Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.
April saw several hacks, exploits and rug pulls that resulted in a net loss of over $100 million among several DeFi protocols.
Amid the growing memecoin frenzy, the chances of exploits have increased multifold, with WallStreetBets — a popular trading sub-Reddit group — allegedly rugging its users for $635,000 just days after airdropping about $15,000.
DeFi protocol Level Finance was a victim of an exploit resulting in the loss of nearly $1 million. The attacker manipulated a “claim multiple” bug in a Level Finance smart contract to steal more than 214,000 native Level Finance (LVL) tokens from the exchange.
The volume of liquid staking protocols has dramatically risen in the past couple of weeks, overtaking decentralized exchanges (DEXs). From April 13 to May 1, the total value locked (TVL) on decentralized exchanges declined by $1.66 billion, while it increased on liquid staking protocols by $280 million.
Liquid staking solutions like Lido and Rocket Pool now have a higher total value locked than DEXs, making them the top category of DeFi protocols according to data from the crypto analytics platform DefiLlama.
Liquid staking protocols have just recently taken the top spot. On April 13, $17.19 billion of crypto was locked in liquid staking contracts, compared with $18.89 billion in DEXs, according to archived information. However, DEXs have experienced a $1.66 billion decline to $17.2 billion, while liquid staking solutions have experienced a $280 million increase to $17.47 billion.
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Crypto exploits, exit scams and flash
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