Here’s why Ethereum DeFi app Arbitrum went offline

Arbitrum suffered downtime on September 14 as the network’s sequencer went offline for roughly 45 minutes, disclosed Offchain Labs, the company that is developing the optimistic rollup, in an official report on Medium.

The young Layer-2 rollup belongs to the flock of scaling solutions that sit on top of the Ethereum (ETH) network, enabling cheaper and faster transactions.

Sequencer outage
“Arbitrum One is still in its beta phase, and we will do our best to minimize downtime. But, as we noted in our launch announcement, we do want to caution users that further outages are possible in these early days,” said Offchain Labs in an official outage report, while underlining that the funds were never at risk.

According to the report, the downtime was ascribed to “a bug causing the sequencer to get stuck” after a huge batch of transactions were submitted over a short period of time.

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed,” reassured the company and continued to point out the difference between a sequencer outage and a network outage.

“The Sequencer never has the ability to steal funds or forge transactions, because every transaction it handles is digitally signed by a user and the signatures are checked by the Arbitrum chain,” read the report, in which the developers reminded that the Arbitrum bridge continued to operate during the outage.

During the downtime, the submission of new transactions was halted, although, as explained in the report, users were still able to bypass the sequencer and submit their transactions directly to Ethereum for delayed inclusion in the Arbitrum chain.

Ethereum evades the attack
Arbitrum wasn’t the only network that suffered downtime yesterday.

Another blockchain platform, Solana (SOL), also stopped processing transactions as the network experienced intermittent instability.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum blockchain itself evaded a malicious attack.

“Someone unsuccessfully tried to attack #ethereum today by publishing a long (~550) blocks which contained invalid pow’s,” according to Marius Van Der Wijden, a developer on Ethereum, who flagged the incident on Twitter yesterday.

Only a small percentage of Nethermind nodes switched to the invalid sidechain, which was fairly quickly overtaken in both length and difficulty by the good chain.

“Another great demonstration of how client diversity makes #ethereum stronger,” commented the developer, while reassuring that all affected nodes reorged back to the good chain.

Divergence: A Complete Overview of the Fast-growing DeFi Protocol.

Divergence is considered one of the most promising DeFi derivatives protocols for good reasons. It is building a decentralized platform for volatility trading and hedging with a focus on digital native assets. The protocol is backed by top investors such as Mechanism Capital and KR1. Its recently announced strategic investors include Huobi Ventures and AscendEx. The protocol is planning to launch its native DIVER token on 20 September 2021.

Many investors are inquiring about what Divergence is doing, and its upcoming IDO. So we reached out to its team for a Q&A section on Divergence and the key features.

Q: What is the value proposition of Divergence?

A: Divergence is a platform for anyone to trade, hedge and profit from DeFi-native volatility. The key value proposition of Divergence is to

Provide DeFi users with features to protect their holding value.
Offer an additional source of yield — volatility premium, in addition to traditional lending, staking, yield farming rewards for LPs;
Provide an easy-to-use tool for traders to profit from asset volatility changes.
Q: What differentiates Divergence from traditional binary options platforms?

A: Traditional binary options prices are quoted by their implied volatility, and transactions are matched in a centralized fashion. This means that market participants have to trust the dealer who facilitates trades and accept what is being quoted.

Divergence deploys smart contracts that enable open and permissionless market-making and trading on-chain. It is a fully decentralized market where anyone can participate in the real-time price discovery process. There are no centralized authorities to determine the pricing of implied volatility for binary options. The market’s expectations for market volatility is reflected in the transaction prices of derivatives tokens on Divergences.

Q: What are Spears and Shields?

A: Spears and Shields are tokenized representations of binary call options and binary put options. Spear buyers make bullish bets on tokens’ price or price volatility, while Shield buyers do the opposite.

To place it into perspective. Spear token holders will be eligible to claim 1 collateral at expiry if the underlying settlement price is at or higher than the strike. Or in the case of range-strike options, Spear holders get paid when the underlying settles outside a price range. Shield token holders will be eligible to claim 1 collateral at expiry if the underlying settlement price is lower than the strike or lands within a price range.

Q: How does Divergence differ from traditional liquidity pools?

