Lưu trữ cho từ khóa: #DeFi

DeFi

Mantle Network’s MNT token sees 12% surge amid whale buying

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MNT, the native token of Mantle Network, the Layer-2 technology stack for scaling Ethereum, has experienced a price surge of 12% in the last 24 hours, now trading at $0.8578.

This surge in MNT’s value comes amidst a broader decline in the cryptocurrency market. Currently, Mantle boasts a market capitalization of around $2.8 billion, placing it 31st in global cryptocurrency rankings by market cap, according to price data from crypto.news.

Over the past 24 hours, MNT’s trading volume has also risen by 12.7%, reaching $240 million. Within the same period, MNT’s price fluctuated between a low of $0.77 and a high of $0.86.

Formerly known as BitDAO, Mantle is an ecosystem investment DAO with close ties to Bybit. The Mantle token, MNT, is used for governance, gas fees on the Mantle Network, and staking on various platforms. The Mantle Network utilizes an Optimistic Rollup (ORU) to scale Ethereum and aims for EVM compatibility.

Operating on the Ethereum network, Mantle offers a seamless, secure, and scalable platform for decentralized application (dApp) developers to launch their projects. This has made Mantle an attractive protocol for supporting GameFi applications, prompting the creation of an in-house Web3 gaming team.

The recent price surge in MNT coincides with an increase in daily active and new addresses involved in MNT transactions.

On-chain data from IntoTheBlock indicates a 19% rise in the number of active addresses completing at least one MNT transaction over the past week. Additionally, the number of new addresses created to trade MNT has increased by 15% during the same period.

Mantle daily active addresses | Source: IntoTheBlock

An uptick in daily active addresses and new addresses typically signifies growing network activity and heightened interest in the asset, suggesting increased demand and potential for future value appreciation.

The spike in MNT’s price has also garnered attention from large holders or whales. These are addresses holding over 0.1% of an asset’s circulating supply. When the net flow of these large holders increases, it indicates that whale addresses are accumulating the asset, which is generally a bullish signal.

According to IntoTheBlock, MNT’s large holders’ net flow has surged by 134% over the past seven days, highlighting substantial accumulation by these investors.

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Theo Crypto News

DeFi

New EEA handbook to address regulatory ambiguity in DeFi laws

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The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) has launched a comprehensive DeFi Risk Assessment Guidelines handbook aimed at demystifying the complexities and regulatory uncertainties surrounding decentralized finance (DeFi).

Though the initiative from the EEA primarily aims to foster innovation in the DeFi space and address concerns over potentially restrictive legislation from global regulators.

The newly released guidelines delve into the intricacies of DeFi operations, offering detailed insights on how to evaluate, manage, and mitigate various risks. This resource arrives at a critical time, with the EEA highlighting a significant void in consistent accounting standards and regulatory guidance, particularly evident in frameworks like the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulations.

“There is still a lot of regulatory uncertainty around ‘boring’ accounting issues, about securities regulation, and so on because regulators are still learning about the [DeFi] space,” Charles Nevile, Director of Technical Programs at EEA, told crypto.news.

These guidelines aim to equip DeFi protocols with tools to proactively engage with compliance requirements and establish industry-supported best practices for risk assessment. Furthermore, they are designed to aid DeFi developers in demonstrating due diligence in a landscape where detailed regulatory mandates are scarce. Amid mounting pressure from regulators and policymakers threatening with anti-crypto legislation and enforcement actions, the EEA’s guidelines cover extensive ground.

Topics range from governance and tokenomics to software issues, liquidity, and compliance with regulatory and external market factors. They also address specific challenges in software components like oracles, smart contracts, and bridges, focusing on security and interoperability. For practical application, the guidelines outline best practices for risk management such as user education, bug bounty programs, stress tests, security updates, and data encryption. An extensive glossary of DeFi-related terms is included to assist newcomers in navigating the sector’s complex jargon.

In addition to aiding developers, the guidelines serve as a reference framework for regulators and licensing authorities, already influencing licensing requirements at the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and being included in the EU’s Sandbox program use cases.

Nevile also noted the importance of regulatory involvement in DeFi development. “The best way for this to happen is for regulators to participate alongside industry members in the multi-stakeholder development approach,” he stated.

The guidelines have drawn support from a diverse group of EEA board members, including crypto industry leaders from Consensys and the Ethereum Foundation, as well as major corporate entities like JP Morgan, Santander, and Microsoft.

