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DeFi To Soon Dive Into Thailand Shores

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The decentralized finance aka DeFi space amassed notable traction throughout last year. During the peak of Covid, while all the other markets were enduring a crash, the crypto-verse, particularly the DeFi space was seen booming. While several platforms, as well as countries, took interest in the decentralized finance space, Thailand became the latest one to join the list.

At the time of writing, the total value locked in the market was at a high of $53 billion. The Compound platform was seen dominating the zone by over 19% as it locked a whopping $10.48 billion.

DeFi Catches The Eye Of Thailand’s Prominent Bank

The prominent news portal Bangkok Post revealed that one of the largest Thailand banks, Kasikornbank also known as the KBank had reportedly taken an interest in incorporating decentralized finance into its system. While the bank will plunge into the decentralized space, the Kasikorn Business Technology Group [KBTG], a tech subsidiary of the KBank is all set to take over this project.

The Chairman of KBTG, Ruangroj Poonpol pointed out that the incorporation of decentralized finance would fall under the second phase of the firm’s digital transformation project. While the first phase was conducted throughout 2018-2020, the second phase kicked off in 2021 and is said to go on till 2023.

Emphasizing on the same, the Chairman said,

“DeFi is a key exploration for KBank Group this year. [..] Providing innovative financial services under DeFi should improve the country’s financial exclusion and allow Thais better access to financial services. With this asset-backed form, DeFi could also create economic value for Thailand.”

Decentralized finance has been arising as a promising field. The rapid growth of the industry continued to prove beneficial for the decentralized finance space as well. More recently, Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban also commented on the emergence of DeFi. He went on to compare the growth of the decentralized finance space to that of the early days of the internet.

DeFi TVL Exceeds $50 Billion As Compound Climbs New Record

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Several prominent Ethereum-driven DeFi protocols have posted a strong bullish move as a new week dawned. This was accompanied by the total value locked across all decentralized finance protocols has hit another milestone.

tvl

According to the latest stats compiled by DeFi Pulse, the TVL in DeFi blasted past a whopping $50 billion on the 5th of April after a renewed market push. With this, the TVL figure was currently found to be almost twice the capitalization of the third-largest crypto-asset, Binance Coin [BNB]. Since the February pullback, the total value locked in decentralized finance protocols has maintained a steady uptrend.

Side by side, the rising TVL was the increase in the token price of many of the top protocols as DeFi traders began stacking during the market lows even as the decentralized finance sector took a break from the spotlight, as opposed to 2020 summer when it was in all rage.

Ethereum Locked Hits ATH Too

As the price of Ethereum established a much-anticipated peak, the cryptocurrency locked in DeFi also surged to a fresh high of 10.78 million ETH. This amount of Ether accounts for roughly 10% of the altcoin’s total circulating supply.

Leading the chart was the decentralized lending protocol, Compound, which recently climbed all the way to $15 billion in terms of the total lending value. As it dominated the decentralized finance market, it contributed to roughly 19% of the value locked up. Next up was another lending platform, Maker with $7.73 billion and DEX platform Uniswap with over $5 billion.

Bitcoin Locked In DeFi Attempts Recovery

The world’s largest cryptocurrency has stalled its momentum around $59K. Despite weeks of consolidating, Bitcoin has failed to establish a record with respect to its value. Alongside, the dull price action, Bitcoin locked up in all decentralized finance projects recently took a tumble to a three-month low.

Its recovery to the current figure of around 138K BTC was not impressive.

Hackers Drain 183 ETH From DeFi Project ‘ForceDAO’

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A relatively new decentralized finance or DeFi project called ForceDAO reportedly suffered an attack by five hackers on the wee hours of Sunday. The exploit of xFORCE’s contract is yet another reminder of how a seemingly massive inflow of money poured into a few hour-old initiatives by FOMOed investors of the sector can have serious consequences.

Another New DeFi Protocol Exploited

In the latest attack, the exploiters reportedly drained and liquidated a total of 183 ETH [ almost $367K] worth of FORCE tokens. Force’s xFORCE contract was hacked and drained by a white hacker. As explained by Polymath Lab’s blockchain team lead, Mudit Gupta, one of the five hackers reportedly returned some amount of stolen funds.

As per the post-mortem analysis published by the portal of the DeFi platform, the hackers were able to deposit FORCE tokens that would fail the “transferFrom call and receive xFORCE tokens”, as the xFORCE contract expects a revert from the token but instead receives false.

Alberto Cevallos noted that the entire episode could have been dodged by using a standard Open Zeppelin ERC-20 or adding a safeTransferFrom wrapper in the xSUSHI contract.

Cevallos also went ahead and stated that the platform takes complete responsibility for the “engineering oversight” and has started processes to make sure any such incidents are mitigated in the future. He also added,

“We also want to thank the White Hat hacker who helped deter further FORCE tokens from being drained. We have a bounty for you. All funds on our platform are safe, only xFORCE was affected.”

