Around the same time a South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for Terra co-founder Do Kwon, Apollo DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization building on the Terra blockchain, said it was closing down its vaults on Terra Classic. The project's developers wrote: "Since the collapse of Terra, Apollo has continued to maintain its LP [Liquidity Provider] vaults on Terra Classic; however, due to the low return and high level of required maintenance, it no longer makes sense to support the Terra Classic network." The Apollo DAO, comprised of over 10,000 token holders, built its vaults primarily for trading the Terra …

A report from blockchain analytics platform Nansen highlights five entities that hold 64% of staked Ether (ETH) ahead of Ethereum’s highly anticipated Merge with the Beacon chain. Ethereum’s shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is set to take place in the coming days after final updates and shadow forks were completed in early September. The key component of The Merge sees miners no longer used as validators, replaced by stakers that commit ETH to maintain the network. Nansen’s report highlights that just over 11% of the total circulating ETH is staked, with 65% liquid and 35% illiquid. There are a total …

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. Decentralized applications, or DApps, finally showed a glimmer of recovery in August as the daily average of unique active wallets rose by 3.7% compared to May. With just under a week left for the Merge, SEBA Bank has opened Ethereum staking services for the institutions. On the other side, layer-2 scalability solutions are hopeful of seeing a significant cut down in their carbon emissions post Merge. This past week, two DeFi protocols became victims …

Ethereum is just over a week away from officially moving to a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain with the Merge slated for completion around Sept. 13–15. With the transition, Ethereum would abandon its current proof-of-work (PoW) chain, eliminating miners from the ecosystem. Ethereum is a vast ecosystem with thousands of decentralized applications and decentralized finance protocols working on top of it. Additionally, there are several layer-2 solutions, i.e., solutions built on top of the blockchain itself, the layer 1, to facilitate faster transactions and make Ethereum more scalable. The Merge would mark the completion of the second phase of the three-phase transition …

The Vienna-based fintech unicorn Bitpanda is harkening back to the ways of traditional finance (TradFi) through new offerings on its exchange platform. By adding commodities to its list of available investment options, Bitpanda aims to provide its users to benefit from short-term price fluctuations in more traditional instruments, such as oil, natural gas and wheat. Bitpanda CEO Eric Demuth told Cointelegraph that due to investor demand, the line between TradFi and decentralized finance (DeFi) is becoming more blurred every year. “People want to be able to trade multiple asset classes simply, safely and conveniently, and TradFi is catching up to …

New Free DAO, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, faced a series of flash loan attacks on Sept. 8, resulting in a reported loss of $1.25 million. The price of the native token has dropped by 99% in the wake of the attack. Unlike normal loans, several DeFi protocols offer flash loans that allow users to borrow large amounts of assets without upfront collateral deposits. The only condition is that the loan must be returned in a single transaction within a set time period. However, this feature is often exploited by malicious adversaries to gather large amounts of assets to launch …

The DAO behind the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Aave has accepted a proposal to reward members from Aave Companies with $16.28 million in retroactive funding for their role in the development of Aave Protocol V3. Voting for the proposal began on Sept. 6, and at the time of writing has already passed 667,000 votes in favor of the funding, more than doubling the 320,000 required. The vote is set to end on Sept. 8. According to the initial proposal, which was first pitched on Aug. 10, the Aave Request for Comment (ARC) seeked “retroactive funding” for work in developing the …

Avalanche-based lending protocol Nereus Finance has been the victim of a crafty hack that saw a user net $371,000 worth of USD Coin (USDC) using a smart contract exploit. Blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK was one of the first to detect the exploit on Sept. 6, indicating that the attack impacted liquidity pools on Nereus relating to decentralized exchange Trader Joe and automated market maker Curve Finance. CertiK also suggested that underlying protocols themselves were impacted, however, Curve Finance responded via Twitter on Sept. 7, stating “maybe you meant ‘assets impacted,’ not ‘protocols impacted’. Only @nereusfinance and its assets seem impacted.” …

As the Ethereum network moves from proof-of-work (PoW) consensus to proof-of-stake (PoS), a digital asset platform initiated a service for institutions to dive into Ether (ETH) staking. In an announcement sent to Cointelegraph, Swiss digital asset banking platform SEBA Bank said that it has launched an Ethereum staking service for institutions that want to earn yields from staking on the Ethereum network. According to the firm, the move is a response to the growing institutional demand for decentralized finance (DeFi) services. According to Mathias Schütz, an executive at SEBA Bank, the firm believes that institutions can also play a role …

All facets of a token's production and management, including its allocation to various stakeholders, supply, token burn schedules and distribution, are managed through tokenomics analysis. Tokenomics help to determine the potential value of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Since the law of supply and demand cannot be changed, tokenomics dramatically impacts the worth of each nonfungible token (NFT) or cryptocurrency. Related: What is Tokenomics? A beginner’s guide on supply and demand of cryptocurrencies However, there are various loopholes in the tokenomics design, such as a substantial initial supply allocation to insiders, which may be a pump and dump warning sign. Also, …

The growing number of speculators taking out Ether (ETH) loans to maximize their potential to earn forked Ether Proof-of-Work tokens (ETHPoW) has been causing headaches for decentralized finance protocols. The issue has been gaining traction over the past month or so, given that a significant number of Ether miners are expected to continue working on a forked PoW chain, or possibly even multiple chains post the long awaited Merge. In the event of a fork, on-chain ETH hodlers such as those using non-custodial wallets or those holding on exchanges that are supporting ETHPoW will be airdropped the equivalent amounts of …

According to a new Twitter post, Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin issuer Circle, said that the recent decision by Binance to merge stablecoin dollar books is "a good thing" for USDC. "This move would lead to a gradual net share shift from USDT to BUSD and USDC," said Allaire. The day before, Binance announced it would cease trading support for USDC and auto-convert deposits after Sept. 29 to a consolidated Binance USD balance comprising other stablecoins pegged to the U.S. dollar. Users will be able to withdraw individual constituents from the consolidated balance at par …