🐻Weekly Recap: Bears In The Driver’s Seat

Happy weekend Defiers!

Crypto markets continue to trend downwards after the Federal Reserve foreshadowed one final rate hike for the year. While the U.S. central bank decided to keep rates steady for now, Fed officials target an interest rate increase to 5.6% before 2024.

Ethereum’s new testnet, Holesky, is on-track to launch this coming week after a client misconfigured resulted in a failed deployment on Sept. 15. Holesky will replace the outgoing Goerli testnet, with developers carefully considering how Holesky can avoid the widespread testnet ETH shortage that plagued Goerli in recent years.

In other Ethereum news, devs are debating a new standard for storing code audit information on-chain. ERC-7512’s authors hope to establish a standard format for representing audit results on-chain, making it easier for ordinary users to look up audit information before interacting with DeFi protocols.

Balancer suffered its second exploit in two months after malicious actors took control of its Domain Name Servers. The DNS attack allowed hackers to redirect the balancer.fi front-end to their own malicious interface, resulting in unaware users losing around $250,000 to the perpetrators.

Grab, the popular “super app” of the Southeast Asian region boasting 180M users, confirmed it launched a centralized web3 wallet for Singaporean users. The wallet exclusively supports the Polygon network, with users able to send payments via SGD stablecoin vouchers or interact with select NFT collections.

Circle continues to expand USDC onto new networks, with Circle launching the second-largest stablecoin across the Polkadot ecosystem last week. Polkadot is USDC’s third native deployment in September following Base and Optimism, with Circle planning additional deployments on Arbitrum, Near, and Cosmos in the coming months.

The trailblazing social trading app, Friend Tech, hosted a resurgence in activity last week. The application’s fee revenue surpassed that of Uniswap amid the spike, with Friend Tech raking in nearly $1M in daily fees. However, Friend Tech is now facing competition from PostTech, an upstart competitor promising to distribute fee revenue back to users.

And in this week’s podcast, Magic Labs discusses how they are working to make it easier for web2 enterprises onbarding to web3.

Enjoy!