Ethereum

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week. The past week in DeFi was dominated by exploits and hacks, with three DeFi platforms losing nearly $39 million. Alphapo’s hot wallets were exploited for over $32

Legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee, who died in 1973, is set to teach martial arts in the metaverse through a tribute event hosted by a social entertainment platform to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the actor’s passing.  Metaverse project Byte City announced on July 26 that those who wish to engage with the

The Optimism network has surpassed Arbitrum in transaction volume for the first time in six months, according to July 27 data from blockchain analytics platform Artemis. Both networks are layer 2s of Ethereum that use optimistic rollup technology, which compresses and batches transactions before submitting them to Ethereum, potentially lowering transaction fees. Optimism fell behind

A new wallet that has launched on Optimism allows users to generate an address without storing seed words, and the account can be saved using an ordinary Twitter login. Called “Beam,” the wallet runs in a browser window and requires no downloads, according to a July 27 announcement from its developer. It also allows users

During a period of hyperinflation in 2013, “my Venezuelan mother asked me to send money to Caracas, the country’s capital,” Hervé Larren recalls. However, bank transfers were not possible between the two countries.  Busy with work in New York, he told a friend that he planned to fly to Caracas — carrying cash for his

In this week’s newsletter, read about how Reddit onboarded millions into Web3 through its nonfungible token (NFT) avatars, and check out McDonald’s first metaverse experience in The Sandbox. Find out why professional gamers are interested in trying out Web3 games, and why Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis is partnering with NFT collection CyberKongz to develop

In 2018, Ethereum lead developer Fabian Vogelsteller contacted the community for a new standard for smart contracts he created alongside co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Dubbed ERC-20, Vogelsteller, at the time, only wished for input regarding the novel idea. Little did he know that ERC-20 would ignite a wave of initial coin offerings (ICOs) shortly after its

Jameson Lopp has been on the front lines of the battle between technologists and those who want to preserve Bitcoin as it is since the scaling debates of 2015–2017. The topic arouses such passion that many suspect it was a disgruntled Bitcoiner opponent who called down an armed SWAT team to his home, leading him

Lending app Era Lend on zkSync has been exploited for $3.4 million worth of crypto, according to a July 25 report from blockchain security firm CertiK. The attacker used a “read-only reentrancy attack” to drain the funds, which is a type of attack that interrupts a multi-step process and then causes it to continue after

Ether price is down today, and several data points are beginning to suggest that further downside could be in store.  On July 24, Ethereum (ETH) experienced a drop close to its monthly low, reaching $1,825, amid Bitcoin’s negative price action, as uncertainty loomed over macroeconomic conditions and a potential whale sell-off. Several on-chain and technical

Seychelles-based cryptocurrency derivatives exchange Bitget has seen prolific growth in key metrics through the first half of 2023, driven by the integration of a recently acquired self-custodial wallet service. Bitget is currently undergoing a rebranding initiative following its acquisition of BitKeep, with the latter being renamed Bitget Wallet. The platform has produced some impressive market performance

Bitcoin-related investment products appear to have lost some of their sheen among crypto investors, recording its first week of outflows since Blackrock filed for spot Bitcoin ETF in June. According to a July 24 report by CoinShares’ head of research, James Butterfill, Bitcoin (BTC) investment products saw outflows of $13 million for the week ending July

The Connext cross-chain bridging protocol has announced a new token standard to reduce losses from bridge hacks. According to a July 24 announcement, the new “xERC-20” standard allows token issuers to maintain a list of official bridges and control how many tokens can be minted by each. In addition to Connext, decentralized finance (DeFi) platform

The latest version of Web3 social layer Lens Protocol has been released, introducing improved functionality to support new use cases and shared monetization for its growing Web3 user base. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) firm Aave Companies announced Lens Protocol v2 on July 17 during EthCC in Paris, with the code powering the protocol reworked to enable

An executive from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) believes that Web3 has the solutions to the headaches and problems found on Web2-based social media platforms.  During a keynote speech at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), a16z partner Sriram Krishnan shared a presentation explaining how Web3 can fix social media and consumer applications. Krishnan stressed

Amid the growing popularity of zero-knowledge (ZK) proof based layer-2 scalable solution, decentralized finance liquidity protocol Symbiosis has added support for Linea, a zkEVM-based Consensys-developed scalable solution for cross-chain swaps. Symbiosis said in a statement that Linea is a developer-ready zkEVM roll-up type, which means it is Ethereum-compatible and thus lets developers reuse a lot