DeFi
China Shows Interest in Restoring Bitcoin Mining in the Country
China was once one of the most opposed countries to Bitcoin (BTC) mining and ownership. So much so that it banned local mining and the use of any cryptocurrency on its territory. It is now showing interest in changing this stance, which will involve reversing the policies implemented years ago to join the blockchain-based economy.
This growing interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) is driven by the increasing pressure the government is facing from its local investors. It is in everyone’s interest for the country to keep up with the evolution of technologies with high economic impact like Bitcoin.
When and why was Bitcoin mining banned in the first place?
The Chinese government showed its disinterest in cryptocurrencies as early as 2017 by banning initial coin offerings (ICOs) and exchanges in the country. Its hammer blow fell on Bitcoin mining much later in 2021 when it declared all cryptocurrency businesses illegal. This includes crypto casino gamestrading and lending using virtual tokens.
There are two arguments that motivate China’s position on cryptocurrencies. The first is how digital assets, as a means of payment, disrupt the economic and financial order, as they can be a breeding ground for crime. This is money laundering and terrorist financing, which the whole world is trying to combat.
The main reason is the high carbon footprint of mining, as most of the country’s energy comes from fossil fuels such as coal. Carbon emissions per Bitcoin mine can then reach up to 8,000 to 13,000 kg, which is estimated at 24,000 to 40,000 kg per hour in Inner Mongolia. The mining ban came into effect in June 2021 to combat the practice.
What happened next after China banned Bitcoin mining?
The most obvious effect of the cryptocurrency exodus from China on Bitcoin was a sharp 50% drop in the network’s computing power. This leveled off at 80% a little later, until mining activities in the United States strengthened to compensate for their absence. Bitcoin also experienced strong market growth, reaching a new all-time high in October 2021, which was not surpassed until 2024.
These major developments in the Bitcoin market happened without China’s involvement. Thus, their local investors were unable to capitalize on the DeFi economy. Many Chinese miners fled to the US to continue their operations, leading to a sharp increase in carbon emissions in the West.
Why is China reconsidering its decision now?
Critics of the ban estimate that China would have lost $4 billion in annual mining revenue if it had chosen to regulate the activity rather than ban it. It should have seized the opportunity to innovate in regulation and technology to stay ahead of the global economy. Instead, it is trying to keep pace with a market that has grown so much without China’s intervention.
China’s recent attempts to reconsider its mining policy are a step in the right direction for its local investors and the cryptocurrency market. Adding more funds to DeFi’s growing market cap and expanding its adoption is always helpful for its long-term development. The world is watching China’s decision to ease this ban and adapt accordingly.
If the ban is lifted, what does this mean for the Bitcoin community?
China is an economic and technological powerhouse in every sector. Its involvement in any sector drives the rapid development of that field and the addition of Bitcoin will always result in a positive net result. Among the most interesting projects, they can try to help improve Bitcoin’s energy consumption to align with their carbon neutrality goals.
Another area where they can contribute is increasing the adoption of cryptocurrencies, not just for Bitcoin, but for all digital assets, including Layer 2 tokens. crypto casino games is also one of their interests because of their large investments in offshore gambling. Regardless, Chinese investors returning to the market crypto The circle is highly anticipated.
DeFi
Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, August 1, 2024, Chainwire
Consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies is a snowball that is accelerating by the day. More and more people around the world are clamoring for access to DeFi. However, the user interface and user experience of cryptocurrencies still lag behind their fundamental utility, and users lack the simple and secure access they need to truly on-chain products.
Haust Network is a network and suite of products focused on changing this paradigm and bringing DeFi to the masses. To achieve this goal, Haust Network has announced its far-reaching partnership with bridgeseasoned veterans in rapidly delivering revolutionary blockchain utilities for projects. The Gateway team empowers blockchain developers to build DAOs, NFT platforms, payment services, and more. They drive adoption of crypto primitives for individuals and institutions around the world by helping everyone build their on-chain presence.
