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DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY

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DEX landscape is growing irrespective of losses in the wider market.

It has been a trying time for the entire cryptocurrency market as the incessant rangebound price action continues to exhaust the bulls in lower rallies. Well, maybe not for the entire market. Decentralized exchange [DEX] volumes have been roaring despite market-wide rout, thanks to DeFi which continues to astonish with billions of dollars entering this new economy.

Messari

According to the latest report by Messari, DEX volume has not just increased a great deal in the second quarter of the year but has also outperformed the first quarter despite Bitcoin slashing half of its gains. As a matter of fact, DEX volumes in Q2 jumped to $405 billion, an increase of 117x year-over-year and an 83% increase since Q1 2021. To put things into perspective, May alone witnessed more than half the volume in the quarter.

Since then, the figures have halved. DEX volume in the month of June plummeted all the way to $95 billion. Despite the fall, June was still the third-highest all-time.

Race for the biggest DEX

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Over the past several months, many decentralized exchanges have emerged. But Uniswap still takes the cake away. Its dominance over the rest of the market has reached a record-breaking 54% share of weekly volume, the platform’s highest level since November 2020. While its Binance Smart Chain-based PancakeSwap witnessed a dramatic spin as well with many speculating that it could soon flip Uniswap, the hype fizzled out with the launch of the latter’s V3.

Polygon plays its part

Polygon had humble beginnings. But today, it is a leading second-layer solution based on Ethereum. This rise to prominence has been crucial in devouring Binance Smart Chain’s [BSC] share of decentralized exchange volumes. Messari’s report also stated,

“As the party shifted towards Polygon, with its new set of tokens to speculate on and farms to harvest, BSC was squeezed out of the picture. The activity provided a great glimpse into the developing liquidity wars between blockchains, showing that when token incentives are the primary reason why capital enters a blockchain ecosystem, it will also be the primary reason capital leaves when incentives fall or incentives are more attractive elsewhere.”

Binance, Coinbase web traffic takes a hit as collective figures slump by 42%

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June has been quite an unsettling month for users. Web traffic to cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase has taken a massive hit. According to the latest stats by blockchain analysis firm, ICO Analytics, the figures for cumulative web traffic to crypto exchanges in June have decreased by 42%.

This includes some of the most prominent centralized cryptocurrency exchanges [CEX] as well as the decentralized ones [DEX]. Thailand-based platform, Bitkub recorded the most decline of 59%, followed by Seychelles-based, OKEx with 57%, California-based Binance US with 56%, and Kraken at 51%.

Following the development, Binance CZ tweeted,

“June is a down month, nothing new there. What stood out is that PancakeSwap, a DeFi on BSC, is ranked 4th of all exchanges. Bigger than many CEX. Amazing”

DEXs outpace CEXs as DeFi continued to scale

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Cayman Islands-based, Binance’s remained at the top of the game with 150 million visits in June, a decline of 40% since the previous month. Nasdaq-listed Coinbase followed suit with 71 million visits. Binance Smart Chain-based DEX PancakeSwap amassed a weekly monthly visit of 18 million. Uniswap, on the other hand, slipped to the 10th position with 9 million, down by 44% since May.

In addition, popular derivatives exchange FTX fell to 25% this June to 8.4 million.

On the contrary, the web traffic for cryptocurrency exchanges had hit an all-time high in May this year. As the cumulative figures surged to 638.2 million visits owing to the market’s unpreceded rally.

Binance’s Regulatory Snub

Binance, for one, has come under a raft of criticism and clampdowns from regulators across the world. The cryptocurrency exchange ash witnessed not just the wrath of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority [FCA] but also from countries across the world such as Canada, Japan, among others. CZ had recently penned down a letter regarding the same,

“I believe a well-developed legal and regulatory framework in the long term will be a solid foundation that truly makes crypto essential in everyone’s daily life.”

Another Binance Smart Chain-based DeFi Platform Loses Millions In Exploit

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There is no respite for decentralized finance-based platforms on top of Binance Smart Chain [BSC]. This time, it was the AMM protocol called Belt Finance that suffered a loss of millions after software exploitation.

According to Belt Finance, a flash loan attack was initiated on the Binance Smart Chain’s 4Belt [USDT/USDC/BUSD/DAI] pool. The hacker reportedly created a smart contract that used popular decentralized exchange PancakeSwap for the purpose of flash loans and exploited its beltBUSD pool. The malicious entity, however, did not stop there and proceeded to attack its underlying strategy protocols as well as executed the contract 8 times to rake in a total profit of 6,234,753 BUSD.

