This week was easily one of the most eventful ones in the cryptocurrency field in terms of overall developments, especially in the DeFi sector.
Starting with Bitcoin, however, not much changed since last week. BTC price started trading at around $11,800 seven days ago, and it’s currently at roughly the same level. However, this doesn’t mean that there was no volatility.
On Monday, BTC briefly broke for the second time above $12,100, causing serious enthusiasm in the community. Over the next few days, however, the cryptocurrency reversed and dropped to as low as $11,100, only to rebound and reach its current trading point.
What happened in the DeFi space, however, is nothing short of amazing. On August 12th, a group of developers launched an experimental protocol called YAM that combines the inherent qualities of both YFI and Ampleforth (AMPL). In less than 24 hours, people locked about $600 million in the protocol, elevating the yield farming craze to a whole new level.
The hype was shortlived, though, as soon after that, the developers revealed they’d found a bug in the rebasing mechanism, which wasn’t audited.
They prompted YAM holders to delegate their tokens in an attempt to push a proposal that would fix the problem, and the community came through, surpassing the necessary quorum. Unfortunately, at the last moment, the developers identified another mistake, which prevented them from pushing through with the fix, causing hyperinflation in the reserve protocol and devaluing all the YAM that was farmed.
The momentum in the DeFi space is also causing serious shifts in Ethereum’s network, the fees of which have skyrocketed to a new all-time high, making it a lot less profitable for small players to take advantage of liquidity pooling. Its price also surpassed the $400 mark.
Elsewhere, just yesterday, the Winklevoss brothers had a meeting with the poster-child of legacy market day trading, Dave Portnoy, explaining the merits of Bitcoin. Portnoy supposedly bought some BTC, as well as LINK, and is contemplating his own coin. Whether or not this will come to fruition, though, only time will tell.
Market Data
Market Cap: $354B | 24H Vol: 80B | BTC Dominance: 60.8%
BTC: $11,672 (+0.80%) | ETH: $389,87 (+3.24%) | XRP: $0.293(-0.66%)
Source: cryptopotato.com