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This Week In DeFi – September 2

This week, 1inch airdrops $OP to wallet users on Optimism, Curve hints a Sept. stablecoin launch and Arbitrum completes its Nitro upgrade.

This week, decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch has announced that it will be airdropping Optimism ($OP) tokens to users who have made swaps via the 1inch wallet on the Optimism network.

A total of  300,000 OP tokens will be given out in the retrospective airdrop, distributed equally to all qualifying wallets.

Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov stated during a community discussion that the protocol’s new stablecoin may launch as early as this month – the first hint of a release date for the token.

The decentralized, over-collateralized crvUSD stablecoin was first mentioned in July, during the Redefine Tomorrow 2022 virtual cryptocurrency conference.

Ethereum Layer-2 scaling network Arbitrum has completed its upgrade to Arbitrum “Nitro”, reducing transaction costs and improving network speed. The network achieves the improvements via call data compression, as well as better compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). 

The Ether market on lending protocol Compound has been frozen thanks to a bug in the code of a recent update. $800 million worth of ETH will remain stuck in the protocol for about a week, while governance attempts to pass a proposal to undo the upgrade. 

Withdrawals and liquidations are frozen, however deposits remain unaffected, according to the Compound team.

It’s an all-round exciting time this September, with a huge range of developments happening across the space – especially on Ethereum.

Headlining the month’s events is obviously The Merge, targeting a mid-month completion of the transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). A growing number of protocols are clarifying their stance on a possible fork, with OpenSea becoming the latest major platform to formally commit to the PoS chain.

Compound has accidentally locked up their users’ ETH right before Merge time with a faulty (and three-times audited) smart contract upgrade, while Aave is implementing a purposeful halt to ETH lending before the Merge, to prevent any hiccups.

We also have Layer-2 networks continuing to flourish, as Arbitrum completes its Nitro upgrade and may soon resume its “Odyssey” program. Its closest competitor, Optimism, also continues to see significant activity, as well as excitement over the 1inch retroactive airdrop.

Over on the protocol side, a very interesting game is playing out as two major protocols, Curve and Aave, come closer to launching their own stablecoins. In a stablecoin market rocked by controversy and failed pegs, we may have the perfect setting for these new tokens to take a significant market share. Definitely keep an eye out for crvUSD and GHO!

Interest Rates

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MakerDAO Updates

DAI Savings Rate: 0.01%

Base Fee: 0.00%

ETH Stability Fee: 0.50%

USDC Stability Fee: 1.00%

WBTC Stability Fee: 0.75

Highest Yields: Nexo Lend at 10% APY, BlockFi at 7.50% APY

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Stat Box

Total Value Locked$59.66B (down 4.7% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap$43.89B (down 5.7%)

DEX Weekly Volume$13B (down 7.1%)

DAI Supply: 6.55B (up 0.61%)

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