Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights. This newsletter aims to bring you the most significant developments from the past week in a creative and accurate manner.
Last week in DeFi, there was a frenzy surrounding the Starknet airdrop, with many users claiming to have received either the minimum expected airdrop or none at all. Additionally, Uniswap’s founder issued a warning about a new Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain scam.
The Ethereum gas fees reached an 8-month high due to the ERC-404 craze, while EigenLayer emerged as the fourth-largest restaking protocol with $7 billion in total value locked (TVL).
The top 100 DeFi tokens had a bullish week, with most of them trading in the green. The TVL also reached a new yearly high above $72 billion.
According to a report by Banteg, a developer from Yearn.finance, airdrop farmers may dominate the much-anticipated airdrop from the Starknet layer-2 scaling solution. The report states that 1,854 individuals allegedly renamed or deleted their accounts after a blockchain snapshot was taken for the basis of the airdrop. The Starknet Foundation plans to allocate 700 million STRK tokens out of 1.8 billion to 1.3 million eligible wallet addresses on Feb. 20, with 50% of the tokens going to protocol users.
EigenLayer, the Ethereum restaking protocol, has surpassed cryptocurrency lending protocol JustLend to become the fourth-largest protocol by TVL. On Feb. 15, EigenLayer’s TVL rose to $6.99 billion, marking a 5.73% increase. The protocol’s TVL has seen a 47.95% increase in the past seven days and a 307% increase over the past month.
Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, has warned the crypto community about a scam that uses wallet addresses as Ethereum Name Service domains. Scammers have copied and registered Adams’ wallet address as an ENS wallet with .eth. This means that when users paste his wallet address in certain interfaces, an unrelated ENS match appears as the top search result.
The Ethereum network gas fees have reached an 8-month high due to the increased interest in the unofficial experimental token standard called ERC-404. On Feb. 9, gas prices reached an average peak of 70 gwei ($60 for a standard transaction), with peak gas costs surging as high as 377 gwei, a level not seen since May 12, 2023.
In the DeFi market, the top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bullish week, with most of them trading in the green on the weekly charts. The TVL in DeFi protocols surpassed $70 billion for the first time in over a year.
Thank you for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights, and education about this rapidly advancing space.