As part of the processes to alleviate concerns surrounding future exploitation, the DeFi hedge fund will now have a snapshot and also a new token. Cevallos announced that the necessary steps for internal re-structuring have commenced and a pland will be unveiled over the coming days making any affected FORCE holders and LPs whole.

Earlier the DeFi protocol’s developers had announced the airdrop of its FORCE tokens, which had lost 90% of its value after the attack, to users of other protocols. This decision was made to ensure a fair launch and lure in users to their platform. According to reports, a total of 25 million FORCE tokens were to be airdropped over a period of a month to those staking on Aave, Alchemix, Badger, Balancer, Curve, Maker DAO, Synthetix, Sushi, Vesper, and Yearn Finance.

Uniswap [UNI] Tilts In Favor Of Bulls; Eyes $34-Hurdle

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Uniswap [UNI] became the first token to first decentralized finance [DeFi token to enter the list of top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap. While retaining its fort, the token has managed to rake in profits of nearly 12% over the past week.

The DeFi token was found to be consolidating below the crucial level of resistance as volatility took a plunge. Despite this, the technicals favored the bulls eyeing to recover the lost gains.

At the time of writing, Uniswap [UNI] was currently exchanging hands at $31.24 as it held a market cap of $16.31 billion. Over the last 24-hours, it was down by 1.92% after recording a trading volume of $608.2 million over the same period.

Uniswap [UNI] Daily Price Chart:

UNI

Uniswap [UNI] has maintained a steady upward trend after faltering in mid-March and testing support below $30-mark. During this time, the UNI bulls faced the upward sloping 50 DMA [Pink] which attempted to move over the UNI candles. However, the renewed bullish push ensured that the candlestick arrangements hovered above the moving average.

The 100 DMA [Blue], on the other hand, continued to float well below the 50 DMA depicting bullish presence in the market.

UNI2

The formation of small green closing bars of the Awesome Oscillator depicted a subtle rise in bullish momentum for Uniswap’s price.

Despite low volatility, the buying demand was slowly building up. This was depicted by the MACD which also appeared to be heading for a bullish crossover nearly three weeks of stint with the bears. In addition, the RSI above the 54-mark indicated a sentiment of growing buying pressure from the investors in the UNI market.

The moving averages had failed to sink the price of Uniswap lower as it continued to clench steady gains. If the bulls succeed in pushing the DeFi token higher, target points that could be breached are $32.9, and $34.2 respectively. Support points for the token, on the other hand, were found to be at $27.9 and $22.4 respectively.

Ethereum Whale Sent ~$1.3B To DeFi Lending Protocol Compound

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The number of Ethereum whales [i.e., large entities who held massive amounts of ETH tokens] has been pretty consistent since the crash in February last week. However, in the latest development, an unknown whale just transferred more than 629,000 ETH.

According to Whale Alert’s tweet on the same, the recipient wallet to which almost $1.3 billion was sent was the smart contract for the decentralized finance [DeFi] protocol Compound contract.

The sender remained anonymous. According to the data available, the whale paid a gas fee of 0.0205 ETH, that is more than $43. However, the movement of a large sum of money coincided with the price of the second-largest crypto-asset hitting an all-time high on the 2nd of April.

Upon further inspection, it was found that the same Compound contract received around 300 ETH from another unknown wallet the previous day, and 13,000 ETH $27 million a couple of days ago.

DeFi Captures Interest of Ethereum Whales

ETH

Over the past few weeks, large ETH holders have refrained from offloading their bags. As per the latest stats, the number of wallets holding over 10K ETH has declined by less than 1% over the last four months. Meanwhile, 100-10,000 ETH addresses have taken a much more substantial plunge of 7.2% over the same time period.

In fact. The mid-tier level addresses were found to be pouring more ETH tokens into DeFi.

This was evident in the above chart compiled by DeFi Pulse, which indicated that Ethereum locked across all decentralized finance [DeFi] protocols have soared to an all-time high of $10.224 million as of the 4th of April.

It is important to note that the amount of the token locked topped 10 million for the first time ever on the 11th of March. As price took a tumble, the DeFi figure also remained dull before establishing a major top.

Additionally, it is worth noting that some of Ethereum’s circulating supply was also directed towards its Beacon Chain, which is essentially a Proof-of-Stake [PoS] blockchain. This was indicative of the onset of Ethereum’s transformation of consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work [PoW] to Proof-of-Stake.

Shopify CEO Consults DeFi Twitter On Potential Integration

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Decentralized finance or as popularly known as DeFi mania has captured players from different spheres. The revolution in the payment industry and every company seeks to remain ahead of the curve due to which industry giants have joined the DeFi bandwagon.