The Binance Smart Chain-based defi protocol also revealed that beltBUSD vault users endured a loss of 21.36% of funds, while 4Belt pool users sustained a loss of more than 6% of funds. Other pools/vaults were not affected. Soon after detecting the attack, the defi platform paused withdrawals and deposits in a bid to prevent more losses. It added,

“While we are aware that this may cause our users inconvenience, it was done to prevent the same exploit from attacking our other vaults/pools. All other pools/vaults and all funds remain unaffected and safe from this attack, and we have now patched the attack vector that allowed this exploit of 4Belt and beltBUSD.”

Belt Finance also revealed that the team was devising a compensation plan that will be released within the next 48 hours.

According to the Rekt Blog, which analyses defi exploits, explained that the lost $6.3 million in a total of eight transactions.

Binance Smart Chain Weighs In

The bloodbath for the BSC does not seem to stop anytime soon. In just nine months, the network’s rise to prominence has attracted many platforms. However, several of these defi protocols operating on top of Binance Smart Chain’s decentralized finance ecosystem have suffered back-to-back hacks and exploits in a short period of time.

Binance Smart Chain had recently stated that the “well-organized hackers” behind the flash loan attacks and security breaches were targeting the platform specifically.

Binance Smart Chain believes hackers are specifically targeting it following back-to-back DeFi exploits.

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Binance Smart Chain believes hackers are specifically targeting it following back-to-back DeFi exploits.

Several defi protocols built on top of Binance Smart Chain [BSC] decentralized finance ecosystem have suffered one after another hacks and exploits in a short period of time that has stemmed especially this past month. The platform believes that the recent flash loan hacks were orchestrated against BSC specifically.

The platform said on the 30th of May,

“There are >8 flashloan hacks recently, we believe, an well organized hackers are targeting Binance Smart Chain now. It is very challenging time for the BSC community.”

In a series of tweets, Binance Smart Chain also went on to urge the team behind the decentralized applications [DApps] to work with their audit companies to do another health check.

It also asked the cloned and forked defi projects, to “double and triple check” the changes from the original version and employ necessary risk control measures to actively identify any peculiar activities in a real-time manner and halt the protocol if any such strange activity indeed occurs.

Binance Smart Chain’s Rise to Fame

Since its inception last September, BSC saw tremendous success. The activity on Binance Chain’s parallel blockchain has dramatically soared as it continued to make headlines as one of the more viable rivals to the Ethereum network which was riddled with scalability issues.

However, as BSC rose to popularity, so are the bad actors that have breached various protocols and managed to siphon off with billions in crypto.

Binance had recently stated that it was not responsible for exploits on BSC protocols. Samy Karim, who happens to be the coordinator of business and ecosystem development at the cryptocurrency exchange, had earlier stated that Binance Smart Chain is a public permissionless infrastructure that enables anyone to deploy. He went on to add,

“You have malicious actors there and hacks, and exploits in defi are not new and definitely not unique to BSC.”

In another related news, BSC had added the blockchain analytics and cryptocurrency intelligence company, CipherTrace for the purpose of tracking illicit transactions.

PumaPay to migrate from Ethereum to Binance Smart Chain, introduce liquidity pools

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PumaPay, the comprehensive cryptocurrency payment solution, announces the upcoming launch of V3.0, which moves its operations from Ethereum to the Binance Smart Chain (BSC)—the first crypto payment solution to do so. The move to BSC includes the introduction of a bridge between the two networks, enabling utilization of a wider set of tokens and cryptocurrency for payments, and opening new liquidity pools with automatic swaps.

Ethereum, for a long time known as the industry-leading platform in blockchain development, has become unscalable for many developers. With soaring gas fees and a slow block processing rate, PumaPay’s service to its customers became untenable on Ethereum’s network. In the spirit of maintaining the original vision of decentralization, boosting payment flexibility and protocols, and building liquidity, PumaPay is shifting to BSC to expand its existing protocols for its customers.

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PumaPay utilizes the PullPayment Protocol that alternates the peer-to-peer system of crypto payments from a push to a pull protocol. PullPayment affords merchants capabilities unique to PumaPay, such as recurring billing—which allows merchants to bill for subscriptions and is the only payment solution on BSC offering this payment option. The new platform on BSC will offer a host of new opportunities to customers and users on the Binance Smart Chain, in addition to faster transaction speeds and cheaper gas fees.

