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.
This week, Grayscale Investments launched its new Aave investment fund that provides eligible investors access to AAVE, the governance token for the Aave platform.
In other news, Polymaket prediction market app users raised the alarm on mysterious Google login wallet attacks, with multiple victims reporting their wallets being drained after using Google accounts to log in.
Grayscale launches Aave investment fund
Asset manager Grayscale Investments launched its new Aave (AAVE) investment fund for the protocol’s governance token, according to an Oct. 3 news release.
The release said the new Grayscale Aave Trust will allow investors to “gain exposure to AAVE, the governance token for Aave’s platform.”
“The Trust is now open for daily subscription by eligible individual and institutional accredited investors,” it said.
Source: Grayscale
The asset management firm recently established a United States-based XRP trust, increasing its investors’ exposure to DeFi via the XRP Ledger.
Polymarket users complain of mysterious Google login wallet attacks
Polymarket prediction market app users have raised concerns that their wallets had begun mysteriously draining after they logged in via their Google accounts.
Cointelegraph spoke to two of the victims of the attacks. One of them, HHeego, claimed that a $1,085 deposit from Binance to Polymarket never hit their account within the Polymarket app.
HHeego assumed the error was with their account before joining the Polymarket Discord server and discovering others were suffering from the same issue.
After inspecting their account history using the Polygonscan block explorer, it became apparent that they had been phished. Their balance had been sent to an account labeled “Fake_Phishing399064.”
Solana DApps volume increased by 46% in a week — Is $180 SOL the next stop?
Solana’s native token (SOL) witnessed a 9% fall over two days to Sept. 29, mirroring the broader altcoin market capitalization, which had reached about $800 billion in late September.
This fell to $739 billion on Oct. 1, but despite the downward trend, network usage surged, prompting traders to speculate whether the asset could outperform its competitors.
The Solana network defines itself through low latency and transaction fees, particularly compared with Ethereum and BNB Chain.
According to GasFeesNow, the average expense traders expected to pay out for transactions was a meager $0.02, a stark difference from Ethereum’s $2.50 and a quarter of the cost of BNB Chain’s $0.08
DeFi resurgence driven by Fed cuts, China, key protocols
On Oct. 1, Apollo Crypto, an investment management firm, released a report detailing a potential second wave of DeFi industry growth.
Despite market inertia that followed the peak of 2020’s “DeFi Summer,” Apollo’s report highlighted a call “for the resurgence of DeFi” and industry staples like Maker, Uniswap and Aave.
The report also revealed that macroeconomic elements such as the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut and China’s credit expansion contributed to driving DeFi’s resurgence.
Impersonators use Slack “driver” in attempt to swindle crypto educator
Duo Nine, a crypto educator and creator of the Your Crypto Community (YCC) platform, almost fell prey to an impersonation scam.
The YCC creator was approached by scammers claiming to be executives from venture capital firm ParaFi. The scammers tried to convince Nine to download a “patch” to enable his copy of Slack to work.
The reality was that the impersonators were attempting to steal his private key through a “driver” that was probably malware, so they could drain the creator’s crypto wallet of its assets.
DeFi market overview
According to Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView data, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap ended the week flat after recovering from significant market losses in early October.
Of the top 100, the FTX Token (FTT) token rose over 72% as the week’s biggest gainer, followed by Aptos (APT), which rose 9.27%.
Total value locked in DeFi. Source: DefiLlama
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.