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The DeFi ecosystem is just moving water in a bathtub

Financial Block Staff

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The DeFi ecosystem is just moving water in a bathtub

Key points to remember

  • Cardano prioritizes long-term value and reliability over rapid user acquisition in DeFi.
  • Hoskinson believes that future adoption of blockchain will be driven by governments and large enterprises.

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The decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is an ever-changing landscape, with the introduction of application-specific blockchains (appchains), layer-2 (L2) blockchains, new virtual machines, and more. In this scenario, users are wondering how blockchains like Cardano can compete with these optimized infrastructures.

Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Global, said during his participation in Blockchain Rio that Cardano is ensuring that everything that has been built so far preserves and protects the value of the blockchain. To achieve this goal, it is more important to make calculated moves rather than just the classic “move fast, break things.”

“There’s no better example than Bitcoin, which by definition is the worst performing of all cryptocurrencies. There aren’t even smart contracts on Bitcoin right now, right? You can’t issue assets on it. Yet it’s worth over a trillion dollars. Why? Because at the heart of it all, the value proposition of Bitcoin is an unwavering commitment to never violate the principles on which Bitcoin was founded and which have value in the marketplace,” Hoskinson told Crypto Briefing.

He added that in competitive environments, like crypto, teams embrace what they know are mistakes to try to move quickly and capture market share. However, protocols spend the next 10 to 15 years trying to correct these fundamental mistakes.

“JavaScript is the best example of that kind of programming language. It was created in 54 days. We spent two decades fixing that really, really bad language. That’s why we saw the rise of Ruby and TypeScript and all these other things, because JavaScript wasn’t fit for purpose. So that’s what Solana and these other things do: They focus on adoption, user acquisition, speed, and transaction costs. They don’t particularly care if the network goes down. They don’t particularly care if they have to reverse or start over. It’s a mad dash for user acquisition.”

While this works for retail holders looking for short-term gains, it doesn’t last in the long term because “protocols are not businesses,” Hoskinson said. Unlike companies that achieve dominance and can “own people’s protocols,” the same can’t happen in the cryptocurrency space.

“Can you imagine the success of Wi-Fi if it broke down all the time and never worked? Competing protocols would destroy it.” Hoskinson went on to point out that previous platforms and devices, such as Nokia mobile phones, MySpace and Yahoo, had up to a billion users before disappearing or losing their user base significantly.

So Hoskinson isn’t thinking about how to keep up with the competition, but how to preserve what people who trust Cardano signed up for and how to add capabilities without going beyond those fundamentals.

“Roll-ups are a great example of that. With extended UTXO, Cardano’s accounting model, and what we’re doing with Plutus V3, not only can we have them, but we can have best-in-class roll-ups because of the way the system works. It’s much harder to implement them on Ethereum or other things. So while they were first to market with that capability, we’re the best to market with that capability. It’s the same with Hydra. It delivers on the promise of everything that Lightning wanted to do and Plasma wanted to do. Yes, they had them years ago. Now we have them. And over time, it’s going to become best-in-class in terms of technology.”

The Input Output Global CEO then compares Cardano to Apple, saying that Apple has stuck to its winning strategy in its various forays, such as its recent foray into large language models for artificial intelligence. Despite short-term competitive issues due to sticking to its strategy, Apple will become “very strong” in its new ventures over time.

“And you know, another thing I think is unfair is that people have unrealistic expectations for growth. They wonder how Cardano is going to catch up. And that’s like our TVL [total value locked] “The growth is 300% in a year. And people say, ‘Yeah, but it’s not 1,000%. What’s going on?’ It’s like asking whether 300% growth per year is unprecedented compared to what we’ve been saying.”

Reliability and compliance

Hoskinson believes that the next billion users to adopt blockchain technology will come from adoption by governments and large companies such as those on the Fortune 500 list.

“Are the government or Fortune 500 companies really going to care that you spent a billion dollars on marketing and you got all these users? No, they’re going to ask fundamental questions, like control, governance, availability, reliability, and security, because at the end of the day, if they make mistakes, they lose their jobs and they don’t get paid for adopting system A or B.”

So, blockchain adoption is a “long-term game” that Cardano aims to play now, by developing an infrastructure where entities can build without worrying about endangering their current users.

Additionally, when it comes to competitiveness, Hoskinson believes people are relying too much on current applications instead of focusing on what will be useful in 2030. “If you make all these decisions correctly, if your competitors don’t, you’re the only option or the best option. So where does the puck go? How do you get regulated companies into the cryptocurrency space?”


SapphireSapphire

He also highlights the need for proper tools to track blockchain development when it comes to offering products, criticizing the lack of solutions to keep the blockchain ecosystem decentralized.

“The plans are to create real assets, tokenized real estate, this, that, and that. But how do you make that work on a blockchain system? Oh, well, it’ll be on the blockchain, but all the private, personally identifiable information will be owned by a centralized company. OK, so doesn’t that make it a centralized asset? It’s not really a block. You’re going about it the wrong way. So my point is, you have to have a basket of solutions for where this is going to go, because everything else is commoditized.”

Additionally, features such as high throughput are not seen by Hoskinson as differentiators, since every blockchain will eventually be fast, adding that a differentiator would be not being sued for deploying an application without a compliance regime.

“Can Solana deliver this right now? No. Neither can Polygon, Ethereum, or Bitcoin. They haven’t even thought about it because they’re fighting for their DeFi degenerates to move water from one side of the bathtub to the other. We’re not adding water to the bathtub. We’re just moving it from one side to the other, and they’re claiming that’s a huge growth success,” Hoskinson concluded.

In June 2024, Cardano prepared for its Voltaire upgrade, signaling a significant advancement in its blockchain governance as it entered the final phase of its decentralization roadmap.

Earlier in June 2024, Charles Hoskinson expressed his belief that Cardano was undervalued, citing its leadership and upcoming improvements like the Chang Hard Fork and Hydra as catalysts for growth.

In April 2024, Paul Frambot of Morpho Labs suggested that widespread adoption of DeFi would advance through collaborations with fintech companies and centralized exchanges, leveraging new infrastructure like Coinbase.

Back in March, a report from Exponential.fi showed that the DeFi ecosystem was maturing, with a trend toward lower-risk protocols due to Ethereum’s shift to a proof-of-stake model.

In January 2024, Aquarius Loan ushered in a new era for DeFi with its cross-chain lending platform that aims to reduce liquidity fragmentation and empower users through its $ARS token governance model.

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We are the editorial team of Financial Block, where seriousness meets clarity in cryptocurrency analysis. With a robust team of finance and blockchain technology experts, we are dedicated to meticulously exploring complex crypto markets with detailed assessments and an unbiased approach. Our mission is to democratize access to knowledge of emerging financial technologies, ensuring they are understandable and accessible to all. In every article on Financial Block, we strive to provide content that not only educates, but also empowers our readers, facilitating their integration into the financial digital age.

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DeFi

Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer

Financial Block Staff

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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

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DeFi

Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News

Financial Block Staff

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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.

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DeFi

Cryptocurrency and defi firms lost $266 million to hackers in July

Financial Block Staff

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Crypto companies, defi lost $266m 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.



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DeFi

The Rise of Bitcoin DeFi: Then and Now

Financial Block Staff

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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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