Weekly DeFi Report: Dovish Fed; No More Red

Summary

Digital assets rallied (7d: $BTC +3.4%, $ETH +9.2%) following the confirmation of publicly anticipated 75bps interest rate hike from the FOMC statement and the dovish speech from Fed Chair, Jerome Powell. General funding rates also turned positive over last 3 days (BTC +6.3%, ETH +5.0%). Jerome Powell denied the US is currently under recession despite the Q2 GDP was preliminarily to be -0.9% (140bps lower than forecasted). Powell also mentioned that ‘it may be appropriate to slow the rate of increases’, given that the hyperinflation has been alleviating. Therefore, the July CPI number released on August 10th will be crucial (forecast +8.8%), with three FOMC meetings to be held in September, November and December this year.

In the last 7 days:

Outperformers in the Top 100: ETC (+70%), BTG (+66%), QTUM (+48%), LDO (+43%), CEL (+37%), BIT (+28%), UNI (+26%)

Underperformers in the Top 100: 10SET (-12%), HT (-7%), OMI (-5%), LEO (-4%), RUNE (-3%), XCN (-3%)

In the DeFi space, total TVL increased following the crypto rally this week, currently at $91B (+7%). For major blockchains’ TVL, Ethereum $59B (+8%), Arbitrum $843M (+16%), Parallel $568M (+17%) took the lead. It is also worthy to note that Optimism’s TVL rallied to $553M (+48%), with its native token $OP trading at $1.68 (+119% this week).

Deep Dive

Ethereum’s Goerli merge date set

More in details: Tim Beiko, the lead of Ether developers, announced that the Goerli testnet will merge with the Beacon Chain, ‘Prater’ (forming Goerli/Prater network). Prater will run through the Bellatrix upgrade on 4 AUG and the merge will Goerli will be executed between August 6th to August 12th. Additionally, the Goerli Merge is the last testnet merger away from the official final PoS Merge, expected to happen in late SEP.

Fantom funding ecosystem projects with transaction fees

More in details: The Fantom community has passed through a proposal, with 99.75% supportive vote, to create an ‘Ecosystem Support Vault’. The vault will be funded with 10% of its transaction fees. Therefore, Fantom’s burn rate will reduce to 20%, which lowers the pace of Fantom supply being destroyed.

Clearpool expanding to Polygon

More in details: Clearpool is an uncollateralized stablecoin lending protocol which only launched on Ethereum in March 2022. It is now expanding its services onto Polygon, enabling institutions to borrow stablecoins from lenders on Polygon network. The team also incentivized lenders to its ‘genesis liquidity pools Polygon’ with additional $MATIC token rewards.

Step Finance acquired SolanaFloor

More in details: Step Finance, a Solana-based data platform, has acquired SolanaFloor for DeFi and NFT insights, aimed at providing users a full coverage of Solana ecosystem with different angles.

Following

Big Money Raises

• Variant, a crypto investment company, raised $450M funding which will be split across two buckets, $150M seed fund focusing on Web3 projects and $300M opportunities fund will double down on portfolio projects.
• Space and Time, a blockchain data platform, raised $10M in seed funding round led by Framework Ventures. Other investors include Digital Currency Group, Stratos, Samsung Next, IOSG Ventures and Alliance. The fund will be spent for team expansion and development for launching projects.