Category: DeFi

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi Ethereum Reddit

Reddit forms First-Ever Blockchain Partnership with Ethereum Foundation

The massive social media and news forum Reddit has announced a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation for the creation of scalable blockchain-based applications. The collaboration represents Reddit’s first-ever blockchain partnership and further solidifies its growing commitment to the technology.

According to the announcement posted by Reddit admin u/jarins on the r/Cryptocurrency subreddit, blockchain technology will allow Reddit to provide decentralized applications to its users, helping them to “create, govern, and grow their own communities.”

“Through this partnership, we will be increasing our commitment to blockchain, accelerating scaling and resources for the Ethereum ecosystem, and bringing the value and independence of blockchain technology to millions of Redditors,” states the post.

Reddit initially collaborated with the Ethereum Foundation in June last year when it hosted an Ethereum “Scaling Bake-Off“. The event invited Ethereum-based scaling projects to put forward proposals for how they could help the r/Cryptocurrency community ‘scale’. The scaling in question involves bringing Reddit’s Community Points onto a blockchain-based network, with the eventual goal of scaling to fit all of Reddit’s 430 million monthly users. Unlike traditional, centralized computer networks, the decentralized nature of blockchain makes scaling a particularly troublesome task.

The new partnership will help to further this goal and bring a wealth of new features to the platform. Further to the new partnership, Reddit is already hiring backend engineers and blockchain developers to help build the network and its applications.

Reddit’s Ethereum-based Moon Tokens

Reddit has long been a vocal support of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, with its popular r/Cryptocurrency subreddit recently introducing ‘Moon’ token rewards on the platform. Moon (RCP) tokens are built on the Ethereum blockchain and are now the official cryptocurrency of the r/Cryptocurrency subreddit. Users are rewarded with tradeable Moon tokens when they receive ‘Karma’ for posting unique and insightful content on the subreddit.

Ethereum Price Action

The good news has helped to push the price of Ethereum (ETH) tokens up by a considerable amount in the past 24 hours, although the cryptocurrency remains slightly down over the past 7 days. It’s been a tough few weeks for cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin (BTC) suffered a rejection at $42,000 earlier this month. Along with most other coins, Bitcoin has been steadily dropping since, hitting a low of $29,300 last week.

Some altcoins have managed to weather the storm though, particularly in the Defi market. Defi Oracles network Chainlink (LINK) is up 10% in the past week, with Defi protocols Uniswap (UNI) and AAVE up by 60% and 48% respectively.

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Australia Bitcoin DeFi Tokens

DeFi Tokens Outperforming Bitcoin — Aave, Chainlink, and UNI Storming the Market with 35% Surge

DeFi tokens and altcoins have accumulated considerable gains of up to 30 % in price in the last few days. While Bitcoin still struggles to break the $32K barrier, several tokens have surpassed previous price records and setting new all-time highs, considering the increased volumes of DEXs —decentralized exchanges—, and traders looking for Altcoins with limited supply, but greater performance.

DeFi Tokens Doing Better Than Bitcoin

Despite a generally bearish market for the DeFi ecosystem at the end of 2020, DEX volumes have increased 8X by project, according to data from Dune Analytics, sparking DeFi-related tokens like Curve DAO and Uniswap UNI.

Source: Dune Analytics

From June 2020 to this month, the DeFi ecosystem has increased considerably surpassing $35B in total value lock with Uniswap —one of the most popular decentralized protocols— leading the charts.

Besides UNI, other tokens like Chainlink’s LINK and Aave have surged with double-digit gains in the last seven days. LINK has accumulated 15 % in price, outranking Litecoin as the number 7 per market capitalization.

Similarly, UNI and Aave have outperformed Bitcoin in the last few days with both tokens gaining 30-37% in price. Likewise, despite the recent price surge this month, holders are still accumulating large amounts of UNI tokens, setting the scene for a larger bull run.

Source: Coinmarketcap

On the other hand, Bitcoin still struggles to break the $32K, despite MicroStrategy recently purchasing $10M worth of BTC. The consolidation is viewed as institutional exhaustion and the uncertainty of the upcoming institutional weather under the Biden administration.

As for the top DeFi tokens in the market, LINK, UNI, and Aave are leading the top 5, together with Wrapped BTC in the #3 spot.

Top DeFi tokens per market cap. Source: Coinmarketcap

Despite the recent bearish week for Bitcoin, traders are expecting a recovery in price considering that this January 25, leaders from the World Economic Forum will discuss digital currencies as part of their Davos 2021 Agenda. Cryptocurrencies will be one of the main issues to be discussed in a session called “Resetting digital currencies”.

The panel will focus on the current environment for Bitcoin and other cryptos and the opportunities they present compared to the decreased cash use and considering how several central banks globally are issuing CBDCs —Central Bank Digital Currencies—.