The EEA has stated that its guidelines will be applicable to both non-crypto firms and regulatory bodies. Additionally, these guidelines are crucial for financial institutions evaluating investment risks. Dyma Budorin, co-chair of the EEA’s DRAMA working group and CEO of Hacken, emphasized the utility of the guidelines for traditional financial institutions cautious about entering the DeFi space.

“They don’t know what DeFi risks are, and that’s why they don’t step into DeFi,” Dyma Budorin, co-chair of the EEA’s DRAMA working group and CEO of blockchain security firm Hacken, noted in a statement to crypto.news. “DeFi protocols that plan to cooperate with old money can use the DeFi Risk Assessment Guidelines as best practice references,” Budorin added.

As major traditional finance firms increasingly adopt DeFi, the relevance of the EEA’s guidelines is underscored. Notably, BlackRock launched its inaugural tokenized fund on Ethereum this year, signaling a significant step into DeFi by a leading global asset manager.

Similarly, financial giants such as JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC are actively exploring DeFi through tokenization, further integrating blockchain technologies into their operations. To keep pace with these advancements, the EEA intends to continue its oversight through the Working Group, ensuring the guidelines evolve in response to new developments and feedback from users. This iterative process aims to refine and enhance the guidelines to better serve the industry.

A recent security incident on July 16 involving the Arcadia Finance protocol underscores the critical need for robust DeFi risk assessment and the implementation of preventative measures. In this breach, hackers targeted a specific contract address, extracting over $455,000 in various cryptocurrencies, which were subsequently laundered through the Ethereum-based mixing service Tornado Cash. The incident highlighted the persistent security vulnerabilities within DeFi protocols, reinforcing the importance of comprehensive risk management strategies as advocated by the EEA’s guidelines.

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Theo Crypto News

Altcoin

Cardano price ‘seeing most bearishness’ as altcoins rebound

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Cardano has risen after bottoming at $0.3174 earlier this month

Cardano (ADA) has has bounced back by 40% from its lowest point this month but remains 45% below its highest point this year. Despite being one of the largest cryptocurrencies, Cardano has faced intense pressure in recent months, with its market cap falling from over $90 billion in 2021 to $15.9 billion on Wednesday. 

External data indicates that Cardano’s interest among developers and investors has waned recently. According to DeFi Llama, the number of monthly developer commits dropped from 3,380 in May to 3,300 in June, and currently stands at less than 2,000 this month.

Additionally, the amount of money locked in Cardano’s DeFi applications has decreased from a record high of 633 million ADA in December 2023 to 538 million ADA on Wednesday. Its TVL of $247 million is much smaller compared to newer blockchains like Base, Blast, Sui, Mode, and Aptos.

Unlike Solana, BNB Chain, and Ethereum, Cardano has no major meme coin or decentralized exchange (DEX). Minswap, its biggest DEX, handled less than $1 million in transactions in the past 24 hours, whereas Solana’s Raydium processed $851 million.

Cardano also has a limited market share in the declining NFT market as it handled sales worth $1.6 million in the last 30 days. The number of Cardano addresses has dropped to less than 30k, and the amount of stablecoins is less than $20 million.

Cardano’s sentiment is waning

Sentiment among traders has been falling recently. The daily volume of Cardano has remained below $500 million since July 5th. In contrast, smaller meme coins like Pepe and Dogwifhat are handling over $700 million daily. The same trend is observed in the futures market.

Data by Santiment shows that interest among traders has dropped to the lowest level in months. Most traders are mostly concerned about the coin’s underperformance and lack of developer activity.

Cardano also has one of the lowest staking yields in the market. Data by StakingRewards shows that it has a staking yield of less than 3%. 

Technically, Cardano remains below the 200-day moving average, suggesting that the ongoing recovery may be short-lived. 

Cardano price chart

On a positive note, the crypto fear and greed index is about to flash green as hopes of a Federal Reserve rate cut rise. Therefore, ADA price will likely rise if Bitcoin sustains its rally and crosses the year-to-date high of $73,400.

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Theo Crypto News

DeFi

Crypto exchanges in South Korea now required to hold 80% of assets in cold storage

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South Korea’s first major set of cryptocurrency regulations is now live to safeguard crypto investors in the nation.

The new framework introduces stringent requirements for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs). Dubbed the Protection of Virtual Asset Users (PVAU), it mandates VASPs to hold at least 80% of users’ digital assets in cold storage.

The Financial Services Commission (FSC) will designate credible financial institutions to handle fiat deposits made towards VASPs. Further, VASPs must segregate customer funds from VASP funds and invest them in “risk-free” assets to generate a yield.

