ tokens and will onboard as a validator for Chiliz Chain as part of the deal.
• Solana Overtakes Ethereum By Active Users After 70% Spike The number of daily active users on Solana overtook the Ethereum mainnet on Nov. 11 following a sharp uptick in activity. According to data to Artemix, Solana hosted 356,300 unique users on Saturday, surpassing Ethereum’s nearly 330,000 by 10%.