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This Week In DeFi – March 24

This Week In DeFi – March 24

This week, Arbitrum's $ARB goes live, Celsius custody will return 72.5% of assets, Coinbase gets a warning from the SEC and DRPC launches decentralized RPCs for Ethereum.

March 24, 2023

To the DeFi community,

This week, Ethereum Layer-2 scaling platform Arbitrum has enabled claims for its recently-announced token, $ARB.

1.16 billion ARB tokens have been made available for early users, representing 11.6% of the total token supply. The claims website crashed as recipients rushed to collect their airdrops, with transaction fees spiked during the frenzy.

Through the token release, Arbitrum will be transitioning to a self-executing DAO and handing over control of governance decisions to ARB token holders. A 12-member council will be able to intervene in emergencies.

ARB is already trading on several centralized exchanges, including Coinbase, Binance, KuCoin, Bybit and OKX.

Gm. The day has come Arbinauts.💙🧡
— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum)
1:01 PM • Mar 23, 2023

Celsius custody account holders will be able to retrieve 72.5% of their cryptocurrency assets, after a federal judge approved a settlement in the defunct crypto lender's bankruptcy case.

The settlement is between Celsius debtors, the unsecured creditors committee, and an ad hoc group of custodial account holders. Individual custody account holders must opt-into the settlement.

The 72.5% return would come over time and does not include transaction fees, and the settlement does not release any rights or causes of action related to assets held in the Celsius Earn program.

Bankruptcy Court: The #Celsius Custody settlement is approved. Will be optional for customers. 30 days to review. Those who opt in will get 72.5% of their claim in two distributions 36.25% up front and 36.25% upon plan resolution (or at end of year).
— Cam Crews (@camcrews)
2:44 PM • Mar 21, 2023

Coinbase has been slapped with a Wells notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), threatening to sue the exchange over certain products.

The potential enforcement action is likely to be tied to aspects of Coinbase's spot markets, as well as its staking service Earn, Prime, and Wallet products. Shares of Coinbase Global Inc. have fallen dramatically upon the news.

CEO Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to explain the notice, as well as the company’s journey with regulators thusfar.

1/ Today Coinbase received a Wells notice from the SEC focused on staking and asset listings. A Wells notice typically precedes an enforcement action.
— Brian Armstrong 🛡️ (@brian_armstrong)
9:29 PM • Mar 22, 2023

Ethereum infrastructure provider DRPC has launched a decentralized remote procedure call (RPC) network for Ethereum-based apps. The service is designed to enhance security, cost-efficiency, and reliability for decentralized applications in the crypto industry.

RPCs are a crucial part of blockchain infrastructure, however are typically provided by centralized entities – a possible single point of failure for blockchain applications in case of outages.

To address this, DRPC has launched a decentralized RPC stack, consisting of a network of globally distributed providers that can more efficiently share the RPC load of crypto apps among themselves. The project currently focuses on Ethereum, but aims to expand its coverage to networks including Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism in the coming months.

DRPC is now Live!🥳
DRPC is an Ethereum-based decentralized RPC network that enhances the following:
1. reliability
2. cost-efficiency
3. security
Get your first endpoint and make Ethereum more decentralized in just 30 secs - drpc.org
More details in the thread🧵
— DRPC.eth (@drpcorg)
4:26 PM • Mar 23, 2023

The battle for the best Ethereum Layer-2 scaling platform is officially in full-swing as Arbitrum joins the race with its ARB governance token – the launch of which broke its claim website.

ARB has already passed its closest competitor Optimism in terms of fully-diluted market cap, with a total valuation of around $14 billion vs $11 billion. Arbitrum also has more than twice the total value locked (TVL), with $2.11 billion of value sitting in its ecosystem vs Optimism’s $985 million. Arbitrum’s TVL is also almost double that of Polygon, which sits at $1.07 billion according to DefiLlama.

Only the Ethereum mainnet, Tron and Binance Smart Chain have a higher TVL as of today.

In other news, the SEC continues to issue Wells notices left, right and center, as Coinbase and Sushi become the latest recipients of the dreaded warning letters. While Coinbase isn’t a decentralized platform, the SEC’s potential action against the company is aimed not just at their staking platform, but also their asset listings. This has the potential to hurt DeFi tokens as the platform is a major source of trading volume and a gateway to investing in such projects.

Sushi’s Wells notice may also be an interesting test, due to its positioning as one of the more decentralized exchanges available today. With almost $600 million in TVL, Sushi’s CEO Jared Grey is asking token holders for a $3 million allocation toward legal expenses to fight the battle.

How will DeFi stand against SEC allegations? This battle may be one of the most important yet.