As bitcoin BTC$75,202.89 heads into this year’s flagship Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas next week, traders will be watching for a familiar pattern, a potential “sell-the-news” event that has played out in previous years. The largest cryptocurrency is trading around $75,000, recovering from a local bottom of around $60,000 in early February after collapsing more…
The aftershocks of the Saturday’s KelpDAO hack are spreading through stablecoin markets in ways that were not immediately obvious. Int he first 24 hours post the attack, users on Aave borrowed approximately $300 million against their tether deposits of stablecoin tether USDT$1.0002 on the platform, according to Chaos Labs data. The borrowing spike isn’t a…
The decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is experiencing a sharp capital outflow following the weekend exploit of the KelpDAO protocol. Leading DeFi lending platform Aave has lost $8.45 billion in deposits over the past 48 hours, driving a broader $13.21 billion decline in total value locked (TVL) across DeFi. TVL refers to the combined dollar value…
LayerZero has placed responsibility for the $290 million Kelp DAO exploit on Kelp’s own security configuration, saying the liquid restaking protocol ran a single-verifier setup that LayerZero had previously warned against. The attack used a novel vector targeting the infrastructure layer rather than any protocol code. Attackers, whom LayerZero attributed with preliminary confidence to North…
Bitcoin is absorbing the return of Middle East risk better than oil or equities. Bitcoin traded at $74,335 on Monday morning, down 1.6% over 24 hours but still up 4.8% on the week after the U.S. Navy seized an Iranian ship over the weekend and Tehran reimposed controls on the Strait of Hormuz. Ether slipped…
Total value locked on decentralized lending protocol Aave dropped by nearly $8 billion over the weekend after hackers behind the $293 million Kelp DAO exploit borrowed funds on Aave, leaving roughly $195 million in “bad debt” on the protocol and triggering withdrawals. Data from DeFiLlama shows that Aave’s TVL fell from about $26.4 billion to…
The current Bitcoin (BTC) market cycle is “dramatically” weaker than the three previous cycles, according to Alex Thorn, the head of firmwide research at investment firm Galaxy. Thorn compared price action since the April 2024 Bitcoin halving to cycles triggered in 2012, 2016 and 2020; the current cycle shows significantly dampened volatility and lower upside….
A breach at web infrastructure provider Vercel is forcing crypto teams to rotate API keys and do a deep inspection of their underlying code. In a bulletin, Vercel said the hacker was able to grab behind-the-scenes settings that weren’t locked down, potentially exposing API keys — the digital credentials apps use to connect to other…
The impact of stablecoins on the banking sector appears “limited” at the current phase of the adoption cycle, but banks could face increasing competition and an erosion of market share as the stablecoin sector and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) grow in market capitalization. “So far, the use of stablecoins remains limited, but their market capitalization…
Institutional investors are warming to digital assets, with improving sentiment and broader use cases emerging as key drivers of adoption, according to a new survey from Tokyo-based bank Nomura and its crypto unit Laser Digital. The study, based on responses from more than 500 investment professionals in Japan, found that 31% of respondents now hold…