A: The fundamental difference is that Divergence pools facilitate the automatic market-making and peer-to-pool swaps of binary options tokens. Each pool can be considered a specific binary options market with its own underlying expiration, strike price, collateral, and rollover mechanisms (per strike or per percentage). Only one type of collateral is used per pool.

Q: What are the main advantages that Divergence offers to liquidity providers (LPs)?

A: Divergence has different features that provide benefits to liquidity providers. Liquidity providers can have higher capital efficiency since the minting and liquidity seeding phases of derivative tokens (binary options) are integrated and do not involve over-collateralization.

Divergence also allows LPs to create multiple binary option pools using fungible tokens, including DeFi assets from other protocols. LPs can leverage this by depositing a yield-bearing asset into liquidity pools and earn rewards on Divergence in addition to rewards from other platforms.

Q: Is Divergence a cross-chain DeFi platform?

A: Divergence is currently building its DEX on the Ethereum mainnet with plans to deploy on the Binance Smart Chain and on Ethereum L2 in the future. As we are blockchain agnostic, we can see us building where the ecosystem demands us to be.

Q: What is Divergence Flagship Product?

A: Divergence flagship product is an AMM-based binary options marketplace for DeFi natives assets. Key features include

Composability with DeFi assets. This means that Liquidity providers can write binary options with any fungible tokens as collateral. This significantly increases capital efficiency.
Market continuity chain: Divergence smart contracts continuously roll over pools based on preset target volatility or strike within a single, smart contract. This means that liquidity providers don’t have to relocate assets once the binary options contract expires.
Capital efficiency. Liquidity providers are not required to over-collateralize since there is a predetermined amount of payout at expiry, 1x collateral is required for writing a call and a put. Divergence reserves maximum claims for collateral, providing liquidity providers flexibility of withdrawing capital prior to expiry.
Q: Who are the major investors behind the Divergence project?

A: Divergence has successfully attracted investment from different rounds of funding. Some of the key participants include top VCs such as: Mechanism Capital, KR1, Arrington Capital, Trading Firms: Orthogonal Trading and DeFi stakeholders: Do Kwon from Terra, Igor from xDai, Sandeep from Polygon.

Other strategic investors include Huobi Ventures, AscendEx, HoneyDao, ICOPantera, Drops Ventures, Kyros Ventures. Divergence is a unique project, and this is evident with the diverse group of firms and individuals that have invested in the initiative to build a decentralized platform for composable crypto derivatives.

Q: When is the Divergence IDO taking place?

A: Divergence will host its IDO (Initial DEX Offering) on September 20, 2021. The IDO will distribute our native token DIVER to the public. The token sale will offer 2% (20 million) of the overall supply of DIVER tokens through a Dutch auction on SushiSwap’s MISO launchpad.

A Dutch auction is a fair distribution method and a type of distribution in which the token price opens at a higher price and descends over time. The starting price of the DIVER token sale is $0.010, with a floor price of $0.05. After the IDO is completed, DIVER tokens will be available for trading on SushiSwap, and future listings are planned on major exchanges.

Q: What are the future developments planned for Divergence?

A: Divergence expects to launch its Mainnet in the fourth quarter of 2021. The Mainnet launch is expected to include various feature enhancements and interface optimizations from its public testnet on Kovan. LPs will be able to use any fungible tokens as collateral as opposed to one testcoin on the testnet. Divergence also plans to launch additional pairs and improve on the ease of navigation and user experience.

Defi Hack Alert: NowSwap losses over $1 Million in cyber attack.

According to news from the Analytic group, PeckShield, the DEX protocol, NowSwap was hacked and lost more than 1 million USD in funds. The attackers stole 535,000 USDT and 158 WETH. USDTs are converted to ETH through the distributed network service, 1inch, and further transferred to the Ethernet Square anonymous trading platform, Tornado Cash. Furthermore, the hackers used an invalid ‘K’ value check in the pair contract of NowSwap to attack the protocol.

Defi Hack History
CREAM Finance Hack
The Defi hack trend has been spreading like wildfire and protocols are dreading if they could be the next victim. Recently, the Defi protocol platform CREAM Finance also suffered its first-ever direct Defi protocol exploit. The organization shared that the hack was in phases, with the main exploit along with a smaller copy-cat. CREAM Finance with PeckShield’s help revealed that the exploit was caused because of an error in the way C.R.E.A.M. Finance integrated AMP into its protocol.