Shopify’s CEO On DeFi

The latest one to express interest in the decentralized world is the Canadian multinational e-commerce company, Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lutke. According to his latest tweet, the e-commerce giant’s exec is looking for ways to integrate his firm with the decentralized finance ecosystem. He stated,

“Hey, DeFi Twitter. What are the commerce-related opportunities that you are most excited about? What role do you want Shopify to play?”

Lutke had also revealed “dabbling” with smart contracts and exploring ERC-20 ecosystem in yet another tweet which read,

“Speaking of crypto though- I spent the morning dabbling with ETH Smart Contracts. Mainly to understand how ERC20 works better. Fascinating world.”

The tweet by the Shopify exec drew a huge amount of responses. Some advised him to enable users to earn Bitcoin, while others requested to support Bitcoin Lightning Network [LN] payments, stablecoin integration, leveraging decentralized finance protocols to enable cash in Shopify accounts to earn yield among other responses.

It is still unclear if the CEO is serious about DeFi integration into his centralized platform. The mere endorsement by the CEO of the online retailing platform, however, speaks volumes for a space that has been long speculated to be a bubble.

It is important to note that Shopify happens to be one of the largest companies in Canada, is also among the largest in the northern hemisphere. There are more than 3 million online stores as part of its platform. Furthermore, the platform was one of the early adopters of the cryptocurrency industry after it allowed crypto payments via Bitcoin [BTC], Ethereum [ETH] among other tokens following a payment integration in 2014.

LiquidApps Employs Bifrost Bridge To Bolster The Presence Of EOS In The DeFi Space

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Decentralized finance [DeFi] has garnered impeccable traction over the last couple of months. LiquidApps, a platform focused on optimizing decentralized development seemed to be aiding the growth of the DeFi market.

While the DeFi space has managed to lure in an array of individuals, it still suffers from siloed blockchains. However, LiquidApps seems to be on a mission to change this by building cross-chain bridges. With this decentralized development solution provider, EOS is all set to become the “first truly decentralized chain to integrate USDC.”

LiquidApps To Boost The DeFi Space With Its Cross-Chain Bridge

LiquidApps created an uproar in the crypto market with the launch of a cross-chain medium that allows users to transfer tokens or data to different blockchains without any hassle. Now, the platform is making use of the Bifrost bridge, developed the community-led DAPP Account DAO (DAD), to allow the free flow of USDC or DAI to be bi-directionally transferred between Ethereum and EOS.

The aforementioned community, DAD has also rolled out eCurve, an EOS clone of the decentralized exchange Curve, that has witnessed over $1 million of DAI/USDC liquidity cross over it from Ethereum. eCurve stands out as the network carries out feeless transactions while being time-efficient. However, the transactions on Ethereum’s Curve cost anywhere between $1-200 each and take up to 10-15 minutes.

More recently, EOS lost one of its major DeFi projects to the Binance Smart Chain. This bridge could pose as a savior for the network in broadening and establishing ground in the DeFi space. This can be viewed as a proof of concept employing EOS.

Additionally, the DAD bridge can also pave the way for arbitrage across chains. A total of three stablecoins including, wrapped DAI, wrapped USDC, and EOS USDT are a part of the eCurve’s three-coin swap pool. The possibility of ETH users swapping their USDC or DAI to any stablecoin to a stablecoin with the highest ratio in the pool stands even though one-thirds model fall out of equilibrium.

Elaborating on the emergence of the DeFi space and cross-chain bridges, Raman Bindlish, the founder of Blockstart a prominent DSP on the DAPP network stated,

“These are exciting times for us as developers of the technology as years of hard work from multiple teams coming to fruition. We are seeing the vision of multi-chain DeFi materialize and it can really enable the solutions that can scale to the same level as traditional finance.”

The progression of the DeFi space is inevitable. With several platforms making their way into the DeFi space, the existing ones are forced to keep up with the needs of their users and LiquidApps seems to be heading in the same direction.

Uniswap Calls Massive Trade Volumes ‘Not Real’; Delta Hits Back

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Uniswap’s phenomenal growth over the short span of time has been lauded by market players and DeFi experts alike. It has emerged as one of the world’s largest decentralized exchange [DEX] sweeping significant volume in the market. However, the trading volume recorded on the 30th March on Uniswap was much higher than normal.

So what exactly happened on Uniswap?

It was DeFi protocol, Delta Financial’s native token, DELTA that was responsible for the brief and fake volumes on Uniswap. The token recorded a trading volume of more than $6.13 billion, meaning, it contributed to roughly 85% of the total volume on the DEX even as the liquidity stood at a little more than $16 million.

