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.
Over two weeks after Curve Finance’s multiple pool exploits, the DeFi protocol has assured the hack victims that it is assessing each impacted user for reimbursement. This comes after the exploiter returned 73% of the stolen funds.
The DeFi ecosystem moved beyond the Curve dilemma only to face another set of exploits this past week, with Zunami Protocol seeing its stablecoins pools exploited, resulting in a net loss of over $2 million. However, the week was also filled with optimistic developments as ConsenSys completed the public launch of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM), Linea, with $26 million worth of Ether (ETH) bridged.
In another development, Fantom-based decentralized exchange SpiritSwap was rescued from its shutdown at the last moment through a community resolution.
Curve Finance vows to reimburse users after $62 million hack
Curve Finance has officially stated its intention to reimburse users impacted by its recent hack, which resulted in $62 million in losses. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post from its official account, ongoing investigations are yielding progress, with approximately 79% of the funds successfully recovered. The platform also said it would assess each impacted user for reimbursement.
This assessment aims to ensure an equitable distribution of resources. The incident on July 30 involved malicious actors exploiting vulnerabilities within the release history of Curve Finance’s Vyper compiler.
Zunami Protocol confirms stablecoin pools attacked, $2.1 million loss estimated
Decentralized finance protocol Zunami Protocol has advised users not to buy any of its Zunami Ether (zETH) or Zunami USD (UZD) stablecoins after encountering an attack on its “zStables” pools on Curve Finance.
On Aug. 13, Zunami confirmed on X that its stablecoin pools had encountered an attack, adding that collateral remains secure as it begins an investigation into the potential exploit.
$26 million ETH bridged: ConsenSys completes public launch of zkEVM Linea
ConsenSys has completed the launch of its Ethereum scaling rollup Linea, onboarding over 150 partners and bridging more than $26 million in ETH to date.
Linea went live with select partners onboarded to the alpha mainnet in July 2023, allowing developers to migrate existing decentralized applications (DApps) from Ethereum’s mainnet or other scaling solutions. The zkEVM is a layer-2 scaling solution that provides lower transaction costs and higher throughput for DApps in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Fantom DEX rescued at the eleventh hour following a planned shutdown
SpiritSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Fantom, will no longer shut its doors in September after its treasury funds were stuck on the troubled cross-chain protocol Multichain. In an Aug. 16 community vote, SpiritSwap users passed a resolution to transfer the project to Power, a fellow nonfungible token platform and DEX based on Fantom. Power will deploy 200,000 USD Coin (USDC) into the SpiritSwap treasury.
On Aug. 9, SpiritSwap said it would wind down operations by Sept. 1 if it could not find a team to take over after the Multichain exploit drained its entire treasury. Interestingly, Power was also exposed to the Multichain fiasco but only suffered “small” losses, as its treasury assets were not bridged to Multichain.
DeFi market overview
Despite the late market turmoil, DeFi’s total value locked in DeFi protocols saw a bullish surge in the past week. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bullish week; however, the late Thursday dip washed away the gains, leaving most tokens trading in red on the weekly charts. The total value locked into DeFi protocols touched $49.8 billion for the first time in five months.
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.