DeFi & L1L2 Weekly (22/03/2023)

Ethereum’s Shanghai hard fork scheduled for 12 April. Arbitrum Foundation launches its new ARB token and transitions to a DAO. MakerDAO votes in favour of increasing US Treasury funds to US$1.25B.

Weekly DeFi Index

This week’s market cap, volume, and volatility indices were negative at -4.15%, -8.19%, and -24.27%, respectively.

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• Derivatives liquidity protocol Synthetix reached US$490 million in daily trading volume for the first time on 17 March, according to Dune analytics. $479 million worth of trading took place on the Kwenta, a synthetic perpetuals trading platform.

News Highlights

• The target date for Ethereum’s upcoming Shanghai upgrade is set for 12 April, as agreed by the core developers during their latest call. 
• The Arbitrum Foundation announced the launch of its new token, ARB, which will be airdropped to eligible community members on 23 March. ARB marks the official transition of Arbitrum to a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and will give ARB holders voting rights on the future of Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova. 
• DAI stablecoin issuer MakerDAO has elected to increase funds allocated to its current US Treasury investments. This increases the DAO’s real-world asset (RWA) vault debt ceiling to 1.25 billion DAI ($1.25 billion)
• A crypto wallet prototype has been found inside Microsoft Edge browser, suggesting the tech giant is experimenting with Web3. According to software research Albacore, Microsoft added code that integrates a non-custodial crypto wallet into its Edge browser. 
• Smart contract auditing firm BlockSec prevented a hacker from stealing $5 million worth of digital assets from decentralised lending protocol ParaSpace. BlockSec detected the exploit after the hacker failed in their first attempt to execute a transaction (which exploits a vulnerability in ParaSpace’s smart contract) because of insufficient gas fees.
• A hacker is laying the groundwork to sweep 3 million ARB tokens from the upcoming Arbitrum airdrop, as reported by Arkham Intelligence. Transaction data suggests that a sweeper bot has been deployed to send Ether to 2,400 wallets, and the person seems to have taken hold of the wallets’ private keys as well.

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