“At approximately 12 pm on 31st August (UTC +8), C.R.E.A.M. Finance was exploited for 462,079,976 in AMP tokens and 2,804.96 ETH tokens.”, CREAM Finance clarified the exploit amount.

PolyNetwork Hack
PolyNetwork, the cross-chain Defi protocol suffered the largest Defi hack worth $610 million. The protocol was hacked on 10th August, where the hacker managed to override permission from the “bookkeepers.” The hacker transferred stolen funds to three different blockchain wallets of Ethereum, Binance, and Polygon. Most of the funds were converted to stablecoins USDC, USDT, and BUSD. However, the attacker recently returned all funds through a private key.

Neko Network Hack
Following the PolyNetwork hack, Neko Network was also attacked and lost over 2 million in Stablecoins. Neko Network attacker’s address obtained 2 million USDT, 390,000 BUSD, and 1 BTCB. The attackers used PancakeSwap on the Binance Smart Chain to exchange the stolen stablecoins with BNB. However, in the Neko Network hack, the Defi protocol has only received a partial return from the hackers.

DAO Hack
Dao Maker, a crowdfunding platform was attacked last month and lost over $7 million in USDC that were later converted into 2,261 ETH. According to one estimate, 9,000 to 10,000 USDC accounts on DAO Maker could have been affected by the hack.

Uniswap, SushiSwap, Balancer, Curve: Low DEX volumes have this impact on investors.

After witnessing a consolidation phase that prolonged for more than three months, the crypto market seemed to be getting back on track during the initial few days of September. However, the unanticipated flash crash that took place on the 7th managed to, yet again, change the narrative. The broader crypto market, at the time of writing, was seen coping with newfound depreciation.

State of the DEXes
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the TVL on Decentralized Exchanges [DEXes] witnessed a notable dip. As seen from the chart attached, a cumulative value of $31.48 billion had been locked on these exchanges until 7 September. However, the same managed to shrink down to $26.1 billion by the 11th.

The aforementioned 16.8% dip has been the most substantial one since June. Even though the curve changed its direction and was currently treading northward, it should be noted that the same was still below the $27 billion threshold.

The slight recovery observed has, by and large, been led by SushiSwap. As per data from DeFiPulse, this DEX currently had over $4.06 billion locked up and recorded an 11% rise over the past day alone.

Curve Finance and Balancer’s TVL too, for that matter, rose by 4% and 3% respectively and reflected values of $11.46 billion and $1.86 billion at the time of writing. Notably, DeFi Projects representing DEXes recovered fairly better than the rest.

The daily DEX volume, however, was not able to recover from its lows. As seen from the chart attached below, the cumulative exchange volume that revolved above 5 billion on the eve of the crash currently stood under 2 billion. Notably, Uniswap and SushiSwap’s volumes were affected followed by Balancer. Interestingly, Curve’s volume had already recuperated from its lows.

Moreover, most aforementioned major operate on Ethereum’s chain and the transaction fee has not been too favorable of late. In hindsight, the this factor substantially contributed to the volume dip as well. Further, it should be noted that stablecoin transaction count did not witness any major change of late. Thus it can be said that the stagnant nature of the same, to a considerable extent, contributed to the volume dip.

Should HODLers expect diminishing returns?

The valuation of the tokens associated with these exchanges was drastically affected too. For instance, Uniswap, Curve, SushiSwap and Balancer shed 22%, 6%, 23% and 24% of their respective value over the past week. However, at the time of writing, all the tokens were trading in green, thanks to the 24-hour hike of 1%, 6.4%, 7% and 3% respectively.

The DEX space witnessed several such crashes in the past and has been quite quick to recover from almost all the notable ones. Keeping in mind how they’ve reacted in the past, it would be fair to claim that the current gloomy phase would not prolong itself. The recovery would be quick, and in retrospect, token HODLers would be fetched with even higher returns.

Avalanche (AVAX) chain’s Zabu Finance sees a $3.2 million exploit.

Zabu Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol on Avalanche (AVAX) has recently been exploited for roughly $3.2 million worth of crypto tokens.

The exploited protocol confirmed the attack on Twitter, clarifying that the funds were stolen from its SPORE pool.

