Sunday Review 09/07/2023

Jack Martin

Jul 09, 2023 - 1 min read

This week we have witnessed the hottest day since records began... on three separate occasions. But while some have been taking advantage of the warm weather, do remember that in many parts of the world such heatwaves cause a huge amount of disruption.

So grab yourself a fan and try to keep cool while we look back at the hot news in crypto from the last week.

After its CEO went missing in May, Multichain found that over $100 million in assets from its cross-chain contracts went missing earlier in the week, in a suspected hack. Worse still, victims of the hack are now being targeted by a scammer pretending to be Fantom and offering compensation.

Also missing this week are some of the user funds from the sudden closure of Hotbit in May, and an increasing number of executives from CZ's legal and compliance teams at Binance.

Innovative stablecoin platform Reserve Protocol took a step back from six key Latin American markets, due to insurmountable issues with the local commercial banks. Observers took the opportunity to shine a light on exactly what makes Reserve Protocol so unique in the first place.

The Bank for International Settlements published its annual report, seeing the potential for the digitalization of money to improve the old and enable the new. Meanwhile, the DeFi platform behind Magic Internet Money (MIM) hoped to improve the new by enabling the old, proposing that a centralized legal entity should take on certain tasks in order to maintain its decentralized nature.

Elsewhere in the DeFi world, Pendle has seen impressive growth in onboarded capital, trading volumes and market capitalization, since Ethereum's Shapella upgrade unlocked staked ether.

Bad news for NFT artists as a race to the bottom by competing marketplaces has contributed to royalty payments dropping to their lowest value in two years.

But Bitcoin Shrimp are making it big. Wallets with under 1 BTC have been rapidly increasing their share of the circulating tokens this week, and now hold almost 7% of all bitcoin.