Multichain inside job? And SOL surges 80% in a month: Finance Redefined
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.
A trader managed to exploit the brief opening of the Multichain cross-chain bridge, which was frozen since its exploit in July 2023, allowing the trader to turn $280,000 worth of Fantom’s (FTM) tokens into $1.9 million worth of different assets.
In other news, Solana’s (SOL) token has surged 80% in a month, and Avalanche is set to shut down its Etherscan-powered blockchain explorer tool amid a fee controversy. A new bridged token from LayerZero has drawn criticism from nine protocols throughout the Ethereum ecosystem, claiming that it limits the freedom of token issuers.
The top 100 DeFi tokens continue their bullish momentum from the last week, with most of the tokens posting positive returns on the weekly charts.
Trader exploits Multichain opening to turn $280,000 to $1.9 million; community suspects insider job
A wallet address turned nearly 1.9 million FTM worth $280,000 to $1.9 million within hours of exploiting the long-frozen Multichain bridge opening momentarily, leading to insider job speculations among the crypto community.
The Multichain bridge, frozen since its exploit in July 2023, opened briefly and closed again on Nov. 1. The trader seized the opportunity to make millions of dollars in profits.
Solana gains 80% in a month as Firedancer goes live on testnet
SOL has posted 30-day gains of nearly 81% and has rallied over 30% in the past week amid the testnet launch of the blockchain’s long-awaited scaling solution, Firedancer.
SOL reached over $41 on Nov. 2, touching highs it hasn’t seen since August 2022, Cointelegraph Markets Pro data shows. Long touted as an “Ethereum killer,” SOL has vastly outperformed its rival, Ether (ETH), which posted under 11% gains in the past month.
Avalanche blockchain explorer to shut down as Etherscan fees draw controversy
SnowTrace, a popular blockchain explorer tool for Avalanche, will shut down its website — powered by Etherscan’s explorer-as-a-service (EaaS) toolkit — on Nov. 30. The SnowTrace team clarified that only its Etherscan-powered explorer will be shut down.
According to the Oct. 30 announcement, Snowtrace users are required to save their backup information, such as private name tags and contact verification details, before Nov. 30. While the team did not explicitly state the reason for shutting down the explorer, some have pointed to Etherscan’s service fees for its EaaS toolkit. Mikko Ohtama, co-founder of Trading Strategy, claims that an annual subscription to EaaS can cost between $1 million and $2 million per year.
Nine protocols criticize LayerZero’s wstETH token, claiming it’s “proprietary”
A new bridged token from the cross-chain protocol LayerZero is drawing criticism from nine protocols throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. A joint statement from Connext, Chainsafe, Sygma, LiFi, Socket, Hashi, Across, Celer and Router on Oct. 27 called the token’s standard “a vendor-locked proprietary standard,” claiming that it limits the freedom of token issuers.
The protocols claimed in their joint statement that LayerZero’s new token is “a proprietary representation of wstETH to Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Scroll without support from the Lido DAO [decentralized autonomous organization],” which is created by “provider-specific systems […] fundamentally owned by the bridges that implement them.” As a result, it creates “systemic risks for projects that can be tough to quantify,” they stated. The protocols advocated for the use of the xERC-20 token standard for bridging stETH instead of using LayerZero’s new token.
DeFi market overview
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bullish week, with most tokens trading in green on the weekly charts. The total value locked into DeFi protocols jumped to $49.46 billion.
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.
According to the US Department of Justice, Wolf Capital’s co-founder has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy for luring 2,800 crypto investors into a Ponzi scheme.
Making Britain better off will be “at the forefront of the chancellor’s mind” during her visit to China, the Treasury has said amid controversy over the trip.
Rachel Reeves flew out on Friday after ignoring calls from opposition parties to cancel the long-planned venture because of market turmoil at home.
The past week has seen a drop in the pound and an increase in government borrowing costs, which has fuelled speculation of more spending cuts or tax rises.
The Tories have accused the chancellor of having “fled to China” rather than explain how she will fix the UK’s flatlining economy, while the Liberal Democrats say she should stay in Britain and announce a “plan B” to address market volatility.
However, Ms Reeves has rejected calls to cancel the visit, writing in The Times on Friday night that choosing not to engage with China is “no choice at all”.
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The chancellor will be accompanied by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey and other senior executives.
She will meet with her counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, in Beijing on Saturday to discuss financial services, trade and investment.
She will also “raise difficult issues”, including Chinese firms supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and concerns over constraints on rights and freedoms in Hong Kong, the Treasury said.
But it did not mention whether Ms Reeves would raise the treatment of the Uyghur community, which Downing Street said Foreign Secretary David Lammy would do during his visit last year.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing. Pic: AP
On Friday, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy defended the trip, telling Sky News that the climbing cost of government borrowing was a “global trend” that had affected many countries, “most notably the United States”.
“We are still on track to be the fastest growing economy, according to the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] in Europe,” she told Anna Jones on Sky News Breakfast.
“China is the second-largest economy, and what China does has the biggest impact on people from Stockton to Sunderland, right across the UK, and it’s absolutely essential that we have a relationship with them.”
Read more – Ed Conway analysis: The chancellor’s gamble with China
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Nandy defends Reeves’ trip to China
However, former prime minister Boris Johnson said Ms Reeves had “been rumbled” and said she should “make her way to HR and collect her P45 – or stay in China”.
While in the country’s capital, Ms Reeves will also visit British bike brand Brompton’s flagship store, which relies heavily on exports to China, before heading to Shanghai for talks with representatives across British and Chinese businesses.
It is the first UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD) since 2019, building on the Labour government’s plan for a “pragmatic” policy with the world’s second-largest economy.
Sir Keir Starmer was the first British prime minister to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping in six years at the G20 summit in Brazil last autumn.
Relations between the UK and China have become strained over the last decade as the Conservative government spoke out against human rights abuses and concerns grew over national security risks.
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How much do we trade with China?
Navigating this has proved tricky given China is the UK’s fourth largest single trading partner, with a trade relationship worth almost £113bn and exports to China supporting over 455,000 jobs in the UK in 2020, according to the government.
During the Tories’ 14 years in office, the approach varied dramatically from the “golden era” under David Cameron to hawkish aggression under Liz Truss, while Rishi Sunak vowed to be “robust” but resisted pressure from his own party to brand China a threat.
The Treasury said a stable relationship with China would support economic growth and that “making working people across Britain secure and better off is at the forefront of the chancellor’s mind”.
Ahead of her visit, Ms Reeves said: “By finding common ground on trade and investment, while being candid about our differences and upholding national security as the first duty of this government, we can build a long-term economic relationship with China that works in the national interest.”
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