What happened?
“Zabu Team Wallet has not sold a single Zabu. We’re under an exploit, possibly from Spore Pool. We’re investigating the exploit. Need help Pangolin, Trader Joe, Avalanche,” Zabu Finance announced the exploit on Twitter, while reaching out to the network and the popular decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

The exploited protocol confirmed that the hacker interacted with the blockchain contract and “successfully pulled out 4,5 billion Zabu tokens from Zabu Farm Contract, dumped all to Pangolin LPs and Trader Joe LPs of Zabu, stole around $600K.”

A blockchain security and data analytics company PackShield reported on Twitter which funds were stolen, estimating the exploited amount to $3.2 million.

“The same bug happened many times before,” PackShield commented on the vulnerability in the contract used by yield farms to distribute rewards, where native tokens have been reportedly exploited all the way to $0,00.

The removal of a large amount of ZABU tokens drove the price down rapidly.

Prior to the attack, the token was trading at around $0.004, while today it struggles at around $0.0001, according to CoinGecko.

Aftermath
“As all supply is reached in a bad way, we are burning all ZABU in Dev Wallet and Treasury Wallet,” announced the exploited protocol on Twitter.

The protocol advised investors to withdraw their holdings or risk losing their assets to the attacker as they “calmed down people by showing them the team was also a victim and burned all team tokens.”

The Zabu team has announced a plan to return tokens to investors based on a snapshot from before the hack, while also seeking a solution for those that bought in after the exploit.

“In that way, people who lost money pre-hack will get distributed the tokens, and continue to support the protocol if they want. For the late buyer (post-hack), they can also participate in the Farm V2 by staking what they’ve bought in a Zabu V1 Staking Pool,” clarified the team.

Coinbase DeFi Design To Be Curated by Ex-Facebook Shalin Pei.

Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), a flagship American cryptocurrency ecosystem, yet again reaffirms its focus on expanding into the red-hot DeFi segment.

Shalin Pei joins Coinbase DeFi team
According to the announcement shared by Ms. Pei on her Twitter account, she is leaving Facebook to join the Coinbase team. In particular, she will work on decentralized finance services provided by Coinbase.

Ms. Pei states that she is excited about her new appointment and added that Coinbase's DeFi team continues its hiring campaign.

Prior to joining Coinbase, Shalin Pei worked at Facebook as product design manager responsible for the FB Social News and FB Local News workloads.

As per information shared on her website, Ms. Pei has been a speaker at the Interaction and UX London conferences and is a seasoned diversity and inclusion advocate.

Coinbase increases its bet on DeFi step by step
In recent months, Coinbase has been aggressively expanding into the turbulent segment of decentralized finances (DeFi). As covered by U.Today previously, it integrated one of the fastest-growing DeFi networks, Polygon (formerly Matic), to its wallet.

Also, Coinbase is seeking an engineer responsible for integration with mainstream Ethereum (ETH) scaling solutions Arbitrum, Optimism and Starkware.

Following the dramatic drop of cryptocurrency prices and the SEC notice, Coinbase's COIN lost 11.4% on NASDAQ in the past seven days; at press time, its price is estimated at $248.

Algorand Foundation Launches $300 Million Fund to Support DeFi Innovation.

Algorand Foundation, an organization dedicated to fulfilling the global promise of blockchain technology by leveraging the Algorand protocol and open-source software, today announced the Viridis DeFi Program, a 150 million Algo (worth approximately $300 million USD today) fund to support DeFi innovation on the Algorand network.

The fund will fuel the growth of decentralized exchanges, money markets, options markets, synthetic asset applications, and NFT platforms, all running on the high-speed Algorand blockchain.

“The Algorand Foundation is excited to launch this funding program to help accelerate the adoption of DeFi across the Algorand Ecosystem. Creating the right infrastructure, application ecosystem and liquidity will be key to ensuring that DeFi on Algorand is regarded as the world’s most energy-efficient, scalable, and low-cost DeFi ecosystem,” said Sean Lee, CEO of the Algorand Foundation in a statement.

Developing on Algorand
Founded in 2017, Algorand was built from the ground up to handle the volume of transactions needed for DeFi, financial institutions, and governments to smoothly transition to the future of finance, or FutureFi.

Its underlying blockchain enables the frictionless exchange of value and the simple creation of next-generation financial products and protocols.

