Liquid staking protocol Lido Finance appears to have benefited most from the Ethereum merge in September, with its total value locked (TVL) now sitting at the top position among other decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. According to data from DeFiLlama, Lido’s liquid staking protocol now commands $5.9 billion in TVL, compared to MakerDAO's $5.89 billion and AAVE’s $3.7 billion. Lido now has the highest TVL of any DeFi protocol. pic.twitter.com/2xsM3lVGVl — Patrick | Dynamo DeFi (@Dynamo_Patrick) January 1, 2023 According to Lido Finance’s website, as at Jan. 2 had $5.8 billion Ether (ETH) staked. Meanwhile, there was around $23.2 million staked …

2022 appears to have been a torrid year for investors, and not just those in crypto, with United States (U.S.) bonds experiencing their worst year in centuries and U.S. stocks pulling back nearly 20% since the year began. As of Nov. 30, a Financial Times report noted that a traditional portfolio consisting of 60% stocks and 40% bonds will have seen its worst performance since 1932 when the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression. Meanwhile, tech stocks, which some theorize have a correlation with cryptocurrency prices, haven’t had a great year either. An index tracking the performance …

Leading decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator 1inch Network announced a major upgrade — Fusion — around its 1inch Swap Engine. The Fusion upgrade aims to deliver cost-efficient, secure and profitable swaps for crypto investors. The Fusion mode in 1inch Swap Engine allows DeFi investors to place orders with a predecided price and time range without paying network fees. In addition, the upgrade includes network improvements such as updated staking contracts and tokenomics. As a decentralized trading and matching system, the 1inch Swap Engine connects DeFi users and provides liquidity for crypto trades through professional market makers. Explaining the intent behind the …

The Digital Currency Group and its affiliates (DCG), which manages $296.7 million (280 million euros) in deposits and digital assets of crypto exchange Bitvavo for off-chain staking services, suspended repayments citing liquidity problems amid the bear market. However, Bitvavo announced to prefund the locked assets, preventing DCG-induced service disruption for users. With users proactively exploring self-custody options as a means to safeguard their funds, an acute liquidity crisis is expected to loom over exchanges. DCG cited liquidity problems as it suspended repayments, temporarily halting users from withdrawing their funds. Bitvavo, on the other hand, decided to prefund the locked assets …

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. Industry experts are confident in DeFi and believe the sector would continue to see adoption despite its security flaws, primarily due to the mammoth failure of centralized exchanges. Despite the continued growth, however, the decentralized exchanges have lost $30 million on liquidity provider incentives. Popular hardware crypto wallet Ledger introduced a new DeFi tracking feature that pairs with its hardware wallets to monitor performance analytics of over 1,000 protocols. The Lodestar Finance protocol that …

2022 was a near-unprecedented year of extremes and black swan events for the crypto market, and now that the year is about to wrap up, analysts are reflecting on the lessons learned and attempting to identify the trends which may point to bullish price action in 2023. The collapse of Terra Luna, Three Arrows Capital and FTX created a credit crunch, a severe reduction in capital inflows and an increased threat that additional major centralized exchanges could collapse. Despite the severity of the market downturn, a few positives have emerged. Data shows long-term hodlers and smaller-sized wallets are actively accumulating …

The FTX bankruptcy has sent the crypto space into a downward spiral, and the crypto space is still buzzing to get all the details that led to this situation. Numerous reports have popped up, and the bankruptcy hearings bring new information daily. Considering the extent of FTX’s involvement in the global crypto space now is the time to take a hard look at what happened and draw some valuable lessons. One thing is very clear from the start - what brought the exchange giant down was overallocation in low-liquidity tokens, mainly its own FTT cryptocurrency. While FTX specifically could get …

In a move to tone down the negative impacts of a bear market and ecosystem collapses, crypto exchange Gate.io launched an industry liquidity support fund with an initial commitment of $100 million. With investors moving their funds away from exchanges into self-custody, market liquidy concerns are an immediate threat to struggling crypto businesses. Gate.io’s $100 million commitment aims to support companies looking to restrategize and adapt to changing market conditions. The liquidity support aims to help crypto businesses maintain their focus on their business while being protected from market uncertainties. The announcement read: “The $100 million will be allocated to …

Yes, the bear market weeds out the bad actor, but it also forces the existing players to rethink their business strategies to offset resultant losses. In this effort, crypto exchange Bybit announced mass layoffs for the second time in 2022. Ben Zhou, the co-founder and CEO of Bybit, announced a reorganization plan amid a prolonged bear market, which involves a steep reduction in the workforce. The “planned downsizing” will affects employees across the board: “We are all saddened by the fact this reorganization will impact many of our dear Bybuddies and some of our oldest friends.” Independent reporter Colin Wu …

Digital asset market maker Keyrock has raised $72 million in a Series B round of funding, according to an announcement on Nov. 30. Ripple, SIX Fintech Ventures, and Middlegame Ventures are among the investors in the round. Funds are planned to be used on Keyrock infrastructure development, scalability tools, as well as regulatory licensing across Europe, the United States and Singapore. Keyrock CEO Kevin de Patoul said the company has been focused on a long-term perspective for its business in the past five years. He also noted that: “The new round of funding allows us to expand on that and …

Two weeks after Binance initially pledged to develop a proof-of-reserve (PoR) mechanism in response to the FTX liquidity and bankruptcy fiasco, it published its official response. In an announcement on the Binance website, the exchange outlined how users can use the mechanism to verify its holdings. Currently, the only token available to verify through the Merkle Tree-based system is Bitcoin (BTC), though the announcement says additional coins will be added in the coming weeks. It also highlighted upcoming transparency updates which include the involvement of third-party auditors to audit its PoR results and implementation of ZK-SNARKs in its PoR methods, …

Cryptocurrency exchange and Initial Coin Offering (ICO) platform CoinList took to Twitter to address “FUD” after a blogger tweeted that users reported being unable to withdraw funds for over a week, sparking fears the company was having liquidity issues or w insolvent. “There is a lot of FUD going around that we would like to address head-on,” CoinList said in a Nov. 24 Twitter thread that stated the exchange is “not insolvent, illiquid, or near bankruptcy.” It said however that its deposits and withdrawals are affected by “technical issues.” 2/ We are upgrading our internal ledger systems and are migrating …