This safeguard ensures that in the event of a cryptocurrency exchange going bankrupt, the respective financial institutions would directly repay customer funds.

These measures are a direct response to the collapse of Terra-Luna and FTX, which wiped off billions of dollars worth of customer funds. Both entities’ implosions heavily impacted South Korea, especially FTX, which saw more than 6% of its traffic come from the East Asian country.

Besides the aforementioned mandates, VASPs are also required to be insured or have a reserve fund in place to mitigate the damage in the event of a hack or liquidity crisis.

Further, the law includes provisions for VASPs to restrict user deposits and withdrawals under certain conditions, offering further control over irregular activities.

The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), the executive arm of the FSC, has also established a real-time monitoring system in collaboration with cryptocurrency exchanges for “constant monitoring of abnormal transactions.” This system’s implementation was also set for July 19, alongside the User Protection Act.

The regulator claims this system will cover 99.9% of the country’s crypto trading volume. If any abnormalities are identified, they must be reported to the FSS via a dedicated data transmission line.

When the system was introduced in early July, 29 crypto exchanges, including Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax, registered with the FSS regarding this.

The recent enforcement follows South Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance delaying the 20% crypto gains tax set to be implemented early next year. The nation’s ruling party is reportedly considering postponing it to 2028.

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Theo Crypto News

Altcoin

ETHTrustFund rug pulls on Base, leading to $2m in investor losses

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Developers have rug pulled the ETHTrustFund project on the Base network, leading to investor losses amounting to $2 million worth of Ethereum.

The fraudulent project abruptly moved these funds from its treasury to a new wallet. Notably, crypto community figure Octoshi first called attention to the scam. He disclosed a series of suspicious funds transfers and the project’s sudden inactivity. 

According to Octoshi, the project’s developer, known only as “Peng,” had been unresponsive for the past three months. This period of silence followed months of building trust and raising over $2 million for ETHTrustFund’s treasury. The project’s website has since gone offline, and its social media accounts have been deleted.

ETHTrustFund marketed itself as a type of OHM fork, capitalizing on the interest within the Base network community. It attracted substantial investment by leveraging the excitement surrounding the network, memes, and ETFs. The project’s documentation remains available, but all other traces have vanished.

Blockchain security firm PeckShield confirmed the rug pull, revealing that the scammers had already laundered the stolen funds. 

The perpetrators bridged the funds from the Base network to Ethereum (ETH)  and then used Tornado Cash and Railgun, both known for their privacy features, to obscure the trail of the stolen assets. 

Etherscan data confirms these findings, showing that the developer siphoned exactly 607 ETH, equivalent to $2.1 million.

Detailed transaction logs from Etherscan indicate that one of the developer’s primary addresses moved 200 ETH to Railgun at 13:27 UTC. Shortly after, this address transferred another 200 ETH to Tornado Cash in two separate transactions. An additional 56.9 ETH was then funneled back to Railgun.

Base has been a hotbed for rug pulls in recent times, as market participants seek to ride on the growing FOMO surrounding the network.

Last August, Magnet Finance, a protocol on Base, was rug-pulled for $6.4 million. 
Solana has also had its fair share of rug pulls, with one involving the URF meme coin and another connected to the CONDOM meme coin project. Both of these rug pulls occurred in April.

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Theo Crypto News

DeFi

WazirX hack sees $200m in crypto swapped for ETH to thwart blocking

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Funds stolen via the July 18 hack on Indian crypto exchange WazirX is being swapped for Ether (ETH).

Data from the on-chain tracker SpotOnChain indicates the attacker has converted over $200 million worth of the siphoned assets to ETH. At the time of publication, the blacklisted wallet held 59,097 ETH.

15,298 ETH was stolen directly from WazirX’s multisig wallet, alongside 200 different crypto assets, including $102 million worth of SHIB, $11.25 million worth of MATIC, $7.6 million worth of PEPE, $7.79 million worth of USDT, and $3.5 million worth of GALA.

Most of these assets have been swapped for ETH with the wallet currently holding just over $11 million worth of altcoins such as Chromia (CHR), Celer Network (CELR), Frontier (FRONT) and Ooki (OOKI) tokens.

Meanwhile, blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain highlighted that the hacker made a deposit of 7.7 million DENT tokens to a Binance address, adding that the wallet “has not been used before.”

Iakov Levin, co-founder Rivo, told crypto.news that the hacker likely swapped the ERC-20 tokens to Ether due its high liquidity. He also underlined that it is “not possible to block ETH like stablecoins.”