50 million ALGO, which has been re-allocated from the AlgoGrant fund, will exclusively support the development of DeFi infrastructure and applications (DApps). Within this, DeFi “SupaGrants” have been designed to support the creation of critical DeFi infrastructures such as cross-chain bridges and price oracles.

The first $5 million SupaGrant will be a call for proposals to build bi-directional bridges from Ethereum and other chains. Once ported to Algorand, dApps need access to market data to manage a variety of smart contract functions.

The second $5 million SupaGrant will seek proposals for the integration of oracle networks with associated price feeds. The balance of this fund will support further application development across this burgeoning DeFi ecosystem.

Since liquidity is a fundamental driver of DeFi and DApp adoption, the Algorand Foundation is assigning a fund of 100 million ALGO (worth approximately $200m USD today) to support and provide liquidity incentives to the Algorand DeFi ecosystem.

In doing so, the Algorand Foundation is ensuring that quality DeFi projects will be able to access liquidity easily while also incentivizing liquidity providers for fueling DeFi on Algorand. A number of projects, such as the first automated market maker DEX Tinyman, have already engaged with the Foundation to ensure that they will have the appropriate liquidity support required at launch.

By supporting DeFi infrastructure, DApps, and liquidity with this dedicated fund, innovators and developers will be able to make an immediate impact on Algorand’s DeFi ecosystem. And they will be doing so on the most sustainable, carbon-negative, high-performance blockchain in crypto today.

Why the idea of SushiSwap flipping Uniswap is a leap too far… for now

In light of debates such as Ethereum flipping Bitcoin, Ethereum killers taking over ETH etc., the comparison between SushiSwap and Uniswap comes as no surprise.

When talking about a platform like SushiSwap flipping Uniswap, however, the conversations and comparisons need to be more nuanced. Why? Well, because the former is a clone of the latter. But, does SushiSwap have any chance of overtaking Uniswap and becoming DeFi’s most powerful DEX platform?

SushiSwap’s competitive advantages
SushiSwap was initially started off to incentivize Uniswap volumes to migrate to a new platform. However, soon after its launch towards the end of August, SushiSwap had taken around 37% of Uniswap’s daily volume, according to a report.

Further, SushiSwap’s steady growth helped the network reclaim more than one-third of Uniswap’s volume while surpassing its previous all-time high TVL.

The total supply of SUSHI tokens has been capped at 250 million tokens with new token emissions decreasing monthly. New SUSHI tokens are emitted through incentivized liquidity pools.

SushiSwap has seen a lot of innovation since the late 2020s with the introduction of Onsen. It is a rotating menu of incentivized liquidity pools governed by the community towards the end of 2020. This was followed by BentoBox, an integrated token vault, Kashi, a margin trading system, and Miso, a token launch platform.

What’s more, SUSHI’s integration with Yearn finance gives SushiSwap a reliable source of revenue as SushiSwap would be the default exchange system for all other Yearn-related apps.

Uniswap’s market domination
Nonetheless, Uniswap has clearly dominated the market, with its total value locked beating SushiSwap’s by almost 40%.

Additionally, Uniswap V3’s launch on Optimism is a new step towards scaling, with Optimism’s marquee partnership expected to find its way to an alpha release. It will be fascinating to see where they try to direct liquidity and volume after the aforementioned takes place and what effect the same has on SushiSwap.

Thus, while Uniswap is still way ahead of SushiSwap, the latter has become one of the most popular Ethereum-based DEXes. SushiSwap has also significantly differentiated itself from Uniswap by offering functionalities like incentivized pools, margin trading, and yield generation.

While SushiSwap may have begun as a clone of Uniswap, its ecosystem has developed differently over the last few months. As for flippening UNI though, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.

DeFi trading platform dYdX opens access to its governance token.

dYdX initiated the distribution of its long-awaited governance token on Wednesday.

The decentralized finance (DeFi) platform first announced it planned to launch a token last month with an accompanying governance plan. It included plans for a safety staking pool, with users who stake $DYDX receiving a yield in the same token.

Wednesday's kickoff wasn't without headache, however. The dYdx team uncovered an error in the deployment of the safety staking pool contract shortly after it went live.

