Over $204M lost to DeFi hacks and scams in Q2: 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.

The second quarter of 2023 saw over $208 million exploited and hacked from DeFi protocols, and with just $4.5 million of funds recovered, total losses to exploits were over $204 million.

The DeFi ecosystem is an ever-growing industry with billions of dollars in daily trading volume. Still, it remains niche to a small population in the crypto industry and out of reach for some. For a thorough overview of DeFi, check out the new report from Cointelegraph Research titled: “Investing in DeFi: A Comprehensive Guide.”

The DeFi lending protocol Maple Finance has decided to offer direct loans to some borrowers instead of relying solely on pool delegates to provide capital to fill the void left by bankrupt major lending protocols like BlockFi.

The popularity of Bitcoin’s BRC-20 token standard has led many leading wallet service providers to add support for the new token standard, and Optimism network transactions surged 67% following the Bedrock upgrade.

The top 100 DeFi tokens continued their bullish momentum into the last week of June, with most tokens trading in green.

Over $204 million was lost in Q2 DeFi hacks and scams: Report

Over $204 million was lost in DeFi hacks and scams in the second quarter of 2023, according to a June 27 report from Web3 portfolio app De.Fi.

The report, titled “Q2 De.Fi Rekt Report,” was partially based on data from De.Fi’s Rekt Database. Over $208.5 million was exploited during the quarter, but $4.5 million was recovered through prosecutions, deals with hackers and other recovery methods. According to the report, the number of DeFi hacks in Q2 rose by “almost 7 times” year-over-year, with 117 incidents compared with only 17 in the same quarter of 2022. In total, over $665 million was lost during the first half of 2023.

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Maple Finance announces direct lending to fill the void left by BlockFi, Celsius

Web3 lending platform Maple Finance has announced the launch of a direct lending program, according to a June 28 fact sheet from the platform’s development team. The program is intended to replace services previously provided by Celsius, BlockFi and other now-bankrupt lenders.

In the past, Maple relied on credit professionals, called “pool delegates,” to provide capital for these loans. For example, Celsius used Maple to create a Wrapped Ether (WETH) lending pool in February 2022.

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Optimism network transactions surged 67% following Bedrock upgrade — Nansen

Transactions on the Optimism network surged 67% following its June 7 “Bedrock” upgrade, according to a June 26 Twitter thread from blockchain analytics firm Nansen. The network had seen less than 300,000 transactions per day before the upgrade, but this figure increased to over 550,000 by the middle of June.

Optimism saw a sharp increase in transactions immediately following the hard fork, rising to over 400,000 from approximately June 5 to 9. Volume rose slower after the initial spike, reaching a peak of over 550,000 on or around June 15. It then started to fall slowly, reaching 500,000 transactions per day by the end of the time data was collected around June 23, according to a chart posted in Nansen’s Twitter thread.

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Wallet providers introduce BRC-20 token support despite market drawdown

On June 21, self-custody wallet provider BitKeep announced support for BRC-20 tokens issued on the Bitcoin network. With the feature, users can view, rank and transfer BRC-20 tokens and nonfungible tokens. Developers also stated BRC-20 in-wallet swaps are coming “in [the] future.”

Last month, cryptocurrency exchange OKX also announced support for BRC-20 assets via the OKX Wallet app. Many centralized and decentralized exchanges have also rolled out BRC-20 support.

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DeFi market overview

DeFi’s total market value saw a bullish surge after three bearish weeks. 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 the green. The total value locked in DeFi protocols remained below $50 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.