Arbitrum’s Bridge Activity and Its Impact on DeFi Sentiment
- Less than a week after launching, the value locked in Arbitrum’s bridge is closing in on that of Polygon. There were a flurry of liquidity mining announcements across Avalanche, Fantom, and Harmony over the last few weeks. Despite this, Arbitrum has been able to outshine it’s EVM-compatible competitors. If anything, this is evidence of just how much the market had been anticipating Arbitrum’s launch.
- Arbitrum’s bridge had a mere $22M locked in it on Sep. 1, which meant the bridge represented just 0.047% of total TVL in Ethereum bridges. In the past two weeks, a few speculative farms and legit protocols have pushed this share up to 32% — a 640x increase in bridge share in just 15 days.
- Arbitrum’s take-off in early September coincides with a sharp decrease in the daily median gas price on Ethereum mainnet. Theoretically, this would make sense, as L2s like Arbitrum scale Ethereum’s throughput to a great degree. However, it’s tough to ascertain whether this is just a pleasant coincidence or if there’s a causal relationship.
- The future of L2s looks extremely promising (despite some hiccups). The market may be looking favorably towards DeFi assets, which have had a rough past six months. Blue chips like CRV, SNX, AAVE, and COMP are leading the bounce, followed by derivative protocol tokens like PERP and MCB. DEXes are lagging the rest of DeFi despite undoubtedly having the most secure product-market fit, highlighting a potential opportunity.
Anti-Bitcoin Protests Escalate on El Salvador Independence Day
- Protests in El Salvador escalated Wednesday, on the country’s independence day, with local press reporting citizens’ fury at the country’s new Bitcoin law.
- Protestors set fire to a Bitcoin ATM in the capital of San Salvador. Some took to the streets holding placards that read “We don’t want Bitcoin” and “No to dictatorship.” El Salvador on September 7 made Bitcoin legal tender in the country. It is the first country to do so.
Moonbeam and Lido To Bring Liquid Staking to Polkadot
- Boston, MA — September 9, 2021 — Moonbeam, the Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on Polkadot, announced plans to integrate and collaborate with Lido, the largest liquid staking derivatives protocol, which is currently deployed to Ethereum and Terra.
- The collaboration will be driven by MixBytes, who has been selected by the Lido DAO to lead the technical integration for the Polkadot ecosystem.
- This integration introduces liquid staking to Moonriver and Moonbeam and will provide DOT holders the ability to stake their assets while at the same time accessing the liquidity of that staked position.
- The deployment of Lido provides a critical building block for the growing DeFi ecosystem on Moonbeam, providing a way for token holders to make productive use of their Polkadot ecosystem assets.
NFT Marketplace OpenSea Confirms Executive Profited From Insider Info
- OpenSea, the leading secondary marketplace for NFT collectibles and valued at over $1.5 billion, confirmed today that one of its executives used privileged information to profit from the sale of NFTs that were featured on its front page—a form of insider trading, in effect.
- “Yesterday we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly,” the company wrote in a statement. “This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behavior does not represent our values as a team.”
Solana blockchain validators restart network after transaction stoppage
- The Solana blockchain is back online after an hours-long outage.
- As previously reported, Solana’s transaction blocks came to a stop on Tuesday. Developers later said that Solana’s mainnet “encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.”
More than $1 billion worth of ether has been burned since Ethereum’s London upgrade
- Since the introduction of Ethereum’s London upgrade on August 5, more than 297,000 ETH has been burned — worth just over $1 billion — according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.
- The upgrade added a new burning mechanism to transaction fees with the goal of making them easier to price. To make a transaction, you now pay a base fee, which gets burned, and a priority fee that’s effectively a tip to the miner.
The 1inch Network integrates with DeFi platform Oasis.app
- The 1inch Network is thrilled to unveil integration with Oasis.app, a leading platform for decentralized finance. Coming shortly after Oasis Trade users were suffering from rising gas costs, this integration is set to offer them a cheaper, more efficient solution.