Get Involved with DeFi

In Australia, there has been an increased interest in DeFi tokens now that Kraken is trying to expand its presence in the country and in the United Kingdom. The U.S.-based exchange will introduce 26 new trading pairs, including LINK and Aave that Aussies can trade with AUD.

Likewise, there are several popular Australian platforms where people can buy and trade numerous pairs, like the Brisbane-based Swyft, an exchange that offers over 200 trading pairs, including LINK and Aave — or Binance Australia, one of the largest crypto-platforms in the world, that host more than 700 pairs.

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Crypto News DeFi Tokens

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) tokens are back on the rise

After surging over the summer and crashing in September 2020, decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens are back on the rise. Since December 1st 2020 Uniswap (UNI), Aave (AAVE), Synthetix (SNX), MakerDAO (MKR), SushiSwap (SUSHI), and Curve (CRV) have all outperformed ETH and BTC. 

Source: CoinMetrics.io

DeFi development has been progressing rapidly since Q4 2020. Synthetic recently announced the initial steps of an integration with the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM), a new solution to help with scalability and reduce Ethereum transaction fees. Yearn.finance (YFI) is working on V2 of their platform and recently released an updated version of their vaults. And the Uniswap team is hard at work on Uniswap V3, which is rumored to improve slippage and potentially address high transaction fees. Uniswap trading volume has surged in early 2021 (as seen in the below chart) to similar levels as September 2020.

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Australia Bitcoin Crypto News DeFi Ethereum

Australian Analyst Positive About 2021 as Ethereum (ETH) Hits New All Time High

Australian Analyst Matt Harcourt of Apollo Capital, the country’s leading crypto-asset investment firm, recently spoke to DMARGE about crypto trends in 2021. While the discussion focused largely on Bitcoin (BTC), it’s Ethereum (ETH) that’s making headlines today after securing a new all-time high (ATH) above its previous record of AUD$1,850 (US$1,420).

Ethereum was one of the best-performing assets of 2020, gaining over 800% in value throughout the year. After starting the year at the extremely low price of AUD$166, ETH has steadily climbed to its new ATH, only suffering a brief dip during the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak.

In mid-2020, a thriving decentralized finance (DeFi) market emerged that was largely developed on Ethereum’s ERC20 protocol. Although DeFi had a somewhat bumpy start with several projects collapsing or exit-scamming, it nevertheless helped to boost Ethereum’s price and should continue to do so into 2021. 24-hour volume on the Ethereum network has also seen extreme growth this year, peaking at $140 billion on January 4.

Harcourt believes there is room for more growth going into 2021, citing a ‘broken’ financial system that will help boost interest in cryptocurrencies.

“…there is a ‘broken’ (I use that word loosely) financial system that will inevitably be replaced by the more open, fair and efficient system that is Bitcoin and blockchain technology (Ethereum, Decentralised Finance),” he told Australian news outlet DMARGE.

However, he noted that now may not be the best time to buy as prices are very high. “A good time to enter the market may come in 1, 2 or 3 months as I think Bitcoin will end 2021 at a higher price,” he said. It looks like he might be right, as other market indicators are suggesting a possible retrace from the current overbought level.

The supply of Bitcoin on exchanges is currently at the highest its been in nine months, suggesting traders are getting ready to sell. With Bitcoin already up by a massive 25 percent just in 2021 alone, buying power must surely start dissipating soon. Even the institutional interest that drove Bitcoin to new highs through late 2020 is beginning to wane, and retail investors appear to be diversifying into altcoins.

Over the past 24 hours, smaller-cap cryptocurrencies like AAVE, ATOM, and MIOTA have all enjoyed gains of between 7 to 12 percent. In the same period, Bitcoin has seen barely any change at all, suggesting that this record-breaking month-long rally that saw it double in price may finally be exhausted.

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Crypto News DeFi

DEXs on Track to Break US$55 Billion in Monthly Trading Volume

DeFi Tokens Generated $252 Million In Revenue For April 2021

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are on track to reaching another massive monthly trading volume, according to the latest market report by Messari, a cryptocurrency analytics platform. DEXs are one part of the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry that has gained immense growth in participation and market valuation since the past year, especially during the rush in DeFi.

Judging by the trading volume, the exchanges had an awakening moment in July where the volume began spiking consecutively to the all-time monthly high in September.

With 15 days left to conclude the month, DEXs could see a new ATH.

DEXs are Seeing High Trades in 2021

DEXs are seeing high market participation in January, as the monthly trading volume is already up to US$22 billion, which is about six percent below the $23.4 billion recorded in December. Recent reports had indicated that more coins, especially Ethereum (ETH), have been leaving centralized exchanges (CEXs) to other places that include DEXs. Notionally, this somewhat explains the increasing trading volume posted on these DeFi exchanges. 