Consequently, access to the pool was blocked as the team sought to create an open-source fix for the contract. Because of the new governance model, the upgrade containing the fix will have to pass a governance vote during the first epoch. In a tweet thread explaining the snag, the dYdX Foundation said no user funds were at risk and all will be recoverable in the coming days.

"The design of the Safety Staking Pool included deposits being locked for a minimum of 1 epoch (28 days). Assuming an upgrade proposal can be passed within the next week, no user impact will have occurred, & the few early stakers will still be able to withdraw their funds on time," it said.

This vote could include ways to additionally compensate early stakers for the rewards they should have received if the error had not occurred, according to dYdX. The issue is being debated in a thread on the dYdX community forum.

The governance model allocated 7.5% of the tokens to retroactive rewards and 25% to user trading rewards. Those who completed a single transaction on the platform in the past three years were eligible for the airdrop. The price of the token reached $12 upon release, according to CoinGecko. For this reason, some claimed to have walked away with tens of thousands of dollars worth of tokens as a result of the airdrop.

However, not everyone was able to reap the rewards, as geographic restrictions blocked some users from receiving the airdrop -- particularly those based in the United States.

Under U.S. securities laws, airdropped tokens are a type of security, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler has made it clear that DeFi won't get a pass under the agency's purview.

At the Aspen Security Counsel Forum he said last month: "Make no mistake: It doesn’t matter whether it’s a stock token, a stable value token backed by securities, or any other virtual product that provides synthetic exposure to underlying securities. These products are subject to the securities laws and must work within our securities regime."

Some would-be participants took to Twitter to sarcastically commiserate that American regulators were "protecting" dYdX users from thousands of dollars.

DeFi Tokens Hit Hard as Crypto Market Correction Continues.
Cryptocurrencies powering decentralized finance projects have depreciated more in price than Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens appear to be taking some of the heaviest price hits in crypto as yesterday’s marketwide correction continues today.

DeFi is a growing sector that offers traditional financial services, like lending and borrowing, but without a centralized entity, like an exchange or broker.

Blue-chip projects like Aave, Uniswap, Chainlink, and Terra have all lost 20% or more of their value overnight, according to CoinGecko, falling harder than market leaders in Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Little more than 24 hours ago, the global cryptocurrency market looked bullish.

Bitcoin was hovering at a price of $52,774 while Ethereum came $40 shy of recapturing the $4,000 thresh hold. Then disaster struck yesterday morning.

El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender yesterday, but that didn’t quite have the effect optimistic crypto fans hoped it would have.

There was a swift 13% drop in crypto’s total market cap, followed by 11% and 15% losses from Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively, in a matter of hours.

Steep as they are, these losses are not as severe as those felt by holders of DeFi tokens today.

Chainlink, an Ethereum-based oracle network that provides on-chain data for smart contracts, has dropped in value by 16.4% in the last 24 hours. It’s currently worth $27.13 at the time of writing.

Uniswap, the token powering the popular eponymous decentralized exchange, took a 14.7% hit overnight. It currently trades for $22.77. More bad news for the DeFi project, which is also allegedly under probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Decentralized lending protocol Aave also crashed 12.5%. Aave is currently worth $315 as of writing.

Elsewhere in the top ten DeFi tokens by market cap, Pancake Swap lost 17.4% of its value overnight to trade at $19.222, while Terra depreciated 8.3% to land on $27.06.

With the market cap of the global crypto market currently down nearly 10%, the near-ubiquitous double-digit losses among DeFi tokens show this sector has been hit hard by the current correction.

DeFi Market Cap Hits New $145 BIllion All-Time High.

Decentralized finance's market capitalization has reached a new all-time high of $145.5 billion dollars, according to the TradingView index. The previous ATH was reached back in May when Ethereum's price was also topping out at the price of $4,170.

According to CoinMarketCap, the largest DeFi project by market capitalization is still Uniswap with a market cap of $18 billion and $5 billion in total value locked in smart contracts. Overall total value locked remains at $134 billion. Previously, U.Today reported that Uniswap is being investigated by the SEC.

Total value locked generally determines the sentiment toward the DeFi market and products from investors and traders. Whenever market participants leave funds in smart contracts, they are leaning toward conserving their funds instead of taking profits and cashing out from the market.

