As the markets come roaring back to life in the first three weeks of 2023, optimism once again fills the air.
An Overview of the Weekend Boom
On Friday evening, just before the weekend, the crypto market saw a rally across the board, pushing the Total Value Locked (TVL) across all chains up by 5.2%, from $44.66b to $46.99b.
Still on the LSD Buzz with Ethereum
MetaMask, the most popular Ethereum wallet, has just integrated staking through Lido and Rocketpool into its user interface, fueling the fire of the LSD narrative.
As a leader among LSD protocols, Frax makes news thanks to its massive supply of Curve and Convex tokens.
Upgrades to the yield tokenization protocol Pendle deliver real-yield to users who lock their Pendle token by dividing up protocol earnings, swap fees, and increased yields.
This week, Aave, the most popular lending protocol on DeFi, released Aave v3 on all testnets (Goerli, Mumbai, Optimism, and Arbitrum). This update is timed with the impending release of Aave's stablecoin, GHO.
More decentralization, aggregation of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), enhanced tokenomics, and the launch of Sushi Studios are just some of the items in SushiSwap's 2023 roadmap.
Eagle, an on-chain two-factor authentication (2FA) service directly linked to your wallets, has been released by the Harpie security protocol.
Australian authorities have revealed plans to introduce a national stablecoin called AUDN on the Ethereum and Algorand blockchains.
For all Level 2s: zkEVM Inbound
Sandeep, Polygon's co-founder, has been dropping clues that the company's own zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) Mainnet will be released "SOOON!" Increased L2 space launches of zk-rollups provide a potential threat to the current market dominance of optimistic rollups.
Premia, a protocol for executing multi-chain options, has published the whitepaper for version 3. (which seemingly no one actually understood). Don't worry though, since before the real v3 debut, they promised a "Explain-it-Like-I'm-5" version.
With the introduction of Option Liquidity Pools on Dopex, Arbitrum option traders now have a more convenient and cost-effective way to liquidate their open positions.
There will be an extension of the Solana Stablecoin protocol, UXD Protocol, to include Ethereum and its forks, Optimism and Arbitrum.
Updates Across the Board Thanks to Polygon
Popular perpetuals DEX, Gains Network, released Indices and Commodities, immediately after extending to Arbitrum just 2 weeks back to combat with close opponent, GMX.
Polygon implements a hard fork in their PoS chain to boost speed and mitigate gas spikes.
Increased Osmosis in the Universe
As part of its Neon update, Osmosis, the Cosmos DEX appchain, has announced the addition of cross-chain swaps, downtime detection, and geometric Time-Weighted-Average-Pricing (TWAP).
Here We Go Again With Another Airdrop
Gammax Exchange, a future perpetuals DEX based on StarkEX, has announced that they may airdrop tokens to users who join the platform before its official launch.
ZigZag, an L2 orderbook DEX, has finally announced its long-awaited airdrop, with the initial distribution going to ZigZag's early market makers.
Prism Protocol, the successor to Terra's blockchain, has announced an airdrop for stakers of the Cosmos token if they delegate to Prism's Cosmos Hub Validator.
Swell, a new LSD protocol, has announced its intention to airdrop tokens to platform stakers via the messaging app Discord.
Hot and Improved Alpha Version!
Alchemy Pay, a supplier of on-ramp services, has recently had a string of successes, including collaborations with Visa for on-ramp/off-ramp services and Apple with Apple Pay.
Blue Collar Blockchain's post on ETH staking techniques has you covered if you're at a loss as to what to do with all your ETH tokens, with a range of solutions to suit varying degrees of risk tolerance.
In the end, Adam Cochran wins CT's longest thread prize with his 2023 Shopping List thread, which is 268 tweets long and includes 31 separate items.
Listen to next week's episode and keep poking about in the DeFi universe, you degens!
No financial advice is offered or implied in this article.