Wider token diversity: Using PumaPay’s token (PMA) as a mediation coin, merchants will be able to select a settlement currency of their choice for each billing model, while users will have the option to subscribe with various tokens that are supported by BSC. Merchants and users will be agnostic to each other’s choice of coin.

Liquidity pools: To power the support for a wider number of cryptocurrencies for payments, PumaPay is introducing liquidity pools to enable swaps between PumaPay’s token and other cryptocurrencies. Liquidity providers will enjoy swap fees.

Total decentralization: Transfer of transaction processing duties to network “executors,” who will be paid by merchants, which will foster a more decentralized crypto payment ecosystem. Merchants will be able to run executor nodes, allowing them to save on fees, and earn for processing other merchants’ transactions.

hjCommunity 3.0: PumaPay’s V3.0 will include bottom-up measures that allow for more community participation in promoting the project with ambassadorship and referral opportunities.

“We are excited for the new V3.0 vision, our move to Binance Smart Chain, and the latest upgrades that we can offer to merchants who use our payment solution,” says Yoav Dror, CEO of PumaPay. “With our new liquidity pools, bridge, and decentralization model, we believe PumaPay is creating, as the first crypto payment solution on BSC, a model system for others to follow should they opt to shift from Ethereum to Binance.

DeFi protocol developers pull an exit scam; siphons off with $32M

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DeFi has witnessed spectacular growth off late. While it does bring in limitless opportunities for the participants in the market, it also tags financial perils along with it.

in 2021 alone, exit scams in the decentralized finance space have increased at a worrisome pace. This time investors fell victim to DeFi100, a decentralized finance protocol built on the Binance Smart Chain. Reports alleged that the founders had run away with $32 million in investors’ funds.

The entities had posted a vicious message on the website which said: “We scammed you guys, and you can’t do shit about it”

DeFi100

DeFi100’s only clarification following the incident was a tweet in which it said their website was hacked yesterday and the message was written by the hackers. Shortly thereafter, the website showed an error 404 message.

Some speculated that several projects are bound to show their true colors as the bull season fades and hence it there could be a huge increase in exit scams over these next few months. One crypto analyst urged market players not to invest in projects that are very new, backed by anonymous teams, made as memes, and lack real utility.

Another twitter user and a community member who goes by the pseudonym ‘CryptoDragon‘ stated,

“After the dev scammed everyone and posted this picture on the site, some angry people found his internet footprints and exposed his real identity and location. The scammer has now been reported to Interpol and local authorities.”

Defi 100’s native token crashes

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After the developers absconded from the project, Defi 100’s native token, D100 took a plunge to its lowest value. According to CoinGecko’s latest chart, the defi coin was down by more than 25% which drove its price to $0.040, at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, crimes have become more pronounced in decentralized sector as they continued to boom while attracting bad actors. Along the same line, the crypto intelligence company CipherTrace had recently stated that while losses from cryptocurrency theft, hacks, and fraud declined sharply in the first four months of 2021, the same cannot be said about the defi ecosystem. The report stated that crime in the burgeoning “decentralized finance” space hit an all-time high.

Binance Smart Chain DeFi PancakeBunny Suffers Flash Loan Exploit

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Another day, another flash loan attack on a defi protocol.

A Binance Smart Chain [BSC] decentralized finance [defi] yield optimizer project called PancakeBunny, has supposedly suffered an “economic exploit”. According to the PancakeBunny team’s official post on Twitter, the protocol was subjected to a flash loan attack from an external actor.

However, the platform clarified that none of the vaults on the platform were compromised.

“We would like to remind the community that no vaults have been compromised. The exploit was an economic exploit that attacked the price of BUNNY, using flash loans. We repeat, no vaults have been breached.”

The malicious entity reportedly borrowed “a huge amount” of Binance Coin [BNB] on DEX Pancakeswap and went on to manipulate the price of USDT/BNB as well as BUNNY/BNB. Subsequently, the hacker dumped all of the acquired BUNNY in the market which led to the crash in the token’s price.

PancakeBunny rebuffed reports that claimed that the attacker siphoned off with $1 billion worth of tokens but has not revealed the actual figures yet. According to calculations, the exploit drained over $200 million from the yield platform’s smart contracts. However, the blockchain security firm Certik said that the losses were around $40 million. Its tweet regarding the same read,

“An alert was published at Certik over an incident on PancakeBunny, which suffered from a FlashLoan attack and resulted in a loss of ~$40M (114K WBNB & 697K BUNNY). An illustration of exploited asset movements is presented & we are actively monitoring further TXs.”

