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This Week In DeFi – October 21

This Week In DeFi – October 21

This week, Aptos goes live and airdrops 20M APT, Frax Finance announces liquid staking, Edge Capital Management raises $67M for DeFi funds and Ripple plans an EVM sidechain.

October 21, 2022

To the DeFi community,

This week, Aptos announced the launch of its mainnet this week, along with an airdrop of 20 million of its native APT tokens to early testers – equivalent to 2% of token supply.

APT also saw rapid listings on several major exchanges, including perpetual futures contracts via Binance and FTX.

The Aptos blockchain comes from the developers of Facebook’s abandoned cryptocurrency project, Libra, which was rebranded to “Diem” before eventually being shut down.

Aptos already has a fully diluted market cap of almost $8 billion.

Mainnet has arrived.
— Aptos (@Aptos_Network)
7:04 PM • Oct 17, 2022

Frax Finance is joining in on the liquid staking fun, as it reveals it will be launching an Ethereum liquid staking protocol “within two weeks”.

The protocol will enable users to stake their Ether and mint Frax Ether (frxETH), an ETH derivative token. As with other liquid staking tokens such as Lido’s stETH, frxETH will mirror the price of ETH and be freely usable within the DeFi ecosystem.

$frxETH is LIVE at app.frax.finance/frxeth/mint
step 1: mint your $ETH into $frxETH 1:1
step 2: stake your $frxETH for $sfrxETH to earn yield estimated at 6.13% APR currently
(¤, ¤)
@fraxfinance@samkazemian
nfa
— Alphaverse DeFi Fund (@AlphaverseDeFi)
9:10 PM • Oct 20, 2022

Edge Capital Management, an obscure crypto hedge fund, has raised $66.78 million across two DeFi funds, according to recent SEC filings.

One fund is based in the US with $28 million in funding, while the other is based in the Cayman Islands with almost $39 million.

According to the limited amount of information available on the funds, the company is seeking digital asset opportunities, with a focus on macro factors.

SCOOP: Edge Capital Management, a newer crypto hedge fund, has raised $66.78 million across two of its DeFi-focused funds.
@BrandyBetz reports
trib.al/Y0fiDso
— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk)
3:05 PM • Oct 20, 2022

Ripple has taken a fascinating step into DeFi territory, kicking off a project which plans to introduce an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible sidechain into the XRP ledger ecosystem.

The project has been organized into three-phases, beginning with a recently-launched version of the chain on the company’s devnet. To follow, a permissionless version will launch early next year, while a full deployment of the chain is scheduled for Q2 2023.

🥁Introducing the first phase of bringing an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain to the #XRPLedger.

EVM developers, we invite you to experiment with the functionality on Devnet and enjoy the best of Ethereum and XRPL for your #DeFi applications.
— RippleX (@RippleXDev)
1:19 PM • Oct 17, 2022

The walls of regulation continue to close in on crypto and DeFi, with news coming from multiple parties this week.

Perhaps the most shocking was FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s regulatory proposal seeking to standardize regulation around DeFi – including implementing know-your-customer (KYC) rules across companies and websites offering access to decentralized exchanges.

Bankman-Fried’s proposal was met with a ton of backlash from the crypto community, with many perceiving his moves as protecting his own self-interests in the market.

On the regulatory agency side of things, we had the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) acting chair calling for more controls on stablecoins.

Martin Gruenberg encourages a system where such tokens are only permitted on networks where all parties are clearly identified and verified – essentially pushing for an entirely permissioned network.

Finally, over at the IRS, the most recent tax guidance has been beefed up to explicitly mention NFTs as taxable assets, as well as shifting language from “virtual currencies” to “digital assets”. The IRS was careful to use language that would also apply its reporting rules to emerging digital asset classes, which may attempt to escape the agency’s grasp.

It will be highly interesting to see how the ecosystem reacts to and defends itself from these budding regulations and others. A great DeFi split into “permissioned” DeFi and the wild-west may truly be beginning – but how segregated will things get?