Meanwhile, DEXs are likely to surpass the September ATH of US$26.7 billion, following the current trading volume so far. Potentially, the crypto analytics platform noted that the trading volume could hit a milestone record of US$55 billion in January. Among all the available decentralized exchanges, Uniswap dominates the market with a current monthly trading volume of $9.7 billion. Other leading DEXs by trading volume include SushiSwap, Curve, Synthetix, Kyber, Balancer, and dYdX.

Total Assets Valuation in DEXs

A glance at DeFi Pulse showed that DEXs are the second-largest set of DeFi protocols with about US$7.67 billion in assets locked – second to the Lending market, which has a total assets valuation of US$10.68 billion. The leading decentralized exchange, Uniswap, has more than US$2.7 billion assets locked, followed by Curve (US$1.9 billion), SushiSwap (US$1.83 billion), etc.

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Binance Blockchain DeFi

Binance and Orbs To Boost New DeFi Projects

Binance has partnered up with Orbs in order to launch a new DeFi accelerator named DeFi.org.

Orbs is an Israeli company that is building blockchain infrastructure for the general public – and Binance is one of the largest crypto exchanges out there, well-known for an extensive list of trading pairs.

Supporting Open-Source Software

The project will focus on singling out DeFi projects interested in the research and development of open-source software that can benefit the crypto space at large. The accelerator will offer mentorship, networking opportunities, and even funding for companies involved.

“We’ve assembled a group of world-class mentors, each an industry expert, in these key fields: Product/UX to help pull your concept into a shippable product. Crypto economics to discuss theory and help finetune your model. Solidity to help review and improve your contract code. Frontend/dev to help engineer a fullstack dapp and actually deliver it. Community/marketing to help level up your meme game and create a kick-ass brand.”

All mentorship and collaboration will be done remotely.

The first mentors will come from Orbs – however, Binance crypto experts will be joining the team shortly.

Following the onboarding of the Binance experts, more mentors will be recruited from various sources.

Although the accelerator program will not focus exclusively on Blockchain-based projects, special attention will be given to companies interested in either the Orbs grant program or Binance’s “Bridging CeFi and DeFi” program.

Orbs themselves were originally looking for a future outside of the DeFi space – but after in-house blockchain development led by Tal Kol – the technical co-founder of Orbs – the team has made the transition from focusing on enterprises to focusing on DeFi. Orbs have developed a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm on the Ethereum blockchain that aims to make DeFi integrations effortless.

Tal Kol will be one of the mentors in the upcoming program.

DeFi.org is already taking applications – there’s no time like the present.

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Blockchain DeFi Investing

AAVE Looking Into A Security Module Rehaul

The 8th of January marks a full year since AAVE has been on the Ethereum mainnet. The team behind AAVE hosted an anniversary zoom call to mark the occasion – an AAVEversary, if you will.

Better Insurance Against Shortfall Events

Among other small updates on the state of affairs at AAVE, the team also announced that they are in talks with Delphi Digital, who are offering to completely rework AAVE’s safety model and build a new insurance product from the ground up.

The current procedure in place at AAVE is to allow AAVE holders to stake their tokens in the Safety Module – which is a liquidity pool that aims to safeguard the tokens from smart contract exploits and other “shortfall events”. The safety module currently holds the largest decentralized insurance fund, worth about $375 million.

However, there are some pitfalls – such as the fact that the safety module covers the whole platform, which means investors who deposit funds in the safety module are covering all projects in the AAVE network – even if some projects bring with them a considerably higher risk level than others.

According to Jose Maria Macedo – a founding member of Delphi Digital and Jonathan Ehrlich – an analyst at the company, the insurance product they offered would come as a separate product for users, instead of being bundled in with all deposits, allowing a better prediction of risk factors for potential investors.

“With existing insurance solutions users have to purchase cover upfront which entitles them to insurance on a given protocol for a set amount of time (generally at least 6 months). With the current state of DeFi, most users don’t know where their capital will be next week let alone 6 months from now […] With our architecture, users only pay for insurance while they use it and the process of buying/selling is abstracted away entirely.”

Although nothing has been decided yet, the new insurance product may help AAVE attract more cautious investors, who may want to stick with safer projects – making it a proposal worth seriously considering.

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Australia Blockchain DeFi

Blockchain Australia Solutions Partners Up With Algorand

Almost 3 months ago, Ralph Kalsi – an Australian blockchain enthusiast and investor became one of Algorand’s brand ambassadors.

Since then, his company Blockchain Australia Solutions has also become an official member of Algorand’s global partner program.

