Winners and losers of a stormy DeFi week

Winners and losers of a stormy DeFi week

Once again this week, a lot has happened in the decentralised finance (DeFi) sector. From Flash-Loan attacks, hacks to the manipulation of price oracles, everything has been there.

After the DeFi sector recorded enormous price increases last week, it is now having to take a beating. The DeFi token Aave (AAVE), Synthetix Netowrk (SNX), YearnFinance (YFI) all fell by more than 13 percent and even the UNI token from Uniswap corrected by 10 percent.

The „ETF token“ DeFi Pulse Index, which Bitcoin Formula is a good indicator of general development of DeFi token prices, also lost more than 15 per cent.

DeFi Pulse Index DPITokensets: DPI price

Nevertheless, the total capital deposited in the Decentralized Finance sector recorded only a slight decline from USD 13.54 billion to USD 12.6 billion. This development suggests that the majority of investors remain convinced of the potential of the DeFi sector. It appears that investors are not under too much pressure from price setbacks and continue to actively use DeFi protocols.

A new day, a new DeFi hack. Pickle went haywire this week and the protocol lost more than $20 million. The team does not yet want to announce how this could happen. In addition, the 20 million DAI tokens are still untouched on the hacker’s address. At the moment it is also unclear whether the security problem has been resolved. Since the hack was announced, Pickle has suffered a price drop of more than 36 percent.

Flash loan attack on price oracle

Cheese Bank, another Ethereum DeFi project, fell victim to a flash loan attack on Monday. Flash Loans are loans where a user borrows money without the need for a security deposit. This makes it possible to exert leverage without risking one’s own capital. There is only one condition – users must repay the Flash Loan into their loan within the same transaction.

Through a Flash Loan, the attacker was able to manipulate the price oracle of Cheesebank by creating an arbitrage situation through which he was able to capture a total of $3.3 million. A discussion broke out in the crypto-community. Many criticised that this security gap could have been avoided if Cheesebank had used a decentralised rate oracle. After all, decentralised price oracles like Chainlink’s are not as easy to manipulate as centralised price oracles.

Uniswap and sushi swap benefit

Despite the attacks and hacks this week, there were also two DeFi platforms that benefited in particular. The decentralised stock exchange (DEX) Uniswap and Sushiswap recorded significantly higher trading volumes.

It seems that more and more users are using decentralised exchanges to trade crypto currencies.

Although Uniswap currently dominates the decentralised exchange scene, there is still no clear winner and several DEX have increased their trading volume in the past week.