Gateway specializes in connecting sovereign blockchains to the Aggregation Layer (AggLayer). The AggLayer is a single unified contract that powers the Ethereum bridge of many disparate blockchains, allowing them all to connect to a single unified liquidity pool. The AggLayer abstracts away the complexities of cross-chain DeFi, making tedious multi-chain transactions as easy for the end user as a single click. It’s all about creating access to DeFi, and with Polygon’s technology and the help of Gateways, Haust is doing just that.
As part of their partnership, Gateway will build an advanced zkEVM blockchain for Haust Network, leveraging its extensive experience to deploy ultra-fast sovereign applications with unmatched security, and enabling Haust Network to deliver its products to its audience.
The recently announced launch of the Haust Wallet is a Telegram mini-app that provides users with access to DeFi directly through the Telegram interface. Users who deposit funds into the wallet will have access to all standard send/receive services and generate an automatic yield on their funds. The yield is generated by Haust Network’s interconnected network of smart contracts, Haustoria, which provides automated and passive DeFi yielding.
As part of this partnership, the Haust Network development team will work closely with Gateway developers to launch Haust Network. Gateway is an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and zkEVM technology, which the Haust wallet will leverage to deliver advanced DeFi tools directly to the wallet users’ fingertips. Haust’s partnership with Gateway comes shortly after the announcement of a high-profile alliance with the Polygon community. Together, the three will work to build Haust Network and connect its products to the AggLayer.
About Haust Network
Haust Network is an application-based absolute liquidity network and will be built to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Haust aims to provide native yield to all users’ assets. In Telegram’s Haust Wallet, users can spend and collect their cryptocurrencies in one easy place, at the same time. Haust operates its network of self-balancing smart contracts that interact across multiple blockchains and then efficiently funnel what has been generated to Haust users.
About Gateway
bridge is a leading white-label blockchain provider that offers no-code protocol deployment. Users can launch custom blockchains in just ten minutes. They are an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and have already helped projects like Wirex, Gnosis Pay, and PalmNFT bring new utility to the crypto landscape.
About Polygon Labs
Polygon Laboratories Polygon Labs is a software development company building and developing a network of aggregated blockchains via the AggLayer, secured by Ethereum. As a public infrastructure, the AggLayer will aggregate the user bases and liquidity of any connected chain, and leverage Ethereum as the settlement layer. Polygon Labs has also contributed to the core development of several widely adopted scaling protocols and tools for launching blockchains, including Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, and Polygon Miden, which is currently under development, as well as the Polygon CDK.
Contact
Lana Kovalski
haustnetwork@gmail.com
DeFi
Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News
- Ethena and ByBit will allow derivatives traders to use USDe as collateral.
- There is a risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place more bets.
Ethena has downplayed the dangers of a new feature, which will allow traders to put up its synthetic dollar USDe as collateral when trading derivatives, which are risky bets on the prices of crypto assets.
While allowing users to underwrite their trades with yield-bearing USDe is an attractive prospect, Ethena said there is potential risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place even more derivatives bets.
“We have taken this risk into account and that is why Ethena operates across more than five different sites,” said Conor Ryder, head of research at Ethena Labs. DL News.
The move comes as competition in the stablecoin sector intensifies.
In recent weeks, PayPal grown up the amount of its stablecoin PYUSD in circulation 96%, while the MakerDAO cooperative plans a rebrandingaiming to increase the supply of its DAI stablecoin to 100 billion.
US dollar growth stagnates
It comes as Ethena has lost momentum after its blockbuster launch in December.
In early July, USDe reached a record level of 3.6 billion in circulation.
That figure has now fallen by 11% to around 3.2 billion.
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New uses for USDe could boost demand for Ethena’s products.
This is where the new plan, announcement Tuesday with ByBit, one of its partner exchanges, is coming.
Ethena users create USDe by depositing Bitcoin or Ether into the protocol.
Ethena then covers these deposits with short positions – bearish bets – on the corresponding asset.
This creates a stable support for USDe, unaffected by price fluctuations in Bitcoin or Ether.
