🚀Weekly Recap: Liquid Restaking Tokens Boom

The Defiant's news articles, explainers, podcasts and videos published between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2.

Happy weekend Defiers!

The markets staged a partial recovery, with BTC up 10% and ETH up 5% from their respective local lows last week. BTC rallied as outflows from Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF waned, while ETH enjoyed a boon from Standard Chartered tipping that an Ether ETF will receive approval in May.

Ethereum’s liquid restaking sector continues to surge, with combined TVL pushing past $1.3B. EtherFi, the leading LRT protocol, now holds $662M worth of ETH, while Puffer Finance rallied to a $200M TVL in its day of accepting deposits.

Liquid staking is proliferating across new chains, with Stride launching the service on both Celesia and dYdX Chain. Vector Finance also introduced vETH, a token backed by a basket of liquid staking and staking tokens.

Jupiter’s JUP airdrop captured headlines, with the drop ranking among the top ten of all time. Despite JUP hodlers celebrating the token’s $790M market cap, a nine-figure payout to Jupiter’s LFG Launchpad which will go to the team is garnering criticism and controversy.

Ethereum’s highly-anticipated Dencun upgrade, which will significantly reduce the cost of transacting on Layer 2, is now live on Sepolia after completing its second of three testnet deployments without a hitch. In other Ethereum news, the Protocol Guild, a collective of core contributors, is urging Ethereum ecosystem projects to pledge 1% of their native tokens’ supply to support ongoing development.

The aftermath from the high-profile CeFi failures of the 2022 bear trend continues to play out. Celsius began distributing $3B worth of crypto and fiat to creditors on the same day that a U.S. bankruptcy court approved FTX’s plan to disburse $7B worth of assets to users. In Singapore, a court ruled that DeFiance Capital’s assets are protected from Three Arrows Capital’s liquidators.

Elsewhere, German Police announced a more than $2B Bitcoin seizure from an alleged piracy network, Polygon downsized its team by 60 people, and hackers took control of wallets owned by Chris Larsen, the co-founder of Ripple, in a bid to drain $112M worth of XRP.

Plus, we spoke to Tina Haibodi and Teddy Knox from EigenLayer to learn about the pioneering restaking protocol, and sat down with Thomas Mattimore, the CEO of ABC Labs, to learn about creating asset-backed stablecoins with Reserve Protocol. And don't miss our video recao and analysis of all the main headlined this week and Cami's hot take on JUP in this week's Crypto With Cami.

Enjoy!

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Alpha Intel

Airdrop Strategy - Silo SEI Liquid Staking

Our resident DeFi degens walk you through how to participate in SEI liquid staking on Silo, a project that is yet to launch a token👀

Plus, we recap all of the hottest yields from across DeFi and web!

Podcast & Interviews

Creating asset-backed stablecoins with the Reserve protocol

Cami Russo spoke to Thomas Mattimore, the CEO of ABC Labs, to learn about Reserve Protocol.

Reserve is a permissionless platform that empowers anyone to launch and govern overcollateralized currencies backed by diverse baskets of assets. Reserve aims to mitigate persistent issues inherent in fiat and crypto to increase access to stable, long-lasting, inflation-proof currency.

Podcast & Interviews

Guide to EigenLayer | Restaking, AVSs, Data Availability, Risks

The Defiant was joined by Tina and Teddy from EigenLayer, the pioneering Ethereum restaking protocol, to take a deep dive into the project's architecture, use cases, and roadmap for 2024.

Friday

Bitcoin Stamps Seek To Improve On Ordinals Counterparty is seeking to ride the momentum from Bitcoin Inscriptions with its new SRC-20 token standard, also known as Bitcoin Stamps.
Universal Liquidity Protocol Pike Finance Goes Live Pike Finance, a cross-chain DeFi money market protocol seeking to overcome the security vulnerabilities of web3 bridges, is now live in beta.
Jupiter’s Launchpad Mechanism Riles Up Crypto Community Jupiter's LFG Launchpad has garnered controversy after the Jupiter team paid the protocol nine-figure fee of JUP and USDC for hosting JUP sales.
Active Dapp Users Tags Multi-Year High: DappRadar The number of active dApp users surged to its highest level since 2022 in January at 5.3M, propelled by strong adoption of web3 games and socialfi platforms.
Liquid Restaking Protocol Puffer Finance Attracts Nearly $200M On First Day The total value locked in Puffer Finance, a new liquid restaking protocol, jumped to $200M on its first day of accepting deposits.

