The rising popularity of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) reflects the growing tendency toward the creation of community-focused projects within the Web3 ecosystem. At its core, a DAO is an organizational structure that allows decentralized decision-making within a community. Currently, there are over 4,000 of these projects in existence, according to the registration data of DeepDAO. With new tools available to make DAOs easier than ever, quantity can easily overtake quality within these communities and it begs the question of what will eventually make these projects relevant in the long run. A basic ingredient The basic structure for decentralized organizations seems …

Cryptocurrency lending firm Genesis Global Capital and other crypto firms are under investigation by securities regulators in the United States, according to reports on Nov. 25. Joseph Borg, Alabama Securities Commission Director, confirmed that its state and several other states are participating in inquiries regarding Genesis' alleged ties to retail investors, including if Genesis and other crypto firms might have violated securities laws, Barron's reported. It is still unclear what other companies are being investigated. Borg noted that the investigation focuses on whether Genesis and other crypto companies influenced investors on crypto-related securities without obtaining the proper registration. The investigation …

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week. The prolonged crypto winter aided by the collapse of FTX has kept investors from backing a new protocol that merges DeFi and the foreign exchange market. A new Cosmos blockchain-based DeFi protocol has caught the eyes of investors who have put $10 million behind the project. Cardano-based leading stablecoin ecosystem Ardana abruptly stopped its development after several launch delays. However, the project remains open-source for others to add to it until they restart the …

Amber Group's co-founder Tiantian Kullander, also known as TT, unexpectedly passed away in his sleep on Nov. 23, according to the company's official website. Tiantian was 30 years old and leaves behind a wife and a son. Besides co-founding the Hong Kong-based Amber Group, TT sat on the board of the e-sports company Fnatic and founded KeeperDAO, a DeFi protocol that allows participants to trade, borrow and stake assets with protection from miner value extracted (MEV) bots, before returning it to the community. In an official statement, Amber Group noted that TT had devoted his heart and soul to the …

Exchange aggregator 1inch released a new tool called “Rabbithole” on Nov. 25, which the company says will protect traders against malicious “sandwich attacks.” The team announced the launch of the tool in a press release that has been made available to Cointelegraph. Rabbithole works by allowing users to submit transactions directly to Ethereum nodes, bypassing the mempool. In order to use it, users need to change the remote procedure call (RPC) endpoint in their crypto wallet. After that, each swap initiated via 1inch will be analyzed by the private tx routing algorithm developed by the 1inch team and then sent …

After community backlash received from an initial privacy policy revision on Nov. 23, ConsenSys, the parent company of MetaMask, released a statement to reiterate the intentions of its data collection. The company stated that the policy has always relayed how certain types of personal information are automatically collected, which could include IP addresses. According to ConsenSys, the latest updates were in the act of transparency as to how Infura, MetaMask’s default Remote Procedure Call (RPC), works with user data. ConsenSys highlighted that MetaMask itself does not collect IP addresses. Rather the policy says users running the wallet through Infura applications …

United States-based ApeCoin (APE) holders could miss out on staking rewards after the U.S. was added to a list of regions geo-blocked from using an upcoming APE staking service. Blockchain infrastructure company Horizen Labs, which is building the site on behalf of the ApeCoin decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), revealed the news in a Nov. 24 update regarding ApeStake.io on Twitter, saying “unfortunately, in today’s regulatory environment, we had no good alternative.” Ape Staking Update: Big thanks to the talented community devs for their helpful improvements. Bug Bounty AIP delayed us a bit, so we shortened the pre-deposit period by a …

On Nov. 24, Ardana, a leading decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoin ecosystem building on Cardano (ADA), abruptly halted development, citing "funding and project timeline uncertainty." The project will remain open-source for builders while treasury balances and remaining funds will be held by Ardana Labs "until another competent dev team in the community comes forward to continue our work." "Development on Cardano has been difficult with alot of funding going into tooling, infrastructure and security. This alongside the uncertainty around development completion has led to the best course of action being halting development of dUSD." The move came as a shock …

On Nov. 23, one day after Mango Markets exploiter Avraham Eisenberg attempted to use a series of sophisticated short sales to exploit decentralized finance protocol Aave, project contributors have put forth a series of proposals to deal with the aftermath. As told by protocol engineering developer Llama and financial modeling platform Gauntlet both of whom are deployed on Aave: "Over this past week, the user 0x57e04786e231af3343562c062e0d058f25dace9e [wallet associated with Eisenberg] opened a short position on CRV [Curve] using USDC as collateral. At its peak, the user was shorting ~92M units of CRV (roughly $60M USD at today's prices). The attempt …

The ongoing crypto bear market has proven itself to be a builders market as investments continue to find projects with promise. Onomy, a Cosmos blockchain-based ecosystem, just secured million from investors for the development of its new protocol. The project merges decentralized finance (DeFi) and the foreign exchange market (FX) to bring the latter on-chain. According to the developers, the latest funding round garnered $10 million from big industry players such as Bitfinex, Ava Labs, the Maker Foundation and CMS Holdings among others. Lalo Bazzi, co-founder of Onomy, says the underlying goal of building a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with …

Blockchain analytics carried out by a Nansen researcher has highlighted outflows of Ether (ETH) and stablecoins from centralized exchanges in the wake of FTX’s collapse. Nansen research analyst Sandra Leow posted a thread on Twitter unpacking the current state of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), with a specific focus on the movement of ETH and stablecoins from exchanges. As it stands, the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract contains over 15 million ETH while some 4 million Wrapped ETH are held in the WETH deposit contract. Web3 infrastructure development and investment firm Jump Trading holds over 2 million ETH tokens and is the third …

Bitcoin (BTC) is forecasted to be a less enticing payment choice by cybercriminals as regulations and tracking technologies improve, thwarting their ability to safely move funds. Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in a Nov. 22 report noted that ransomware negotiations and payments would rely less on Bitcoin as a transfer of value as an increase in digital asset regulations and tracking technologies will force cybercriminals to rotate away from Bitcoin and into other methods. As reported by Cointelegraph, ransomware payments using crypto topped $600 million in 2021 and some of the biggest heists such as the Colonial Pipeline attack demanded BTC as …