Delta is a newbie in the world of DeFi and identifies itself as on-chain options layer which uses a combination of liquidity standards to minimize premiums and provide competitive options price. In short, it essentially aims to solve the problem of expensive and volatile options trading especially due to lack of liquidity.

The large trading volume figures were due to Delta’s liquidity rebasing system. This is essentially an algorithmic mechanism of increasing the price to mint tokens over time. While this seemed similar to that of wash trading, since it requires swapping tokens back and forth in order to trigger high volume and price of a token, the inventor of Uniswap Protocol, Hayden Adams, clarified that while it is not wash trading, it also does not represent “real” volume either.

He also went on to say that the figures will soon be considered untracked volume on Uniswap.

Adams also stated that the current Delta stats will not influence Uniswap’s global trading volume and added that Delta’s strange protocols are the reasons behind the exploding figures.

Delta Financial has hit back with the following tweet:

“All DELTA data is completely frozen, as if trading is not happening at all. To top it off an engineer wrote ‘Scammy Token’ in the PR. Meanwhile, the volume is still misreported on all other tokens.”

Polkadot [DOT] Sets Eyes On $36 As Bears Take A Back Seat

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Polkadot [DOT] saw fresh gains on the 29th of March which curtailed its weekly loss to 8.15%. Coincidentally, this price action was followed by Bitcoin’s recovery which was closely followed by the altcoin lot as well.

Lately DOT has been oscillating in a tight range and has failed to sustain any higher levels. However, the crypto-asset rose by 5.79% over the last 24-hours while recording a trading volume of $1.58 over the same time. This catapulted the token’s price to $34.55 as it held a market cap of $31.93 billion, at the time of writing.

Polkadot [DOT] Daily Price Chart:

DOT

After a trading in a symmetrical triangle, DOT candles briefly broke below as bears overpowered its price action. The closing green candles depicted recuperating bulls in an attempt to take charge of the current momentum.

The moving averages were fiercely slopping upward as opposed to the price action which was trading sideways. The 50 DMA [Pink] went over a few candles after the drop but has not able to dominate the closing candle which was a positive sign. The 100 DMA [Blue] continued to hover well below the 50 DMA as well as the candlestick arrangement in Polkadot’s daily price chart.

Sell Pressure Declines

DOT2 1

Polkadot was on a recovery mode which appeared to have flipped MACD as it was headed for a potential bullish breakout in the near-term. This depicted a rising buying demand in the market.

The dotted markers of Parabolic SAR, however, floated above the DOT candles resisting any upward price action.

The RSI also shot back up above the 50-median line suggesting a sentiment of increasing buying pressure in the market that could take Polkadot to establish a local top.

The above charts projected the return of the bulls even hints of bearish pressure still lingered. If Polkadot’s price gains the necessary momentum and retain its position above the 50 DMA, it could target its immediate resistance levels of $36.12, $38.29 and $39.5 respectively. The cryptocurrency found crucial support at $29.9 and $26.94.

Binance Smart Chain Welcomes EOS’s Largest DeFi Platform

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Binance Smart Chain [BSC] has seen tremendous development. In terms of liquidity and decentralized applications [dApps], BSC is becoming a major player in the industry. Hence, it is safe to say that it has emerged as one of the most distinguished alternatives to not just the Ethereum network but also to EOS. The latter lost one of the biggest decentralized finance [DeFi] projects to the Binance ecosystem this week.

The DeFi platform in question is ‘Effect Network‘ which is headed for a switch in its development from the EOS network to the Binance Smart Chain. The developers cited concerns regarding the future and viability of the EOS blockchain as one of the most prominent reasons for relocation.

It is important to note that the founder and Chief Technology Officer of EOS’s parent firm Block.one, Daniel Larimer had left the company nearly a couple of months ago. Furthermore, the controversial departure led to many questions regarding his inability to bring about viable solutions to the many issues plaguig the EOS ecosystem.

Talking about the growing confidence in Binance Smart Chain instead, Effect Network’s CEO Chris Dawe reportedly stated,

“Look at what the Binance organization has accomplished in only the last three years. It is a testament of dedication, hard work but above all its laser-focused vision. The amount of products and services our clients and workforce can tap into with the Binance ecosystem are amazing and will help accelerate the growth of the Effect Network like never before.”

Binance Smart Chain’s Exponential Growth

Despite centralization debates, the BSC ecosystem has grown considerably over the past several months. Thanks to growing gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain that was currently hovering close to $18. BSC, on the other hand, was processing on average 2X volume of the Ethereum network, that too, at a fraction of its current transaction fee.

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Therefore, several DeFi platforms have either left the Ethereum network or have expanded their footprint across BSC as well to enable its users to choose their preferred mode of network. Gauging at BSC’s unique address count, it can be noted that the network has seen significant growth as the figures continued to maintain a steady uptrend. It was found to be at 61.7 million on the 27th of March.