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This Week In DeFi – April 28

This Week In DeFi – April 28

This week, Binance launches a liquid staking token, Ethereum DEX unique users near 2-year highs, users seek an airdrop for LayerZero and Solana wallet Phantom expands to Ethereum & Polygon.

April 28, 2023

To the DeFi community,

This week, Binance has launched its own liquid staking token, Wrapped Beacon ETH (WBETH), via its Ethereum staking service. Just like other liquid staking tokens, WBETH represents a claim on staked Ether and allows users to participate in the wider DeFi ecosystem – while still accruing Ethereum staking rewards.

Users will be able to wrap Beacon ETH (BETH) tokens to WBETH and unwrap WBETH to BETH tokens with zero fees.

https://twitter.com/binance/status/1650456542578188290

The number of unique traders on Ethereum DEXes surged to over 72,000 on April 19 – the highest number since the end of 2021. The traffic has been attributed to the mini-boom of “memecoins” such as $PEPE, which showed unbelievable returns for early buyers.

The surge in DEX trading activity also led to a surge in Ethereum gas fees, peaking at around 73 gwei.

https://twitter.com/3orovik/status/1651658925651927054

Total transactions on cross-chain protocol LayerZero have tripled since the Arbitrum airdrop of $1.7B in ARB tokens to its users last month, as users appear to be anticipating an airdrop to early users.

LayerZero launched in March 2022 and reached nearly 2 million cumulative transactions roughly a year later. In just the past month, users have pushed through almost 5M transactions.

Investors are betting that the growth will be sustainable, as LayerZero Labs announced a $120M raise at a $2.9B valuation on April 3.

https://twitter.com/CoingraphNews/status/1651371794631147520

Solana wallet Phantom will add support for the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains on May 1, enabling users to transact on all three chains via its application.

This is the first step for Phantom in its multichain journey, allowing users to see all their funds on the three networks in one place for each wallet. Phantom also contains features for NFT holders, such as showing specific data related to NFT collections and the ability to list their NFTs on marketplaces directly from Phantom.

The wallet will also have security measures, such as transaction simulation and NFT spam filtering.

https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1651228532285079553

CeFi platforms continue to waver this week,as the turbulent Binance.US–Voyager deal is terminated by Binance.US. The exchanged cited regulatory uncertainty as the reason for throwing away the $1 billion deal, going as far as calling regulators “hostile” – something that many in the industry may currently agree with.

On the other hand, the global Binance platform is beefing-up its staking services by launching its WBETH liquid staking token, which may make the service more competitive with decentralized competitors such as Lido.

The meme coin boom may be dragging plenty of users back into the DeFi space on Ethereum, while airdrop speculation appears to be garnering a lot of attention on rising platforms such as LayerZero, zkSync and others. Aside from this, the market seems somewhat quiet.

What will the catalyst for the next DeFi wave be?