After a year-long struggle to fend off the market bears, parts of the crypto ecosystem started showing signs of recovery in the third quarter of 2022. BNB Chain’s Q3 report confirms significant growth in crypto trading volumes and decentralized finance (DeFi) but a drop in nonfungible token (NFT) trading. According to DappRadar BNB Chain Report Q3, BNB Chain retained its position as the second biggest DeFi blockchain after Ethereum (ETH), with a Total Value locked (TVL) of $7.6 billion. On the DeFi side of things, BNB Chain suffered a 93% decrease from Q3 of 2021 but has since shown signs …

DBS Bank, a major financial services group in Asia, is applying decentralized finance (DeFi) for a project backed by Singapore’s central bank. DBS has started a trading test of foreign exchange (FX) and government securities using permissioned, or private, DeFi liquidity pools, the firm announced on Nov. 2. The development is part of Project Guardian, a collaborative cross-industry effort pioneered by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Conducted on a public blockchain, the trade included the purchase and sale of tokenized Singapore government securities (SGS), the Singapore dollar (SGD), Japanese government bonds and the Japanese yen (JPY). The project has …

Nikolai Mushegian, a co-founder of the cryptocurrency lending platform MakerDAO and the decentralized Dai (DAI) stablecoin, was found dead in Puerto Rico last week. Mushegian died due to drowning after being dragged by sea currents on the Condado beach in San Juan, the local newspaper El Nuevo Día reported. Mushegian had no vital signs by the time his body was rescued. The Condado beach is considered one of the world’s most dangerous places for swimmers, reportedly taking the lives of at least eight people in 2021. The unfortunate event was reported to local authorities on the morning on Oct. 28. …

The month of October has broken all records for crypto exploits and the amount of digital loot pilfered — living up to its new moniker of "Hacktober" — according to the latest figures. On Oct. 31, blockchain security firm PeckShield tweeted some scary statistics for the month, reporting a total of $2.98 billion in stolen digital assets as of Oct. 31, 2022, which is nearly double the $1.55 billion lost in all of 2021. "Hacktober" saw around 44 exploits affecting 53 protocols, it added. Malicious actors made off with a whopping $760 million in the month, however, $100 million had …

Decentralized autonomous organizations are paving the way toward community governance for any kind of company. We’re seeing new creative use cases for DAOs, such as GameFi comic books laying the foundation for collectible card game development and support from key players like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin — who has claimed there is value in shared decision-making to eliminate acts of collusion. But on the other end of the spectrum, there are DAOs dissolving or running out of Ether (ETH) to pay back lenders, and there is also declining optimism. The number of critics is increasing along with their concern over …

Four projects have received some $7 million worth of tokens from the hacker behind the $14.5 million Team Finance exploit on Oct. 27. Over the weekend, the attacker confirmed in a series of messages that they would keep 10% of the stolen fund as a bounty and return the other tokens to the affected projects. The exploiter — a self-described “whitehat” — drained assets from Team Finance through the Uniswap v2-to-v3 migration. As reported by Cointelegraph, liquidity from Uniswap v2 assets on Team Finance were transferred to an attacker-controlled v3 pair with skewed pricing, explained the blockchain security firm PeckShield. …

Over the last year, venture capitalists poured more than $4.6 billion into infrastructure and projects related to nonfungible tokens (NFTs). This infrastructure now needs users. They will come when people understand that they can apply these NFTs not just for speculative purposes but to design and structure their everyday activities. For these, they don’t need NFTs — they need to sort their lives out. And, decentralized catalogs are there to help them do it. We can think about an NFT as a book someone owns, and this ownership is recorded on the blockchain. But what we’re actually missing is the …

The shift of the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol opened new opportunities for developers and investors to explore, including the burning of Ether. Now, Ethereum PoS transactions are validated through staking rather than mining. Staking impacts the supply and price dynamics of Ether in ways that are different from mining. Staking is expected to create deflationary pressure on Ether as opposed to mining that induces inflationary pressure. The increase in the total amount of funds locked in Ethereum contracts could also push its price up in the long term. This is because it affects one of the …

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. After the Mango Markets exploit last week, Compound protocol paused the supply of four tokens as lending collateral to protect it against any price manipulation. Crypto staking protocol Freeway said one of its trading strategies “appears to have failed,” forcing the firm to halt services earlier this week. October continues to be dominated by DeFi hacks as another DeFi lockup protocol, Team Finance, lost $14.5 million during contract migration, despite an audit clearance. MakerDAO …

On Oct. 28, NFT Steez, a bi-weekly Twitter Spaces hosted by Alyssa Expósito and Ray Salmond, met with Web3 content writer, Julie Plavnik to discuss the importance of self-sovereignty while building a digital identity in Web3. Plavnik references author Gavin Wood when describing Web3 and says that “communication” is a core tenant in the subsequent iteration of the internet. “Web3 is the communication of encrypted channels between decentralized identities,” Plavnik affirms. According to Plavnik, the emerging concept of Web3 placed a magnifying glass on user data and ownership, especially concerning the creator economy. Plavnik describes the creator economy as a …

Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) Christy Goldsmith Romero has pointed to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its flow-on effects as an example of how contagion risks within crypto markets are similar to those experienced by the traditional financial (TradFi) system during the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008. Romero suggested in a speech given at the International Swaps and Derivatives Association’s (ISDA) Crypto Forum on Oct. 26 that increased links between crypto markets and TradFi increases the risk posed by crypto to overall financial stability, noting: “The digital asset market remains relatively small and contained from the level …

On Thursday, decentralized finance, or DeFi, lockup protocol Team Finance said over $14.5 million worth of tokens were exploited though the Uniswap V2 to V3 migration function on its platform. As told by blockchain security firm PeckShield, the hacker transferred liquidity from Uniswap V2 assets on Team Finance to an attacker-controlled V3 pair with skewed pricing. By locking tokens to the contract, the attacker bypassed existing validation mechanisms and pocketed the huge leftovers as refund for profit. Uniswap V3 was designed with better efficiency for liquidity providers (LP) than V2 on its decentralized exchange. However, V2 smart contracts are still …