Certick

Further making the situation worse, the hacker left a rabbit-related pun as a note after the execution of the transaction that read “Aren’t Flashloans Earitating”

Notably, the BSC-based defi project is led by Mound, a startup that secured $1.6 million from the exchange’s venture capital and incubator arm, Binance Labs recently.

DeFi Token, BUNNY Free Falls

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The native token, BUNNY was trading above $230 before the incident. However, it slashed its gains by more than 80% over the past 24-hours and was currently trading at $31.48, according to CoinGecko.

Binance smart chain invests in DeFi protocol lab under the $100M Fund Set-up

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Binance Smart Chain [BSC] has infused reportedly an undisclosed sum of funds into the decentralized finance [DeFi] called DefiDollar. The amount comes under the $100 million fund set up to further advance the DeFi ecosystem on Binance’s blockchain network.

According to the official blog post by the platform, the investment led by Binance Smart Chain is a strategic move to boost the decentralized finance ecosystem by supporting a team such as DefiDollar to bring about innovative products that provide – indexes, yield diversification as well as better capital efficiency.

DefiDollar describes itself as a “Defi Protocol Lab” that aims to take DeFi to the masses and also intends to simplify access to Web3.0 based decentralized finance products.

Siddhartha Jain, COO and Co-Founder of DefiDollar commented on the development,

“We aim to create value for users via our DeFi focused product suite. Our future roadmap revolves around launching value-added products like ibBTC and Opeth. These will help the protocol serve a wider audience and help users to access the composable power of DeFi in an intuitive and easy-to-use manner.”

The executive of the DeFi platform also revealed the team’s intentions to expand its multichain presence and have launched the protocol, as well as a savings account, on Binance Smart Chain [BSC] which enables access to users who previously got priced out due to high fees.

DefiDollar also plans to create value across the full spectrum of decentralized finance activity on Binance Smart Chain, from the savings product to ibBTC.

Binance Smart Chain’s Rise To Prominence

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Five months into 2021, the sector shows no sign of slowing down. Binance with BSC has been nothing short of a trailblazer among the centralized entities in the DeFi space. It has been growing exponentially and has cut into the market leader, Ethererum’s share.

As of 6th May, the total value locked [TVL] in the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem was found to be nearing $50 billion.

Binance Smart Chain’s DeFi Project Losses Over $30M In Flash Loan Exploit

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A DeFi project Spartan Protocol’s contract suffered an exploit that led to loss of more than $30 million in funds. The incident reportedly originated due to a flawed liquidity share calculation in the protocol, that resulted in the drainage of assets from the pool.

In the post-mortem blog post, the security firm PeckShield detailed,

“In particular, the specific hack inflates the asset balance of the pool before burning the same amount of pool tokens to claim an unnecessarily large amount of underlying assets. The consequence of this attack results in more than $30M loss from the affected pool.”

The decentralized protocol [DeFi] was built on Binance Smart Chain for incentivized liquidity and synthetic assets. While first reporting the incident Spartan had revealed that the malicious entity used $61 million in Binance’s native token BNB to control the pools via an unknown economic exploit path to remove almost $3 million in funds from the pools.

According to the post-mortem report, the flash loan was taken on BSC’s popular DEX PancakeSwap for 100,000 wrapped BNB [wBNB]. This amount was to be paid back at the last step with 260 wBNB as the flash loan fee. However, the hacker allegedly swapped the wrapped BNB to Spartan’s native token – SPARTA five times via this exploited pool of the protocol. It swapped wBNB to SPARTAN an additional ten times through the same pool.

After inflating the asset balance in the pool, tokens were burnt to withdraw the liquidity. This process was repeated until the flash loan of 100,260 wBNB was returned and the hacker drained more than $30 million from the DeFi protocol.

DeFi Flash Loan Attacks One After Another

Rekt, which posted another assessment of the incident, also stated that Spartan’s latest exploit with $30 million funds drained is the sixth biggest incursion on its leaderboard.

This news comes jist days after the attackers of yet another Binance Smart Chain’s DeFi exchange Uranium Finance siphoned off with more than $57 million in exploit from a similar attack. In April 20th, layer two protocol EASYFI lost around $59 million.

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.