Only Regional Partner

For now, Blockchain Australia Solutions (BAS) is the only official partner of Algorand in the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) region. BAS was brought into the partnership by Ralph Kalsi himself and Nadeem Shaikh (CTO) and Mohammed Naquib (CIO).

The Algorand blockchain — and it’s cryptocurrency, named Algo —  ensures true decentralization by using a Byzantine Agreement Protocol – also known in this case as a Pure-Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. The Algorand blockchain is also immune to forking.

Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols are algorithms that are immune to arbitrary types of failures in distributed algorithms. Due to the omnipresence of the Internet, there has been a need to develop decentralized algorithms that are immune to malfunctions.

Algo provides immediate blockchain transaction assurance by using high-speed block finalization. This quality alone makes Algorand highly useful to any business that was  — up until now — heavily dependent on the chain of intermediaries that support and secure transactions to a wide array of customers and employees.  

Algo’s ultra-rapid transaction delivery makes it scalable to billions of users, making it a potentially valuable tool in the banking industry. Expect to see the use of Algorand’s blockchain used by banks both decentralized and traditional within the following years. No matter how many Algo users there will be, the transaction speed will never fall below 4.5 seconds.

Blockchain Australia Solutions brings to the table a strong focus on research into blockchain technology and its applications — such as quality assurance, eco-friendly housing, and much more.

BAS is also a partner of Fintech Australia — which may provide the Algorand Foundation with plenty of networking power in Australia and New Zealand.

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DeFi Hackers

DeFi Platform Warp Finance Recovers 75 % Of $5.85M Stolen Funds

Warp Finance announced the recovery of $5.85M, 75% of funds stolen on December 17 — when an attacker withdrew a $7.76m through a flash loan exploit.

The DeFi platform said the distribution and compensation of the stolen funds for the affected users will begin on December 21. The compensation is proportional to the number of W-DAI (DAI stablecoin) and W-USD (U.S. Dollar) held at the moment of the snapshot.

While the hacker got away with nearly $8M, the DeFi firm managed to retrieve the loan collateral. White Hat hackers, which is slang for ethical hackers — helped to locate and secure the funds. Approximately 75% of users will get a reimbursement.

The attacker managed to hack Warp Finance by using several flash attacks, like multiple flash loans through dYdX protocols, flash swaps via Uniswap, and flash liquidity.

IOU Tokens For Compensation

Warp Finance plans to compensate for the remaining 25% loss with IOU tokens. According to the firm, the Portal IOU tokens will refund users in a near future, and even giving them a profit on their initial deposits.

While we are relieved that lost funds have been partially recovered, we see this only as a first step to making Warp Finance users whole. For this reason, we will issue Portal IOU tokens to every affected user. The end goal of the IOU token is to fully refund users and potentially even giving them a profit on what they initially deposited. 

Stated the firm .

Cyber-crimes have seen a surge in 2020, with more than $100M stolen including recently 8M stolen from DeFi insurer CEO Ciphertrace,  a cryptocurrency forensics and blockchain threat intelligence firm, reported on November 11 that 45% of all thefts in the first six months of 2020 were Defi hacks, equating to about $51.5M — 40% of volume for that period.

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Australia DeFi Industries

Aussie DeFi Centered Around Institutional Lending Goes Live

Maple Finance – a DeFi startup focusing on institutional lending with top-notch conditions for collateral has recently finished their seed round.

The platform will not change their rates, bringing an interesting approach to the budding DeFi industry.

However, they may make special offers for institutional customers in good standing.

The seed round for the platforms MPL governance token – which brought in revenues of about $1.3 million – was done with Framework Ventures, FTX, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, FBG, The LAO and many other investors.

Ready For Kick-Off

Sidney Powell – the co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance – commented on the establishment of his company with over $15 billion worth of assets ready to be used for DeFi loans and more.

“What we’re allowing is top institutions with solid balance sheets, sound reputations and strong cash flows soon being able to access capital-efficient finance, which enables further growth and adoption of crypto globally.”

The company has expressed its interest in serving crypto-native organizations – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) for instance.      As some of these firms don’t have traditional legal structures, investors and customers may have a harder time connecting with these firms – and that’s where decentralized finance institutions like Maple come in.

The company will split its assets up into pools – with a Pool Delegate in charge of each. These pools will be organized in categories like world regions, risk profiles, and more. Each Pool Delegate will supervise a pool where their expertise on a certain subject will be most helpful.

In order to demonstrate their business model, the first pool will soon go live – and offer limited funds within the $1-2 million range. The total amount of funds in the lending pool will be between $10 and 15 million.

With yet another up and coming decentralized financial institution, Australia continues down the path of becoming a regional – and hopefully global – blockchain superpower.