ERC-20 tokens have a contract function that allows contract owners to maintain a list of addresses that are prohibited from participating in token transactions. This is typically implemented using a mapping structure in the smart contract, which checks the blacklist before executing transfers, thus preventing any interaction with the blacklisted addresses.

In contrast, ETH lacks this feature since it operates on the core Ethereum protocol, which does not allow for the modification of address permissions.

Akhsay Nassa, co-founder of Chimp DEX, also had a similar opinion, explaining that the attacker wants to prevent the funds from being frozen by authorities.

“With a large, active market, ETH allows for quick and fair trades. Moreover, its numerous cross-chain bridges and exchanges enable easy movement between blockchains, further obscuring the trail,” he added.

The attack was the result of the exchange’s wallet management system being exploited. There were discrepencies in data displayed for Liminal, the digital asset custody and wallet infrastructure provider for the exchange.

“We suspect the payload was replaced to transfer wallet control to an attacker,” the WazirX team said in its post-mortem of the incident.

Meanwhile, crypto sleuth ZachXBT speculated that North Korea’s Lazarus group may have been involved. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic also came to a similar conclusion.

WazirX halted withdrawals for both crypto and fiat and has vowed to recover the funds.

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Theo Crypto News

Công nghệ

Venture capital is flowing to Solana ecosystem | Opinion

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Solana has outperformed all expectations in the aftermath of the FTX black swan event, which saw the price of its native token plunge to single digits. Now, it stands as far more than the unlikely underdog. With VanEck’s recent filing for a Solana (SOL) exchange-traded fund, Solana is knocking on the doors of the big leagues.

But what makes Solana so powerful that Pantera Capital declared it the “macOS of blockchains”? It all boils down to the user experience. Solana is perhaps the most consumer-facing blockchain that seeks to meet users in the middle and even, sometimes, abstracts away its on-chain features.

Solana’s monolithic blockchain architecture

Unlike modular blockchains like Ethereum and Cosmos, the monolithic design of Solana’s network allows for vertical integration. It’s a design that optimizes every blockchain component, resulting in a seamless user experience, much like the one with Apple’s operating systems.

This architecture enables Solana to handle high throughput and low transaction fees. Both are crucial factors for decentralized finance applications, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs), and a host of other low-friction blockchain applications, such as the recently launched Blinks. Thanks to optimizing its entire stack, Solana is an attractive platform for developers and users alike, contributing to a surge in retail activity and decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on the network. As a result, Solana has seen growth spikes in both the number of active users and the volume of transactions, positioning it as a leading blockchain.

Growing on-chain activity

Solana’s growth is evident from its increase in unique active addresses from 14,000 in October 2020 to nearly 1.34 million today. Priority fees have also jumped from under $100,000 per month in mid-2023 to over $60 million in March 2024. The share of DEX volume on Solana has also risen significantly, from 0% in early 2021 to over 24% by May 2024, while 85% of all new tokens on DEXs as of May 2024 were based on Solana.

It’s fairly easy to explain these on-chain growth trends. Solana has become a popular favorite for creating new tokens and meme coins. The ease of use, combined with Solana’s speed and low transaction fees, have made it the destination of choice for casual traders. The rise in popularity of Telegram trading bots, no doubt, contributed to the on-chain explosion on Solana, with the market cap of community-driven meme tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF) having reached billions.

The world’s first mainstream blockchain

It would be short-sighted to attribute all of Solana’s growth and future promise to the money markets. Sure enough, platforms like MarginFi and Jupiter are pushing the envelope for simple defi products that don’t require users to have deep pockets in order to gain a meaningful edge in the trading experience. But Solana has proven itself to be capable of so much more.

Perhaps that explains why Pantera Capital just concluded a raise for a new fund aimed at purchasing up to $250 million worth of SOL tokens (at a significant discount since the tokens are from the FTX bankruptcy estate). This came on the heels of a mega investment decision in April by Pantera Capital and Galaxy Trading to buy around 30 million locked SOL tokens with a cumulative value of $1.9 billion.

Even though the price of SOL has risen over 723% in the past year, Solana provides many opportunities for venture capitalists outside of speculating on the SOL token. One thing has become clear: crypto-adjacent technologies and digital systems that otherwise integrate web3 functionalities are closer to home for the average user than blockchain-native products. Solana is already one of the most widely used blockchain networks and is firmly charting a course to take crypto products to mainstream consumers.