Various DeFi tokens like UNI or AAVE have faced 44 and 33 percent growth respectively in the last month only. Increased transaction volume on the Ethereum network and newly introduced features that came to the network after the London upgrade may greatly affect the current DeFi market.

A decentralized finance network is the set of open source software and frameworks that work together in order to provide users with financial solutions without the involvement of a third party. DeFi platforms like Uniswap allow users to receive passive income by providing liquidity on the market or lending their funds. The DeFi platform mostly utilizes Liquidity Pools in order to step away from the traditional market-making system that uses the services of Market Makers—protocols or individuals that provide liquidity to trading pairs.

Newly Launched Wallstreetbets Defi App Aims to 'Take Over Traditional Financial Markets'

At the beginning of 2021, a trend ignited by the creators of the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets caused the whole world to focus on retail traders in the stock market purchasing so-called dead stocks like AMC, GME, and others. The hype behind the Wallstreetbets group has fizzled in the last few months, but a group that claims to represent the Wallstreetbets community has started a decentralized finance (defi) project called wsbdapp.com. The Wallstreetbets application provides traders with the ability to swap synthetic stocks backed by blockchain tech.

Wallstreetbets and Defi: ‘Synthetic Stonks’
A small team that claims to be associated with the creator of Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets has started a defi platform, or decentralized application (dapp). The platform is called wsbdapp.com

The tokens are blockchain-based tokens that represent stocks listed on the stock market and they are otherwise known as synthetics. In fact, at the end of July, Uniswap delisted 100 tokens and many were synthetics tied to commodities and stocks. The crypto community assumed Uniswap delisted the synthetics because they could possibly be considered unregistered securities by U.S. regulators.

Newly Launched Wallstreetbets Defi App Aims to 'Take Over Traditional Financial Markets'
Newly Launched Wallstreetbets Defi App Aims to 'Take Over Traditional Financial Markets'

At the beginning of 2021, a trend ignited by the creators of the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets caused the whole world to focus on retail traders in the stock market purchasing so-called dead stocks like AMC, GME, and others. The hype behind the Wallstreetbets group has fizzled in the last few months, but a group that claims to represent the Wallstreetbets community has started a decentralized finance (defi) project called wsbdapp.com. The Wallstreetbets application provides traders with the ability to swap synthetic stocks backed by blockchain tech.

Wallstreetbets and Defi: ‘Synthetic Stonks’
A small team that claims to be associated with the creator of Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets has started a defi platform, or decentralized application (dapp). The platform is called wsbdapp.com

The tokens are blockchain-based tokens that represent stocks listed on the stock market and they are otherwise known as synthetics. In fact, at the end of July, Uniswap delisted 100 tokens and many were synthetics tied to commodities and stocks. The crypto community assumed Uniswap delisted the synthetics because they could possibly be considered unregistered securities by U.S. regulators.

When visiting the website, people are greeted by neon-lighted words that say “Defi’ing Wall Street with blockchain tradeable assets.” The defi platform says it is “always open” and the dapp offers “borderless trading, 24/7, 365 days a year.” The wsbdapp.com web portal adds: [Wsbdapp Gives] the benefits of blockchain made real for traditional investors.

Wsbdapp’s Native Token WSB
The wsbdapp.com has its own native token called WSB and the token can be leveraged for liquidity pools and staking, the website claims. At the time of writing, WSB is exchanging hands for $0.03 per unit. During the last 24 hours, $1,078,872 worth of WSB has been swapped and there’s 1,000,000,000 WSB in circulation, according to the token’s smart contract.

This means the aggregate WSB market valuation is a touch over $30 million on Saturday, September 4, 2021. Interestingly, WSB token has been doing well and is up 6.3% during the last 24 hours and 33.2% for the week.

Two-week statistics show WSB has gained 48.9% and one-month metrics show WSB is up 58% to date. The Wallstreetbets community who created the new dapp note that the work they are focused on will not be easy but the community is focused on a common goal.

“Taking over the traditional financial markets is no small hill to climb — it’s a giant mountain with jungles, wild beasts, and crushing climates,” the website explains. “The meme ‘Apes Together Strong’ that we are so fond of in the [wsbdapp] community represents more than just strength in numbers — it’s a call to arms. Our community advances headstrong towards a common goal… Mass adoption of distributed investment governance — with the [wsbdapp] at the core, governed by community vote using the WSB token.”