🤼Weekly Recap: Uniswap Labs Enrages Community With Front-End Fee

Happy weekend Defiers!

Uniswap Labs rustled feathers among UNI holders by introducing a 0.15% fee on Uniswap trades executed via its front-end interface. With the tariff expected to rake in $30M for the company annually, UNI holders believe they should also be receiving a share of protocol profits.

It was an odd week for market action, with BTC surging 10% in an hour after an untrue tweet from Cointelegraph, a crypto media outlet, falsely claimed BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF had been approved by U.S. regulators. The crypto markets gave up most of the gains over the following 60 minutes, with the tumultuous market action driving more than $150M worth of digital asset liquidations.

Vitalik Buterin said he hasn’t sold any Ether since 2018, responding to on-chain data noting $4M in ETH sales from wallets associated with Buterin in September. Buterin said sales corresponded to charitable donations he had made where the recipient opted to liquidate the coins for fiat.

Lido governance overwhelmingly voted in favor of leaving Solana after failing to turn a profit on the network. The leading liquid staking provider is also considering exiting Polygon.

EtherFi, an upstart liquid staking protocol, deployed its eETH token on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet ahead of its Nov. 6 launch. EtherFi hopes to capture market share from Lido’s stETH token by offering exposure to both Ethereum staking and restaking via EigenLayer.

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s validator waitlist has been cleared out, meaning demand from new validators is trending below its current limit of 12 per epoch (6.4 minutes). Ethereum’s developers are contemplating lowering the limit to reduce the rate of validator uptake.

In Bitcoin news, Lightning Labs updated Bitcoin’s Taproot protocol, promising to facilitate the creation of stablecoins and other web3 assets not previously seen on the Bitcoin network. The news follows the success of BRC-20 tokens and NFT-like Ordinals on Bitcoin earlier this year.

Reddit announced it will discontinue its Aribtrum-based “Community Points” system. The news quickly tanked the price of its two subreddit tokens, with three moderators accused of front-running the market based on insider information.

The SEC dropped its December 2020 lawsuit against two Ripple executives after both sides agreed to terms. The two sides will now negotiate penalties for Ripple relating to $729M worth of XRP sales deemed illegal by the judge. The news followed the SEC’s attempted appeal getting rejected after the court ruled that Ripple’s XRP coin does not inherently comprise a security even if it is sold via a securities contract.

The New York Attorney General sued Genesis, Gemini, and Digital Currency Group alleging fraud that cost 230,000 investors more than $1B. The complaint claims the firms knowingly misrepresented the risk profile of the Gemini Earn product and the company’s financial health prior to FTX’s collapse.

And in this week’s podcast, Lucas Vogelsang, the founder of Centrifuge, explores the growing intersection between real-world assets and DeFi.

Enjoy!

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