Why venture capital is bullish on Solana

If the Apple comparisons ring true, Solana would have succeeded in giving users refined web3 use cases that change how we communicate, transact, and create. From real estate to digital networks, from AI systems to identity verification services, there is no shortage of such projects being built on Solana. Privasea, for instance, is a technology that attests to human liveness to protect the digital presence of real people from bots and AI impersonations. With deep fakes, sybil activity, and other forms of digital fraud becoming more rampant than ever, solutions like Privasea are addressing a necessary aspect of daily life.

Another fine example is Grass, a layer built on Solana that is designed to give users control of the rails by which data itself is acquired for AI. The implication of its success would be to disrupt the billion-dollar AI industry, where only a handful of players have sufficient computing resources to crawl the entire internet. With over two million users already, Grass currently boasts the ability to fine-tune specific AI models and inform certain types of real-time inference. It is projected that, by the time Grass hits 25 million users, it will be capable of crawling enough data to train ChatGPT from scratch on a weekly basis!

As a final note, critics point to Solana’s history of network outages as a bearish factor. This perspective, of course, fails to consider that a major upgrade called Firedancer is slated to go live next year. Already, lite versions are being rolled out to incrementally boost the network’s resilience against congestion. Circumstances are conspiring to make Solana the home of a fresh generation of blockchain users, opening up untapped markets and revitalizing prevalent ones. Therefore, it only makes sense that venture capitalists are swooping in early with strategic long-term investments.

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Theo Crypto News

DeFi

Rho Markets attacker offers to return funds, says incident not a hack

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Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT says the attacker who took funds from Scroll-supported lending protocol Rho Markets is willing to return all funds.

Specifically, the attacker has written an on-chain message committing to returning all funds, claiming theirs wasn’t an exploit or hack. In a post after the incident, blockchain investigator ZachXBT noted that the attacker appeared to be a grey or white hat and that the funds could be recovered. The exploiter has a lot of exposure on centralized exchanges, ZachXBT noted.

Not long after, the attacker communicated with Rho via an on-chain message.

The message read:

‘Our MEV bot has profited from a configuration error in Rho Markets’ price oracle. We understand these funds belong to users and are willing to return them in full. However, we first want you to acknowledge that this was not an exploit or hack, but a configuration mistake on your part. Additionally, please inform us of the measures you will take to prevent such incidents in the future,” they wrote.

Rho Markets pauses platform amid investigation

Earlier on Monday, blockchain security firm Cyvers Alerts noted that Rho Markets had suffered an attack that impacted the protocol’s USDC and USDT pools.

From the incident, the attacker managed to move $7.6 million in user funds, with these held on several chains.

Rho and Scroll, an Ethereum Layer 2 protocol, confirmed the attack, noting “unusual activity. As they commenced investigations, the Rho Markets team announced a pause to the network.

“The platform functions will be enabled again once everything returns to normal. Thank you for your understanding and patience,” Rho Markets wrote.

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Theo Crypto News

DeFi

AVAX jumps 13% as gaming partnerships propel growth

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AVAX, the native token of Layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, has experienced a notable increase of 13% over the last 24 hours, positioning it as the top gainer among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Currently, the token is trading at approximately $32.2, up 11.5% in the same period, with its daily trading volume tripling to around $829 million, according to the latest data from crypto.news.

AVAX price chart | Source: TradingView

With the market cap now standing at $12.7 billion, AVAX ranks as the 11th largest cryptocurrency. However, despite the recent gains, it remains 78% below its peak of $146.2, reached on November 21, 2021.

Avalanche was introduced in the autumn of 2020 by a team led by software engineer Emin Gun Sirer, along with Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan “Ted” Yin. The Layer-1 blockchain, which supports smart contracts, quickly positioned itself as a direct competitor to Ethereum.

The recent surge in AVAX’s price follows an announcement on July 19 that ChronosWorlds, a post-apocalyptic RPG game, has selected Avalanche as its preferred blockchain for deployment.

The partnership underscores the growing interest in utilizing robust and stable blockchain platforms like Avalanche for gaming applications. In related news, Fableborne’s first play-to-airdrop event, held on the same day, was hailed as a success, attracting over 77,000 concurrent participants.

Additionally, recent trading activities by large-scale investors (whales) have also influenced AVAX’s price dynamics. These investors have reportedly begun to short the cryptocurrency, particularly after it reached a recent low near $26.

This price movement in AVAX coincides with a broader upward trend in the cryptocurrency market, including a 7% increase in Bitcoin over the past week and a slight overall market uptick of 0.5%, bringing the total market valuation to $2.44 trillion.

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Theo Crypto News