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LaCucina launches DeFi engagement platform democratizing the crypto landscape, partners with MDEX, Beefy.Finance

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LaCucina, the fair DeFi engagement platform, is coming out of stealth, announcing its official launch this January on the Binance Smart Chain, the first one on the blockchain to offer regular users a way to enjoy DeFi even more. Through its advanced engagement enhancing system, the platform offers a variety of benefits-boosting opportunities to users who use selected decentralized exchanges. LaCucina also announces its collaboration with MDEX, a leading decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, and Beefy.Finance, a secure and high-APY multi-chain yield optimizer.

Many DEXs and farms offer lucrative opportunities with high-percentage yields, yet they are often designed to mainly benefit the crypto whales, essentially allowing the rich to get far richer, while those who hold less see very slow growth. These benefits derive from staking protocols that mostly reward users for staking large sums into the liquidity pools rather than for their dedication to bringing liquidity, no matter what the staking amount. LaCucina evens the playing field by rewarding engagement in a more fair, fun, and flexible way.

Teaming up with MDEX and Beefy.Finance, LaCucina amplifies their users’ rewards on coins staked at those third-party platforms through an engaging and fun benefits program. LaCucina sets up Ovens for select liquidity pools on MDEX and Beefy’s Vaults. These Ovens then monitor the transactions in the underlying liquidity pools or vaults and reward users based on a multitude of parameters such as liquidity timing or duration. By linking their wallets with LaCucina, users who participated in the target pools over the designated time periods will be able to get additional benefits.

As part of the collaboration, MDEX will offer a farm for the $LAC liquidity pool, rewarding $LAC liquidity providers with its $MDEX token. LaCucina will set up an Oven for this liquidity pool, making sure its participants are also rewarded with $LAC. Beefy.Finance, for its part, will launch a Vault for the MDEX farm, further amplifying the benefits for liquidity providers. To claim their rewards, liquidity providers will not have to move their staked positions or stake anything at LaCucina; the platform does not feature native staking and operates as an additional reward level on top of third-party decentralized exchanges and farms. 

LaCucina is also granting retroactive perks to users who provided liquidity to select liquidity pools on MDEX, PancakeSwap, and Sushiswap in past months as well as a wide variety of ongoing reward programs. The users do not have to do any additional staking to claim their rewards. The platform’s flexible engagement enhancing system, or Cooking Plans, is designed to prioritize factors other than the stake size, such as the time when the stake was made, its duration, and other parameters. This allows small users to punch above their weight with well-timed and committed engagement.  

LaCucina also introduces a unique and innovative way for users to increase their relative share of rewards via interaction with NFTs. Users can spend their LAC tokens to get “Secret Ingredients”—special NFTs, such as “Space Mushrooms” and “Martian Worms.” These NFTs representing interstellar food ingredients are released on an on-going basis and vary in rarity and nutritional value. LaCucina users can put several ingredients together to “cook” a new NFT of a different type—a Reward Boosting Dish such as pizza, pasta, or zuppa. The Dish will carry a multiplier that its owner can then activate on any Oven to increase their relative share of rewards. The multipliers will range between 1 and 10, depending on the rarity and nutritional value of the ingredients used. 

“LaCucina was born out of the necessity for projects to create appealing and attractive ways to incentivize users to engage with and promote participation. None of the existing DEXs and farms out there offer the level of flexibility that LaCucina offers, resulting in biased allocations of rewards, in such a way that the rich get richer and the small players do not stand a chance of properly enjoying DeFi,” says LaCucina’s Head Chef. “But the vision doesn’t stop there. LaCucina is planning on being the most impartial launchpad for crypto projects, facilitating direct engagement between projects and users and allowing projects to directly reward users for their engagement with the project. LaCucina’s roadmap for the near future offers a truly special product and aims to set a new standard for launchpads.”

“Our mission is to help users maximize their profits when putting their crypto to use,” says Weso, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Beefy Finance. “LaCucina’s vision is geared toward the same goal, which makes it a perfect partner. We are happy to be offering our users even more value from their investments with no additional costs on their end and look forward to welcoming more investors on our platform.”

“Liquidity providers are a central pillar for any decentralized crypto exchange,” says KIKO, CMO of MDEX. “Without their support, such projects cannot function. Any extra incentive for users to stake their tokens into liquidity pools ultimately works toward enabling the larger crypto ecosystem as such, which makes projects like LaCucina such a crucial piece of the puzzle. We are thrilled to be moving ahead with this partnership.”

What’s brewing in the Binance Smart Chain [BSC] ecosystem?

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There has been a lot going on in the Binance Smart Chain [BSC] network. The latest to hit the smart contract platform is the RAMP DEFI, multi-chain decentralized finance or DeFi protocol that launched its Liquidity Incentives Program on 30th November 2021. According to the blog post, RAMP’s ‘collateralized stablecoin lending protocol‘ would facilitate users to deposit assets at high APYs and borrow against these tokens at the same time, allowing for a seamless scaling platform.

For starters, APY or annual rate of return plays the role of cryptocurrency savings account equal to annual percentage rate (APR) account. Further, the blog stated,

With this incentive program, we hope to help new DeFi users discover the full potential of the RAMP platform and maximize the full value of their crypto-asset ownership in the process.

Another important project that is doing the rounds is the launch of a new meme coin dubbed Rocky Inu [ROCKY] created exclusively on the Binance Smart Chain, two days ago. As per the press release, the canine-themed project takes its inspiration from famed meme coins such as Shiba Inu, to create a ‘low cap gem with massive moonshot potential’. That being said, the press release further claims that the newly launched coin is supported by some of the well-known influencers in the crypto world, which would propel it to reach new heights of popularity.

Binance Smart Chain’s [BSC] much anticipated Bruno Upgrade

According to the Binance website, the upcoming BSC version 1.1.5 Bruno hard fork is scheduled to be activated in the block height of 13,082,000, or at approximately 30th November at 8 am [UTC]. Furthermore, all Deposits and withdrawals on the Binance Smart Chain network will be suspended from around 7:45 am [UTC] on 30th November.

As per the announcement, BSC users and developers will not be directly affected by the upgrade. It will however impact the validators or full node operators. After the activation, the blog explains that “the blockchain will be able to handle a series of new features and eliminate existing bugs.” and further notified that all validators would be required to upgrade into the latest version to continue sending transactions. 

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
DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 3

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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DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 4

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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DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 6

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
DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 10

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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DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 11

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
DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 14

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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DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 15

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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DEX volumes see explosive growth in Q2; increases by 117x YoY 17

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.