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This Week In DeFi – April 21

This Week In DeFi – April 21

This week, net ETH staking briefly turns positive, PancakeSwap looks to go deflationary, Agility quintuples its TVL, and a16z launches an OP client.

April 21, 2023

To the DeFi community,

This week, net ETH staking went positive for the first time since the Shapella upgrade on Tuesday April 18, with 26,680 more ETH ($53 million) being staked vs unstaked that day.

Overall, there have still been much more staking withdrawals than deposits since the upgrade, however the trend may be turning around as users can now unstake at any time.

The rate at which ether is being burned has also increased, with Ethereum burning about 11,600 ETH ($23 million) in the past week. The ether supply has decreased at a rate of 0.502% per year over the past seven days, nearly double the burn rate of the past 30 days.

https://twitter.com/TheBlock__/status/1648271034951294977

BNB Chain DEX, PancakeSwap, has proposed lowering the inflation rate target for its native CAKE token to 3%–5%, a significant reduction from its current rate above 20%.

The proposal would move CAKE towards a deflationary model, by cutting the token rewards paid to traders and stakers by over 68%. The proposal is open to community feedback for a week before moving to a final vote.

https://twitter.com/PancakeSwap/status/1648310860669140992

New Liquid-Staked ETH exchange, Agility, has experienced a surge in user deposits, with over $276m in deposits in the past week – multiplying the value locked in the protocol more than 5-fold.

Agility introduced a token incentive program to coincide with Ethereum's Shapella upgrade, offering users additional rewards. The platform's total value locked is now over $337m, up from $60m a week ago, and its staking pools saw inflows of over $110m in the last 24 hours alone.

https://twitter.com/OnchainDataNerd/status/1648887102309040129

a16z has launched "Magi," a new rollup client for Optimism that aims to boost the decentralization and network security of the OP Stack.

Magi is written in Rust and will improve client diversity and resilience. The lead engineer for Coinbase's layer-2 solution Base, Jesse Pollak, tweeted that "magi means more decentralization, security, and scale for the OP Stack."

Magi is still in development and currently syncs to the Optimism testnet, with production readiness expected in the coming months.

https://twitter.com/eddylazzarin/status/1648703454813241350

The SEC has single-handedly been wreaking havoc for the US crypto industry as of late, slapping Coinbase (and Bittrex) with Wells notices and potentially on the verge driving one of the biggest on-ramps to crypto out of the country.

To add insult to injury, SEC chair Gary Gensler refused to assess Ether’s status as a security (or not a security) in a recent congressional hearing – leaving the second-largest crypto’s regulatory safety in the country up in the air.

Furthermore, the SEC’s lawsuit against Bittrex appears to class Algorand’s ALGO token as a security, spelling bad news for many other assets across the sector.

Companies behind DeFi platforms may also be in danger, as the SEC seeks to clarify its stance and power over the industry, already having issued Wells notices to many entities.

The future of crypto and DeFi in the United States sure looks shaky, and may result in a large exodus of innovation and talent out of the country to the rest of the world – depending on where regulators are more lenient. Of course, DeFi will continue to exist regardless, but the US crack-down is a disappointing hamper on a flourishing technology in one of the world’s greatest superpowers.

Will Gensler be stopped?