Mitigate risks
While using USDe as collateral for derivatives trading is proving popular, it is unclear what the effects will be if the cryptocurrency market experiences major fluctuations.
Using derivatives as collateral to place more bets has already had disastrous effects.
In June 2022, Lido’s liquid staking token stETH broke its peg to Ether following the fallout from the Terra collapse.
Many traders who used looping leverage to increase their stETH staking yields were liquidated, creating a cascade that caused the price of Ether to drop by more than 43%.
Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said: DL News His office and his partners have taken many precautions.
Ethena spreads bearish bets supporting the USDe across the five exchanges it partners with.
According to Ethena, 48% of short positions supporting USDe are on Binance, 23% on ByBit, 20% on OKX, 5% on Deribit, and 1% on Bitget. website.
In doing so, Ethena aims to minimize the impact of an unforeseen event on a stock market.
The same theory applies to the distribution of risks across different supporting assets.
Fifty percent of USDe is backed by Bitcoin, 30% by Ether, 11% by Ether liquid staking tokens, and 8% by Tether’s USDT stablecoin.
Previous reviews
Ethena has already been criticised regarding the risks associated with USDe.
Some have compared USDe to TerraUSD, an undercollateralized stablecoin that collapsed in 2022.
“It’s not a good design for long-term stability,” said Austin Campbell, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School. said as the USDe launch approaches.
Young replied to critics, saying the industry needs to be more diligent and careful when “marketing products to users who might not understand them as well as we do.”
Ethena has since added a disclaimer on its website stating that USDe is not the same as a fiat stablecoin like USDC or USDT.
“This means that the risks involved are inherently different,” the project says on its website.
Tim Craig is DL News DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Feel free to share your tips with us at tim@dlnews.com.
DeFi
Cryptocurrency and defi firms lost $266 million to hackers in July
In July 2024, the cryptocurrency industry suffered a series of devastating attacks, resulting in losses amounting to approximately $266 million.
Blockchain Research Firm Peck Shield revealed in an X post On August 1, attacks on decentralized protocols in July reached $266 million, a 51% increase from $176 million reported in June.
The most significant breach last month involved WazirX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which lost $230 million in what appears to be a highly sophisticated attack by North Korean hackers. The attack was a major blow to the stock market, leading to a break in withdrawals. Subsequently, WazirX launched a program in order to recover the funds.
Another notable incident involved Compound Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, which suffered a governance attack by a group known as the “Golden Boys,” who passed a proposal who allocated 499,000 COMP tokens – valued at $24 million – to a vault under their control.
The cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI also fell victim On July 16, a hack resulted in losses of $9.73 million. Additionally, Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning network, was one of the first protocols to suffer an exploit last month, loming $8 million on July 3 due to an attack targeting its staking mechanism.
Meanwhile, Rho Markets, a lending protocol, suffered a $7.6 million breach. However, in an interesting twist, the exploiters research to return the stolen funds, claiming the incident was not a hack.
July 31, reports The Terra blockchain protocol was also hacked, resulting in a loss of $6.8 million across multiple cryptocurrencies. As crypto.news reported, the attack exploited a reentrancy vulnerability that had been identified a few months ago.
Dough Finance, a liquidity protocol, lost $1.8 million in Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) to a flash loan attack on July 12. Similarly, Minterest, a lending and borrowing protocol, saw a loss of $1.4 million due to exchange rate manipulation in one of its markets.
Decentralized staking platform MonoSwap also reported a loss of $1.3 million following an attack that allowed the perpetrators to withdraw the liquidity staked on the protocol. Finally, Delta Prime, another decentralized finance platform, suffered a $1 million breach, although $900,000 of the stolen funds was later recovered.
DeFi
The Rise of Bitcoin DeFi: Then and Now
The convergence of Bitcoin’s robust security and Layer 2 scaling solutions has catalyzed the emergence of a vibrant DeFi ecosystem.
By expanding Bitcoin’s utility beyond simple peer-to-peer payments, these advancements have opened up a new frontier of financial possibilities, allowing users to participate in decentralized lending, trading, and other complex smart contract operations on Bitcoin.
