🌀 Weekly Recap: Market Turmoil Returns

This week, Cami Russo was joined by Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base — the Layer 2 scaling solution from Coinbase that launched last week.

Base has quickly become a trending topic and a trending chain this summer, attracting more than $200M of value in its short life. Coinbase is the world’s second-largest crypto centralized exchange by volume, and now it’s moving to the on-chain world. In the conversation, Jesse dives into the origin story of Base, Coinbase’s decision to launch a Layer 2 rather than build a brand new Layer 1, how Base is unique in the already crowded Layer 2 space, the project’s roadmap towards decentralization, and much more.

Is DeFi dead? With dwindling trading volumes, disappearing users, and declining value deposited in DeFi apps, it's a question many are asking. By the end of today’s video, you’ll be better equipped than MOST to answer it.

We’ve come a long way since the DeFi summer of 2020 and there’s a lot to cover from nostalgia-inducing valuations to the stomach-churning nose dives. So today, on the third anniversary of DeFi summer, we're diving deep into the sensational events, the groundbreaking innovations, and the rollercoaster of DeFi to figure out if it's dead, dying, or on the mend.

Everything You Need To Know About Liquid Staking & LSTfi

We'll chat with Stader Labs, Swell Network and Pendle Finance about DeFi's hottest topic: Liquid Staking & LSTfi.

• Parallel’s PRIME Token Doubles After Beta Launch Parallel, a gaming ecosystem whose flagship offering is a sci-fi digital trading card game, has seen its PRIME token double since the game’s beta version went live on July 31.
• Spark Protocol Users Max Out $200M DAI Debt Ceiling MakerDAO’s money market, Spark Protocol, is bumping up against its DAI debt limit less than two weeks after raising the ceiling from $20M to $200M. The pool's utilization currently sits at 99%.
• Markets Crater After Weeks Of Sideways Action After nearly a month of low volatility, the bottom fell out of crypto markets on Thursday. Bitcoin and Ether have fallen by 12% and 10% respectively over the past seven days, with other tokens experiencing even steeper declines.
• THORChain Processes Record Volume After Introducing ‘Streaming Swaps’ The governance token of the cross-chain liquidity protocol THORChain has surged over 40% this week despite a brutal selloff across broader markets. RUNE hit a four-month high of $1.64 on Aug. 18.
• Wintermute Proposal To Borrow YFI Draws Fire From DeFi Community On Aug. 13, Wintermute asked the Yearn community to consider lending the market-making firm 350 YFI ($2M) from the project’s treasury. The proposed 12-month loan would be uncollateralized and carry a nominal interest rate of 0.10%.

• Coinbase Wins Approval To Offer Crypto Futures To US Clients Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., has become the first regulated entity in the country to offer both spot trading and futures derivatives in the cryptocurrency space. Initially, futures contracts for Ether and Bitcoin will be available.
• Bitcoin Hits Two-Month Low Under $28,000 Crypto markets fell sharply Thursday in what has been a rough week for global markets, as investor concerns over interest rates resurfaced. Bitcoin is trading under $28,000 for the first time since June 20, while Ether is down nearly 4% to $1,740.
• Dexalot Awarded $3M Grant By Avalanche Foundation The Avalanche Foundation has awarded $3M in AVAX tokens to Dexalot, a fully on-chain central limit order book DEX, running on its own Avalanche Subnet. The foundation will disperse the funds over the next 12 months, contingent on Dexalot’s DEX reaching volume-based milestones.
• Shibarium Botches Launch With Bridged ETH Unrecoverable Shibarium, the long-awaited Ethereum Layer 2 from the team behind Shiba Inu (SHIB), is off to a disastrous start after completing its mainnet launch. Screenshots circulating on social media showing Shiba Inu’s pseudonymous lead developer, confessing that all Ether bridged onto the network was unrecoverable.

• Singapore Finalizes Regulatory Framework For Stablecoins Singapore has finalized its regulatory apparatus for local stablecoin issuers amid a bid to preserve its position as a regional hub for digital assets. On Aug. 15, Singapore’s central bank published updated guidelines for locally-issued stablecoins based on a public consultation in October 2022.
• Sei Network Launches Token and Mainnet Beta Sei Labs has unveiled its mainnet beta for the Sei network, a Layer-1 blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK. The project aims to facilitate high-throughput central limit order book DEXes.
• Linea Completes Public Mainnet Rollout Consensys completed the rollout of its Linea Layer 2 network with the deployment of a native bridge, “unlocking” DeFi applications on the network by allowing users to migrate ERC-20 tokens over from Ethereum. Its alpha release hosted more than 2.7M transactions from 100,000 weekly users.
• PayPal Teams Up With Ledger On Fiat Onramp For US Users PayPal launched a new fiat on-ramp for U.S. users in partnership with Ledger, a leading hardware wallet maker. Ledger Live users can now purchase BTC, ETH, LTC, and BCH via a PayPal account, subject to state laws.
• Bitcoin and Ether Hold Up Amid Market Selloff So much for a calm summer market — 28 of the top 100 digital assets dropped 5% or more today on news that a major market maker is paring down operations. The two largest digital assets, Bitcoin and Ether, proved relatively resilient, down less than 1% on the day.

• Gitcoin’s Collaboration With Shell Angers Crypto Community Gitcoin, a platform that supports open-source software development, has announced a year-long collaboration with multinational oil and gas conglomerate Shell PLC. The partnership aims to develop open-source climate solutions, but it appears the crypto community isn't impressed.
• y00ts NFT Collection to Migrate to Ethereum Popular NFT collection y00ts has announced its migration from Polygon to the Ethereum mainnet, marking its second move after initially being minted on Solana and moving to Polygon earlier this year.
• Binance To Launch opBNB Layer 2 Network Later This Month Binance announced it will deploy opBNB, a Layer 2 network for BNB Chain, on mainnet this month, meaning the deployment will take place within roughly the next two weeks. Binance first unveiled opBNB alongside launching its testnet on June 19.

• Polygon’s Fee And Transaction Volumes Diverged In Q2 Transaction fees on Polygon PoS Chain, the most popular network in the Polygon ecosystem, suffered extreme volatility last quarter. Data from Nansen shows its daily gas fees expended spiked from $80,000 to $260,000 during April, despite coinciding with transaction volume falling from 3M to 2M.
• CRV Emissions Drop By 16% As Token Turns Three Three years after Curve Finance launched its CRV token, a preprogrammed change has reduced the annual issuance of the digital asset by 16%.

• DeFi Lender Alchemix Says Vyper Hacker Returned Stolen Crypto The hacker who destabilized DeFi last week returned the stolen funds after impacted protocols offered a reward. “We are extremely happy to announce that all funds stolen by the hacker of the Alchemix @CurveFinance pool have now been returned,” Alchemix tweeted.