Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.
The last week’s headline was dominated by some of the biggest hacks in DeFi. This week is redemption time for many DeFi protocols that either averted an attempted hack or got a significant chunk of their stolen funds back.
The BitBTC bridge reportedly had a bug that would essentially allow an attacker to mint fake tokens on one side of the bridge and swap them for real ones. However, one Twitter user was able to foresee the vulnerability and informed the cross-bridge platform about it.
The Moola Market attacker has scored about a half-million dollar “bug bounty” after choosing to return a majority of the cryptocurrency they exploited from the Celo-based lending protocol. Cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute repaid a $92 million TrueFi loan on time despite suffering a $160 million hack.
Mango Market hackers that returned a significant chunk of the $117 million stolen from the protocol could still face legal action despite the protocol deciding to award him a $50 million bounty.
The top 100 DeFi tokens remained bearish for another week, as the majority of the tokens traded in red, barring a few. The total value locked also remained below $50 billion for the second consecutive week.
Twitter user saves cross-chain bridge from potential exploit
A cross-chain bridge between BitBTC and the Ethereum layer-2 network Optimism has been able to avoid a potentially costly exploit thanks to the work of an eagle-eyed Twitter user.
The custom cross-chain bridge offers a ramp for users to send assets between Optimism’s network and BitAnt’s DeFi ecosystem, which includes yield services, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), swaps and the BitBTC token, in which 1 million BitBTC represents 1 Bitcoin (BTC).
Moola Market attacker returns most of $9M looted for $500K bounty
An attacker has returned just over 93% of the more than $9 million worth of cryptocurrencies they exploited from the Celo blockchain-based DeFi lending protocol Moola Market.
At around 6:00 pm UTC on Oct. 18, the Moola Market team tweeted it was investigating an incident and had paused all activity, adding it had contacted authorities and offered a bug bounty to the exploiter if funds were returned within 24 hours.
MangoMarket'ss exploiter said actions were ‘legal,’ but were they?
The $117 million Mango Markets exploiter has defended his actions as “legal,” but a lawyer suggests that they could still face the consequences.
Self-described digital art dealer Avraham Eisenberg outed himself as the exploiter in a series of tweets on Oct. 15, claiming he and a team undertook a “highly profitable trading strategy” and that it was “legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed.”
Wintermute repays $92M TrueFi loan on time despite suffering a $160M hack
When Wintermute, a cryptocurrency market maker, lost $160 million due to a hack and concerns related to the repayment of debt worth $189.4 million surfaced. However, in an exciting turn of events, Wintermute paid back its largest debt due Oct. 15, involving a $92 million Tether (USDT) loan issued by TrueFi.
After repayment of TrueFi’s $92 million loan, Wintermute still owes $75 million to Maple Finance in USD Coin (USDC) and wrapped Ether (wETH) and $22.4 million to Clearpool, a total of $97.4 million in debt.
Binance delegates 13.2M UNI tokens, becoming Uniswap DAO’s second-largest vote-holder
Crypto exchange Binance is now the second-largest entity by voting power in the Uniswap DAO, sitting just behind the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, according to the on-chain list of delegates.
On Oct. 18, Binance delegated 13.2 million Uniswap (UNI) tokens from its books, which represents 5.9% of the voting power — a percentage of tokens delegated to the exchange. Compared to the total supply of UNI, the amount delegated represents 1.3%.
DeFi market overview
Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value registered another dip, with the total value locked (TVL) falling below $50 billion at the time of writing. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView show that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a mixed week, with the majority of the tokens trading in red on the 7-day chart, barring a few.
Maker (MKR) continued its bullish momentum into the third week of October, registering a 12% gain over the past seven days, followed by Aave (AAVE) with a 10% weekly surge. Lido DAO (LDO) was another DeFi token that registered a 9.45% surge in the weekly charts
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insight,s, and education in this dynamically advancing space.