Over the last week, the leading 100 decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens have remained relatively steady, with most of them recording marginal weekly profits.
Welcome to ‘Finance Recalibrated’, your essential weekly update on the evolving world of DeFi — a meticulously compiled newsletter designed to keep you informed on the most significant occurrences of the previous week.
The second quarter of 2023 witnessed DeFi protocols losing over $208 million to exploits and hacks. With a meager $4.5 million recovered, the total losses amounted to more than $204 million.
Despite commanding billions in daily trading volumes, the DeFi landscape continues to be a niche segment within the crypto industry, somewhat inaccessible to a larger audience. For an in-depth understanding of DeFi, refer to Cointelegraph Research’s newly released report, “Investing in DeFi: The Comprehensive Guide.”
Maple Finance, a DeFi lending protocol, has chosen to offer loans directly to some borrowers, stepping away from its earlier reliance on pool delegates for capital provision. This move is aimed at filling the void left by now-defunct major lending protocols like BlockFi.
The growing popularity of Bitcoin’s BRC-20 token standard has spurred many top wallet service providers to accommodate the new token standard. Following the Bedrock upgrade, transactions on the Optimism network witnessed a 67% spike.
The top 100 DeFi tokens continued their bullish run into the last week of June, with most tokens reflecting positive trading.
A recent report published on June 27 by Web3 portfolio app De.Fi reveals that DeFi scams and hacks led to a loss of over $204 million in Q2 2023. The report, named “Q2 De.Fi Rekt Report”, relied partially on data from De.Fi’s Rekt Database. While $208.5 million was exploited during the quarter, $4.5 million was reclaimed through legal actions, deals with hackers, and other recovery methods. The report highlights a year-over-year increase in DeFi hacks by “almost 7 times”, with 117 incidents in Q2 2023 compared to only 17 in the same quarter of the previous year. Total losses in H1 2023 amounted to over $665 million.
Maple Finance, the Web3 lending platform, recently announced the initiation of a direct lending program, aiming to replace services previously offered by now-bankrupt lenders such as Celsius and BlockFi.
Following the June 7 “Bedrock” upgrade, transactions on the Optimism network surged 67%, as per a June 26 Twitter thread from blockchain analytics firm Nansen. Daily transactions, which had been less than 300,000 prior to the upgrade, rose to over 550,000 by mid-June.
Despite a market downturn, BitKeep, a self-custody wallet provider, declared support for BRC-20 tokens issued on the Bitcoin network on June 21. The update enables users to view, rank, and transfer BRC-20 tokens and nonfungible tokens. BRC-20 in-wallet swaps are expected to be introduced “in [the] future.”
In the previous month, cryptocurrency exchange OKX also rolled out support for BRC-20 assets through the OKX Wallet app. Several centralized and decentralized exchanges have similarly enabled BRC-20 support.
The total market value of DeFi saw a bullish uptrend after a three-week bearish phase. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView suggests that the top 100 DeFi tokens by market capitalization experienced a bullish week, with the majority trading in the green. The total value locked in DeFi protocols, however, stayed below the $50 billion mark.