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- 🟣 A Basket Case on Blast and Base
🟣 A Basket Case on Blast and Base
A DeFi mishap and Bitcoin bangs its head on the $71K ceiling
Macauley Peterson
April 12, 2024
đź‘‹ GM.
Welcome back to 0xResearch – quick hitting alpha for the crypto degens. Here's what we got for you today:
A Blast liquidation fiasco
New way to transport tokens cross-chain
What’s clogging Base?
After a promising start to this Friday — more often than not a green day — crypto markets turned sharply lower following the opening bell in New York.
Bitcoin (BTC) followed Thursday’s script, dipping 1.75% like clockwork, beginning at around 8:00 am ET. The daily uptrend remains intact with a close above $69,500.
The dollar breakout mentioned on Wednesday continues, with DXY surging another 0.75% on the day. It’s now at the highest level since Nov. 3, 2023, largely thanks to euro weakness after the ECB hinted Thursday it could start cutting interest rates in June.
Blast-based borrowing and lending dapp Pac Finance seems to have inadvertently liquidated a bunch of its users to the tune of $26 million by adjusting LTV and liquidation parameters without advance notice.
Oops!
“In our effort to adjust the LTV, we tasked a smart contract engineer to make the necessary changes. However, it was discovered that the liquidation threshold was altered unexpectedly without prior notification to our team, leading to the current issue,” the team wrote on X.
They blamed it on a rogue “smart contract engineer” and suggested a governance contract/timelock for upgrades could mitigate an issue like this in the future. Well, duh!
Observers noted that the Pac Finance team previously was behind ParaSpace protocol, which suffered an exploit in March 2023.
Just another centralized points-farming operation with an anon team and poor operational processes. Don’t get me started, but Pacman can’t wave a magic wand to fix this one.
In more cheerful news, Chainlink cut the ribbon on Transporter, a retail-facing front-end for its Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Transporter initially supports token transfers between Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and WEMIX.
If you just said, “what the heck is WEMIX,” you’re not alone. It’s #147 on CoinGecko with $16.7 million in TVL per DefiLlama, though that excludes WEMIX.FI, which reportedly has $169.7 million.
DePIN is ripe to disrupt a range of traditional infrastructure networks. Our latest report, made free thanks to AIOZ Network and POKT Network unpacks how investors can best gain long-term exposure to the sector, and where the opportunity lies. Check it out here!
Not very Zen: Base Chain storage use
The XEN scourge — sorry, stress test — in action on Base.
The “proof of participation” token that has spammed Ethereum’s state in the past has also been making the rounds on the faster, cheaper rollup.
“The chart above visualizes how Base’s state is currently being used,” Paradigm data analyst Storm wrote on X. “[The] size of each rectangle [equals] how much state is used by each type of contract.”
XEN has been on Base since the early days, and as activity on the rollup has ramped up, its overall share of state being stored has actually decreased significantly from 85% to 68%, Storm notes.
Arweave recently launched the testnet for AO computer, a new messaging protocol that will sit atop a PoS network and aims to become a scalable global compute platform through parallel processing and modularity.
Solana current design is causing users’ transactions to be displaced or dropped. Until further solutions mature, we do not see the appetite to add additional risk at present; however longer term, we think the market will eventually look past these idiosyncratic headwinds and believe SOL is still a top candidate for outperformance throughout this cycle.
Shakeeb Ahmed was tied to two hacks, and the DOJ first filed an indictment against him in July of last year
The “fastest-growing ETF in history” has seen net inflows on every trading day since its Jan. 11 launch
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The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.
