Finance Redefined: Number of DAOs surge, Solana launches $100M DeFi fund

This past week, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem was ruled by decentralized autonomous organizations and new fund launches for the growth of the Web3 ecosystem. The total number of DAOs surged by eight times while Solana launched a $100 million DeFi fund.

Optimism, an Ethereum layer-2 protocol that Vitalik Buterin recently praised for its governance model, lost 20 million tokens due to a mix-up of layer-1 and layer-2 addresses. A leaked 600-page copy of a United States crypto draft bill also grabbed the community’s attention, as it proposes heavy regulatory scrutiny for DeFi and DAOs.

The top-100 DeFi tokens showed mixed market performance, with several tokens registering double-digit gains in the last seven days, while a significant majority remained bearish on the weekly charts.

Number of DAOs increases 8x along with a spike in votes and proposals

The total number of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), the number of governance proposals put forward and the number of votes cast have all seen astounding growth over the past 12 months.

Data compiled by Snapshot Labs and shared by Electric Capital engineer Emre Caliskan in a Thursday tweet highlighted that DAO numbers have increased over eight-fold, from 700 in May 2021 to 6,000 now. The number of proposals has increased by 8.5 times, and the number of total votes has increased by 8.3 times over the past 12 months, from 448,000 to 3.7 million.

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Solana Ventures sets up $100M fund for GameFi and DeFi in South Korea

Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation have formed a $100-million fund to help support the growth of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain gaming and DeFi projects in South Korea.

In addition to supporting projects built on Solana, the fund will help keep some Terra-based projects afloat following the collapse of that ecosystem last month.

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Leaked copy of the U.S draft bill shows DeFi and DAOs under regulatory lens

A leaked copy of a United States draft bill concerning cryptocurrency started doing the rounds on Twitter earlier on Tuesday. The 600-page copy of the leaked bill highlights some of the key areas of concern for regulators including DeFi, stablecoins, decentralized DAOs and crypto exchanges.

User protection seems to be the primary focus of regulators, with policies intended to require any crypto platform or service provider to legally register in the U.S., be it a DAO or DeFi protocol.

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Optimism loses 20M tokens after L1 and L2 confusion exploited

The honeymoon period for the Optimism layer-2 scaling solution has been cut short, as an exploit in its market maker’s smart contract led to the loss of 20 million OP tokens.

The exploit took place on May 26 but has only just been reported to the community. One million tokens valued at about $1.3 million were sold on Sunday. An additional 1 million tokens valued at about $730,000 were transferred to Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum address on Optimism earlier today at 12:26 am UTC. The remaining tokens are dormant for now but could be sold at any time or used to sway governance decisions.

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DeFi market overview

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked registered a slight dip over the past week, with the value dipping below $80 billion again. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals that DeFi’s top-100 tokens by market capitalization registered a week filled with volatile price action but broke out of the bearish trend over the past couple of days.

The majority of the DeFi tokens in the top-100 ranking by market cap traded in the green, Chainlink (LINK) was the biggest gainer with a 29% surge, followed by Theta Network (THETA) with a 17.2% rise. Tezos (XTZ) registered a 14.14% price rise, while PancakeSwap (CAKE) grew by 1.23% over the last seven days.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.