The Defiant

Happy weekend Defiers!

Cryptocurrencies rallied to fresh multi-year highs early in the week, with ETH trading above $3,000 and BTC tagging $52,900 for the first time in 22 months and 26 months, respectively. However, the markets quickly found resistance at the local price highs, with bears now threatening to dictate the next market move as digital assets consolidate.

Uniswap’s UNI governance token surged 60% on Friday after a proposal was floated by the Uniswap Foundation to turn on the protocol’s ‘fee switch.’ If passed, UNI stakers would be able to claim a portion of trading fees generated by Ethereum’s leading DEX.

Worldcoin was among the week’s top gainers after the price of WLD surged by more than double. The move comes as World App surpassed 1M in daily users for the first time.

Starknet’s long-awaited airdrop dominated headlines, with the $2B drop comprising the largest on record. However, the event also attracted controversy, with the STRK token’s allocations and unlock schedule garnering backlash from the Starknet community. StarkWare responded by revising the project’s unlock schedule, reducing the number of team and investor projects scheduled to unlock in April from 64M down from 1.3B.

Ethereum restaking persists as a leading narrative in DeFi, with Gerabox introducing leveraged restaking as a new primitive for the sector. EigenLayer also closing a $100M Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz after emerging as the fourth-largest DeFi protocol with a $7.7B TVL.

Ethena Labs’ launch of its yield-bearing stablecoin, USDe, ruffled feathers from across the web3 community. The token purports to offer 27% annual yields from a combination of ETH staking rewards and short funding rates, but many onlookers remain wary following the collapse of Terra UST in 2022.

Many of the users impacted by the widespread CeFi failures of 2022 are beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. A U.S. court ruling allows Gemini to begin selling $1.6B worth of GBTC shares it holds as collateral backing $900M worth of loans taken out from its Earn users by Genesis, the insolvent CeFi broker.

An Aave proposal to distribute quarterly airdrops to users is gathering momentum. Aave wants to reward users whose actions help achieve its strategic objectives with wETH and GHO tokens, starting with users depositing liquid staking tokens and minting GHO. Aave and Gauntlet are also parting ways after a four-year partnership.

High gas fees on Ethereum drove Ether’s supply to a new post-merge low. The milestone follows $63M worth of ETH getting burned over the past two weeks.