DeFi & L1L2 Weekly (02/11/2022)

zkSync launches ‘Baby Alpha’ on mainnet. Arco Protocol goes offline, asks community for confidence vote. Huobi’s HUSD stablecoin depegs after it’s delisted from the exchange.

Weekly DeFi Index

This week’s market cap and volume indices were positive at +6.28% and +40.62%, respectively, while the volatility index was negative at -21.97%.

• Stablecoin issuer Frax Finance (FXS) unveils Ether staking service with a dual token model. The liquid staking system has three components: frax ether (frxETH), staked frax Ether (sfrxETH) and the Frax ETH Minter. Users can deposit ETH into Frax ETH Minter to get frxETH; however, to earn staking rewards, they would need to exchange frxETH with sfrxETH. This mechanism is quite different from Lido, another ETH staking protocol which only introduces one token (stETH).

Project Spotlight

• Crypto.com signed an MOU with game software development studio ACT Games to collaboratively promote blockchain-based games. The two companies plan to utilise ACT Games’s IP and Crypto.com products to release games on the Cronos blockchain, provide Crypto.com Pay as a payment solution, and adopt the Crypto.com DeFi Wallet for ACT Games’s blockchain-based projects.
• Crypto.com Capital recently announced its support of Souffl3, a leading NFT marketplace launched on the Aptos blockchain. Souffl3 has completed a US$2 million seed round co-led by Crypto.com Capital and Synergis Capital, and the funds will be used to build a “next-generation NFT experience for creators, builders, and traders”.
• Brave announced the latest round of partners who joined its Wallet Partner programme in October. Through this programme, Brave’s native crypto wallet now features integrations with several Cronos projects, including Cronos ID, Minted, Ferro Protocol, and VVS Finance, and aims to help organically drive greater adoption of Cronos.

News Highlight

• Matter Labs released the ‘Baby Alpha’ phase of zkSync 2.0 on the mainnet, which is described as the first ‘product-ready’ scaling solution that is natively compatible with Ethereum. This initial phase will focus on stress-testing and implementing security efforts to the network. 
• Arco Protocol, a DeFi platform launched on the Aptos blockchain, has gone offline following failed fundraising efforts via an initial DEX offering (IDO) and the loss of key partnerships. It later asked for a community vote through a Twitter poll, and the majority of respondents have requested refunds. 
• Huobi announced that it would delist its native stablecoin HUSD from the exchange and  help its users convert their HUSD into USDT. HUSD then depegged from the U.S. dollar and is down 70% days after the announcement. 
• Team Finance temporarily paused all activity on its network after suffering a malicious exploit that drained $15.8 million worth of tokens from the protocol. According to blockchain data analytics company Peckshield, the hacker only required 1.76 ETH ($2,700) to execute the attack. 
• On 1 November, Lightning Network released an ‘emergency hotfix release’ to all LND node operators on its network. This was after a bug caused the LND nodes to stop syncing, preventing them from parsing certain transactions, and is the second critical bug discovered in less than a month.

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