Read on to learn about the rise of Bitcoin-based decentralized finance and how the space has expanded to accommodate a new generation of native assets and features.
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What is DeFi?
Decentralized finance (DeFi) represents a paradigm shift in financial services, offering internet-based financial products such as trading, lending, and borrowing through the use of decentralized public blockchains.
By implementing blockchains, smart contracts, and digital assets, DeFi protocols provide financial services through a decentralized ecosystem, where participants do not have to deal with intermediaries when transacting.
What is Bitcoin DeFi?
The inherent limitations of the Bitcoin mainchain in supporting the intricacies of decentralized finance have created the need to develop smart contract-based Layer 2 solutions.
Additionally, the advent of the Ordinals protocol in 2023, which facilitated the emergence of fungible token standards such as BRC-20 and Runes, catalyzed the growth of DeFi on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This expansion in protocol diversity has broadened the applications of the world’s leading cryptocurrency network beyond the core base-layer use cases around value preservation and transactional capabilities.
Therefore, Bitcoin DeFi has become a nascent sector within the digital asset market, after previously being a missing essential part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin DeFi in its early days
Integrating decentralized finance (DeFi) concepts into the Bitcoin ecosystem has been a journey of innovation and perseverance. Early attempts to bridge the gap between Bitcoin’s fundamental simplicity and DeFi’s complexities have spawned pioneering projects that, while laying essential foundations, have also encountered significant obstacles.
Colored coins
Colored coins represented an early foray into tokenizing real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. By leveraging the existing network to track ownership of assets ranging from stocks to real estate, this approach highlighted Bitcoin’s potential as a platform beyond digital currency. However, scalability and practical implementation challenges have limited its widespread adoption.
Counterpart
Building on the colored coins, Counterparty has become a platform for creating and trading digital assets, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), on Bitcoin.
The introduction of popular projects like Rare Pepe NFTs has demonstrated the growing appeal of digital collectibles. However, constraints around user experience and network efficiency have hampered its full potential.
These early experiments, while not fully realizing their ambitions, served as valuable stepping stones, informing Bitcoin DeFi’s subsequent developments. Their challenges highlighted the need for more sophisticated infrastructure and protocols to harness the full potential of decentralized finance on the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin DeFi Today
Today, building DeFi applications on Bitcoin is primarily done in the realm of Layer 2 (L2) networks. This architectural choice is motivated by the limitations of Bitcoin’s base layer in supporting complex programmable smart contracts.
Bitcoin’s original design prioritized security and decentralization over programmability, making it difficult to develop sophisticated DeFi protocols directly on its blockchain. However, the recent emergence of protocols like Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes, while not DeFi in their own right, has sparked possibilities for future DeFi-like applications on the main chain.
In contrast, L2 solutions offer a scalable and programmable environment built on Bitcoin, enabling the creation of various DeFi products.
By expanding Bitcoin’s capabilities without compromising its core principles, L2s have become the preferred platform for developers looking to build DeFi applications that encompass trading, lending, staking, and more.
Leading L2 networks such as Lightning Network, Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin provide the infrastructure for these efforts. Some of these L2s have even introduced their own native tokens to the network, further expanding Bitcoin’s DeFi ecosystem.
Essentially, while Bitcoin’s core layer presents challenges for DeFi development, its security and decentralization have provided a foundational layer for the innovative L2 landscape to thrive.
Bitcoin Layer 2 offers a promising path to building a robust and thriving Bitcoin-based DeFi ecosystem that offers trading, staking, lending, and borrowing. All you need is a DeFi Wallet like Xverse to access the new world of decentralized financial services secured by Bitcoin.
Conclusion
The integration of DeFi principles into the Bitcoin ecosystem, primarily facilitated by Layer 2 solutions, marks a significant evolution in the digital asset landscape.
Building on the foundational work of pioneers like Colored Coins and Counterparty, the industry has evolved into more sophisticated platforms like Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin to create a thriving Bitcoin-powered DeFi ecosystem.
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