Defi Financial News

While the GameFi sector has flourished of late, critics have noted that despite the increasing amount of titles being released, when it comes to games offering players unique and captivating gaming experiences, the industry is still lacking. 

Post Ethereum (ETH) merge, layer-2 blockchains have been catching the eyes of users and investors alike. Research firm Delphi Digital has been tracking Arbitrum since August and recently shared its analysis in a monthly market report.

Solana's developers forked the widely used token liquidity hub Serum, after being compromised by a hack on the bankruptcy exchange FTX on Nov. 11 that led to a series of unauthorized transactions. 

Even as the ongoing Binance-FTX saga continues to dominate the crypto airwaves, there has been a growing trend — an uneasy one at that — that has been garnering the attention of many digital currency enthusiasts in recent months, i.e., hackers returning partial funds for discovering exploits within a protocol. 

On Nov. 11, NFT Steez, a bi-weekly Twitter Spaces hosted by Alyssa Expósito and Ray Salmond, met with Thomas Webb, the founder of the interoperable avatar game Worldwide Webb, to discuss the integration of interoperability in Web3 and the Metaverse. 

The MakerDAO Risk Core Unit, a key group within the MakerDAO governance system, submitted an urgent request today to change collateral parameters for the DAOs stablecoin, DAI.

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.

Chainlink Labs offered its Proof of Reserve product as a solution to future trust issues in the crypto exchange market on Nov. 10. In a tweet thread, Chainlink Labs asked “Will crypto continue to repeat the mistakes of the traditional black-box financial industry? Or will a better system emerge?”

Optimism developers jvmi and Kelvin Fichter released a new app called Magic Mirror on Nov. 9 that allows NFT holders to copy or “mirror” their Optimism NFTs to the Ethereum mainnet. NFT holders can now use their Optimism NFTs in a variety of verified apps, such as in Twitter’s profile badge system — where previously, only NFTs native to Ethereum Layer 1 could be used.

Decentralization is part of the cryptocurrency industry’s core, with various protocols trying over time to achieve the level of decentralization that Bitcoin (BTC) managed to get as it grew organically from a white paper published to a mailing list to a new asset class.

Kris Marszalek, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com has become the latest crypto company promising to publish "audited proof of reserves," amid the downfall of rival exchange FTX. 

Orthogonal Credit, an arm of the digital asset hedge fund Orthogonal Trading, disclosed on Nov. 9 that it pushed to close Alameda Research’s dedicated borrower pool on Maple Finance in the second quarter of 2022 after identifying “key weaknesses” in its due diligence. 

Websites linked to the crypto exchange FTX have been taken down on Nov. 9, following a liquidity crisis and a pending acquisition of the company by its rival Binance. Websites for Alameda Research and the company's venture capital arm FTX ventures were offline and made private, while both FTX's main site and FTX US's website remain accessible.

For all the progress that has been made in DeFi, the industry currently stands at something of a crossroads. Since its peak last year, TVL in DeFi has shrunk from around $150 billion to where it is now, around $50 billion. The turmoil has coincided with global trends that have affected industries across the board, but the challenges faced by DeFi are unique, especially given how young a sector it is.

While decentralized finance (DeFi) is expected to be an upgrade to traditional finance mechanisms, some believe that denying users access to decentralized exchanges based on their wallets is a backward move. 

According to a new post by blockchain security firm SlowMist on Nov. 7, it appears that the last week’s token exploit affecting GameFi project Gala Games resulted from a public leak of applicable security keys on GitHub. As told by SlowMist, pNetwork, the cross-chain interoperability bridge used by Gala Games on the BNB Smart Chain, had three privileged roles in its smart contract pGALA.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX took to Twitter to address user complaints surrounding sluggish withdrawals. FTX assured users that everything is running smoothly with the matching engine, although node throughput is limited for Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals.

Disclaimer: This article is updated with pNetwork’s official response to Huobi.

The GameFi industry is set to unleash its massive potential within the next six years. According to Absolute Reports data, its estimated value will grow to $2.8 billion by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.4% in the same period.It’s a quieter perhaps less scandalous branch compared to the more newsworthy centralized finance (CeFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi) spaces, but this hasn’t impacted its force nor its promise. Even in the depth of crypto winter — read: a bear crypto market — blockchain-based games have continued to register a steady uptick in daily active users and transactions month after month throughout 2022, and the gaming sector has proven to be the most resilient compared to other market sectors. 

Few doubt the potential that DeFi has to redefine crucial aspects of finance for all. But, as it stands, using DeFi platforms and protocols is often time consuming and anything but easy.

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.