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This Week In DeFi – February 2

This Week In DeFi – February 2

Alex Miguel
February 02, 2024

Happy Friday, DeFi readers!

This week…

$JUP trading goes live
DeFi on Bitcoin gets investor attention
Swell launches rswETH, Binance Labs invests in Puffer Finance
Abracadabra Finance exploited for $6.4M

$JUP trading goes live

Jupiter, Solana’s largest decentralized exchange platform, has finally seen its native token go live as $JUP airdrop claims opened this week.

The token has settled at around a fully diluted valuation of just under $6 billion, at a price of $0.592 per JUP.

The platform is already sitting in the top 10 decentralized exchanges ranked by circulating market cap, however it is almost on par with top-ranked Uniswap in terms of fully diluted valuations.

Final Pre-JUP Reflections
First off, we have no idea what is going to happen.
We have chosen to take a pragmatic yet utopian approach, focused on maximum transparency, zero manipulation of liquidity, zero supply squeeze, simulataneous participation, open market price discovery… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— meow 🥧 (@weremeow)
1:28 PM • Jan 31, 2024

DeFi on Bitcoin gets investor attention

Bitcoin-based DeFi continues its trend, as Bitcoin cross-chain DEX, Portal, raises $34 million in seed funding – including contributions from Coinbase Ventures and OKX Ventures.

The raise was reportedly oversubscribed by more than two times due to interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitcoin-based perpetual swaps platform Velar has also raised $3.5 million in venture funding, which will build its platform on Stacks’ upcoming Nakamoto Release and its synthetic Bitcoin token, sBTC.

📰🔥 We're thrilled to announce #Portal's 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 $𝟯𝟰𝗠 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 from investors, including @cbventures, @Arrington_Cap, @OKX_Ventures, @gate_io, & others for building #DeFiOnBitcoin, featured on @TheBlock__… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Portal (@portal_finance)
4:23 PM • Jan 30, 2024

Swell launches rswETH, Binance Labs invests in Puffer Finance

Liquid restaking continues to gain interest from the wider ecosystem as Binance Labs invests in Puffer Finance, an Ethereum liquid restaking protocol on EigenLayer. The investment is aimed at assisting development of Puffer’s Layer-2 network and will see pufETH launch for BNB Chain users.

Liquid restaking platform Swell has also launched a new restaking token this week, with its rswETH token seeking to offer Ethereum staking rewards and native yields – also on EigenLayer.

We’ve invested in @puffer_finance!
Puffer is a decentralized and permissionless native liquid restaking protocol (nLRP) that combines Ethereum liquid staking with native restaking on EigenLayer.
Read more👇
— Binance Labs Fund (@BinanceLabs)
1:04 PM • Jan 30, 2024

Abracadabra Finance exploited for $6.4M

DeFi protocol Abracadabra Finance was hit by an exploit resulting in the loss of over $6.4 million involving a smart contract vulnerability related to precision loss.

The attack allowed the exploiter to borrow a large number of MIM tokens with insufficient collateral, causing the MIM stablecoin to temporarily depeg from its intended value.

In response, the Abracadabra team has taken measures to stabilize the MIM token, including a plan to buy back and burn MIM tokens.

1/
Important Security Update:
We’re actively investigating today’s hack on our protocol.
Initial findings suggest:
1) No user collateral at risk.
2) Issue fully mitigated.
3) Funds tracked by @chainalysis
More details in this thread:
— 🧙🏼‍♂️ (@MIM_Spell)
4:29 PM • Jan 30, 2024

Is a Bitcoin DeFi boom looming?

Stacks, a smart contract-enabled Layer-2 scaling solution for Bitcoin, is narrowing down the launch date for its latest release – and it may result in a DeFi boom on Bitcoin.

The Stacks “Nakamoto” upgrade will see the scaling platform’s block times decouple from the actual Bitcoin blockchain’s block times, resulting in a massive decrease in transaction processing time from a tedious 10 minutes to just five seconds.

This speeding-up of the Stacks network will open the door for true usability of dApps, getting it up to par with Ethereum and allowing users to have a much more tolerable user experience.

Nakamoto will also introduce sBTC: a trustless, two-way peg for Bitcoin, unlocking the full potential of the king of cryptocurrency’s relative stability and security for DeFi purposes, all on a Bitcoin-secured L2.

sBTC will be censorship resistant, have no need for an external oracle, and will automatically fork with the Bitcoin base chain.

Stacks’ native token, STX, already currently stands at a significant market cap of $2.2 billion, and hosts an ecosystem complete with wallets, NFTs, decentralized exchanges, launchpads, and more.

With sBTC providing a viable alternative base store of value to the more-volatile ETH on Ethereum, as well as a more trustless and decentralized model than many stablecoins, Stacks and its Nakamoto upgrade may provide a very sensible new DeFi ecosystem in Q2, 2024.

How much traction will it get, exactly? We’ll find out soon.

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— stacks.btc (@Stacks)
10:08 PM • Jan 31, 2024