The cryptocurrency ecosystem underwent a turbulent year in 2022. Criticism inside and outside of the crypto industry was fueled following the collapse of FTX, Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and the Terra ecosystem. A number of losses have been recorded from these events. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis released a report in December of last year, which noted that the depegging of Terra’s stablecoin, Terra USD Classic (USTC), saw weekly-realized losses peak at $20.5 billion. Findings further show that the subsequent collapse of Three Arrows Capital and Celsius in June 2022 saw weekly-realized losses reach $33 billion. While these events may have …
On Thursday, Sky Mavis, the creator of monster-battle game Axie Infinity, released its much-anticipated RON governance token. The token is based on its Ethereum (ETH) sidechain Ronin Network. Its purpose includes paying for transactions on Ronin, staking, and participating in community proposals. According to its developers, Ronin has over 250,000 unique daily active addresses. When ranked by the number of weekly active users, Katana, Ronin's decentralized exchange (DEX), is the No. 2 largest DEX. In addition, the blockchain surpassed $5 billion in deposited value, with 15% of all NFT transactions occurring on the network in 2021. In total, there have …
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols have diversified investment opportunities in the crypto industry by facilitating novel and innovative passive income generation schemes. Delving a bit into how they work, DeFi systems are based on blockchain technology and run on programmable chains such as the BNB Chain and the Ethereum Network. The chains use decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) finance architectures to cut out the middleman and enable lending, borrowing and liquidity provision. This leads to higher interest rates compared to those provided by regulated financial institutions such as banks. For perspective, many regulated banks provide interest rates of less than one percent per …
Terra remained the focus of the majority of headlines throughout May for its spiral collapse leading to a loss of over $40 billion in investors’ money. Despite some early resistance from the community and heavy backlash from the likes of Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, Terra co-founder Do Kwon managed to relaunch the collapsed network with a new chain called Terra 2.0 (Phoenix-1). The amended proposal for the relaunch of the network by increasing the genesis liquidity, which introduces a new liquidity profile for pre-attack Luna Classic (LUNC) holders and decreases the distribution to post-attack TerraUSD Classic (USTC) holders, was …
Decentralized finance (DeFi) markets may have cooled down over the past year, but the technology powering these applications continues to advance. In particular, smart contract platforms that enable transactions to take place across DeFi applications are maturing to meet enterprise requirements. While it’s notable that enterprises have previously shown interest in DeFi use cases, smart contract limitations have hampered adoption. A report published by Grayscale Research in March puts this in perspective, noting that “Despite handling millions of transactions per day, smart contract platforms in their current state would be incapable of handling even 10% of the worlds’ internet traffic.” …