Thursday

Stride Launches Liquid Staking Token For Celestia Stride, the leading liquid staking protocol in the Cosmos ecosystem, now supports Celestia (TIA) a few days after its DYDX launch.
Polygon Labs Cuts 60 Team Members and Spins-Off Two Units Polygon's team now spans 220 staff after downsizing by 60 people.
Real-World Asset Firm Superstate Launches First Fund Tokenizing U.S. Treasuries Superstate, an asset manager which makes tokenized investment products, launched its first fund, USTB. The fund allows users to access short-term U.S. Treasuries on-chain.
Blast Accused Of Dishonestly Forking Optimism’s Code Blast, the controversial Layer 2 team, has garnered renewed condemnation after allegely forking Optimism’s code without giving credit to the original author.
Celsius Begins Asset Distributions To Customers As Court Approves FTX’s Repayment Plan Celsius said it began distributing $3B in crypto and DeFi to creditors on the same day that a U.S. bankruptcy court greenlit FTX's repayment plan.
Ethereum Projects Urged To Donate 1% Of Token Supply To Support Development Protocol Guild, a collective of core Ethereum contributors, is calling on ecosystem projects with native tokens to donate 1% of their tokens’ supply to support ongoing Ethereum development.

Wednesday

Jupiter's JUP Token Rockets to Top 10 DEX Minutes After Airdrop Jupiter's highly-anticipated JUP airdrop ranked among the top 10 by market value. JUP's fully-diluted valuation exceeded that of Uniswap's UNI token.
German Police and DEA Announce Record BTC Seizures German police seized more than $2B worth of BTC on the same day that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced a $150M Bitcoin forfeiture.
Binance Labs Invests In Bringing Ethereum Restaking To BNB Chain Binance's venture capital wing invested in Puffer Finance to bring Ethereum liquid restaking onto BNB Chain.
Hackers Drain $112M in XRP Tokens From Ripple Co-Founder's Wallet Hackers took control of personal wallets owned by Ripple co-founder, Chris Larsen, siphoning $112.5M worth of XRP.
Vector Reserve Introduces ‘Liquidity Position Derivative’ Vector Finance's vETH token is backed by a basket of Ethereum staking a restaking tokens.
DeFiance Capital Scores Win in Singapore Dispute Against 3AC A Singaporean court ruled that DeFiance Capital's assets are protected from Three Arrows Capital's liquidators.

Tuesday

Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade Goes Live On Sepolia Without A Hitch Ethereum's highly-anticipated Dencun upgrade is live on the Sepolia testnet after a successful fork. The upgrade will next go live on the Holesky testnet on Feb. 7.
Swell Launches Liquid Restaking Token As LRTs Boom Swell is the latest DeFi project to enter the liquid restaking sector with the launch of its rswETH token.
Ether Rallies After Standard Chartered Predicts ETF Approval In May ETH posted price gains after Standard Chartered, the major multinational bank, predicted U.S. regulators will approve a spot Ether ETF in May.
Vitalik Buterin Outlines Synergies Between AI and Blockchains Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's chief scientist and co-founder, penned an article offering possible integrations between AI and web3 technologies.
Lending Protocol Abracadabra Hit By $6.5M Exploit The Abracadabra lending protocol suffered a $6.5M exploit, causing its MIM stablecoin to depeg.
Grayscale ETF Outflows Slow As BTC Price Rises The price of BTC has rallied more than 10% since outflows from Grayscale's ETF peaked on Jan. 23.
Immutable zkEVM Launches Early Access Phase On Mainnet Immutable zkEVM, Immutable's gaming-focussed Layer 2 rollup leveraging Polygon technology, is now live in early access on mainnet. Immutable said more than 200 games have committed to launching on the network.

Monday

Manta Soars To $3.7B Valuation Ten Days After Launching Token The freshly-launched token for Manta, the third-largest Layer 2 network, broke into the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
SocialFi App Farcaster’s Activity Spikes After Launching Frames Feature Farcaster's surging user base comes amid a spike in socialfi adoption.
DYdX Chain Enables Liquid Staking for DYDX Token Stride launched liquid staking for the DYDX token, with Persistence and Quicksilver also planning on launching the service.
Solana Memecoin WEN Rallies as 3-Day Airdrop Ends WEN is the latest Solana-based token to storm the memecoin rankings.