Week in DeFi: Airdrops Usher in the New Year

0xKira

Tue, Jan 9, 2024, 9:37 PM 5 min read

Ethereum core developers arrive on the dates for the testnet releases for the highly anticipated Dencun upgrade. In the same week, Gamma Strategies faced an exploit resulting in 6 million in funds lost, while Aevo launched pre-token trading for the Dymension token, DYM, after Dymension opened claims for their airdrop.

Overview

Total Value Locked (TVL) across all chains dropped slightly across the week with two large flushes wiping out high leverage traders in the market. Notable outperformers include Cosmos-based chain, Sei, and zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) chain, Manta Pacific, which saw a 96% and a 30% increase in TVL respectively.

Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/chain-ranking/

Welcome to Alpha Central

Ben dives into the realm of organic yields, the new way to go after high and unsustainable yield farming fell out of favor in the last bear market. His thread dives into the respective sources of organic yield including:

Proof-of-Stake staking
Restaking
Real-world assets (RWAs)
Futures basis payments
Selling options
Fee sharing from protocol fees

Ethereum: Dencun Upgrade Dates Set and Ready to Go

Ethereum developers confirm the dates for the upcoming milestones leading up to the highly anticipated Dencun upgrade, kicking off with the Goerli upgrade coming on 17th January, Sepolia on the 30th and Holesky on 7th February.

DAI stablecoin issuer, MakerDAO will be redeominating their token, in a 1:24000 split in a move codenamed, New Governance Token, in order to reignite the meme value of the token for better token price performance.

Other Product Launches and Updates

ETH restaking protocol, Renzo, announces ezPoints, their own point system to reward stakers on the platform. Depositors earn from ETH’s native staking yield, EigenLayer’s points and Renzo’s ezPoints.

L2s: Aevo Launches DYM Perpetuals Ahead of Token Launch

Options and perpetuals trading platform, Aevo, launched perpetuals for the Dymension token, DYM, shortly after the announcement of the DYM airdrop. Traders can now speculate on the price of DYM before its actual launch.

Concentrated liquidity management protocol, Gamma Strategies, has been exploited, resulting in more than $6 million in losses across liquidity pools on Camelot DEX, Ramses and Uniswap on Arbitrum.

Other Product Launches and Updates

Options protocol, Lyra, upgrades their L2 chain, Lyra Chain, to incorporate Celestia for data availability. With the upgrade, Lyra aims to provide a boost in throughput and lowered costs to compete with its centralized competitors.
Bracket Labs’ Passage arrives on Arbitrum mainnet, allowing traders to speculate on whether assets will trade within a specified range or break out of it. An incentive program is also now live for early traders on the platform.
Omni-chain L2, Parallel, goes live on mainnet for developers. The chain is built on Arbitrum’s tech stack and seeks to unify liquidity across L2s. Parallel uses broker accounts, liquidity vaults and their custom execution layer to connect L2s together.
Omni-chain money market protocol, Radiant Capital, was exploited for $4.5 million in ETH after the launch of a new USDC market on the protocol. The protocol was paused after the exploit but has since been resumed after extensive audits and fixes.
Peach introduces themselves, an Ethereum L2 built on the Optimism tech stack and data availability layer, Celestia. Peach is a DeFi focused L2 seeking to be a hub across multiple ecosystems.

Solana: Grass Revamped Point System

Incentivized web scraping protocol, Grass, revamps their point system, increasing referral bonuses and introducing tiered earnings to incentivize consistent contributors. The new point system will also utilize an epoch approach to snapshot users’ points regularly.

Full stack developer, Sol_idity, introduces Tiny SPL, the latest token standard on Solana. Tiny SPL uses state compression to allow for ownership of tokens on Solana without the need to pay rent for token accounts on the chain.

Whales Market unveils their over-the-counter (OTC) marketplace for points from pre-token protocols such as Friend.tech, Hyperliquid, Blast and more. Starting from as early as next week, speculators on the eventual friend.tech token can trade points on friend.tech on the Base chain.

Solana liquid staking protocol, SolBlaze, announces SolBlaze Points, a new point system for the project. The utility of said points has not been revealed yet though.

Another Week, Another Airdrop

Cosmos rollapp provider, Dymension, announces the genesis airdrop. Eligible wallets from Ethereum, Solana and the Cosmos ecosystem can now claim their airdrop which will be dropped in the genesis block. Claims remain open until 21st January.

Solana memecoin, LFG, airdrops to users on Ethereum who have spent more than $2469 in gas, in a bid to attract Ethereum power users to Solana. Claim for the airdrop ends in a month.

Ethereum zkEVM chain, ZKFair, opens claims for the second phase of their airdrop, which airdrops to users of other zkEVM chains, Lumoz point holders, among others.

Manta Network announces, Into the Blue, the official MANTA airdrop. The eligibility criteria extends to users who have contributed to the network over the last three years, based on activity on the chains, Manta Pacific and Manta Atlantic.

Modular deployment protocol, Saga, unveils the criteria for the upcoming SAGA airdrop. Eligible users include selected ATOM, TIA, MATIC and AVAX stakers. Details on the claiming process will be released in the coming weeks.