This Week in DeFi – September 24

This week, 1inch Exchange adds Arbitrum to its growing list of L2 solutions integrations and brings much needed DEX aggregation to the most recent scaling standout. 1inch will combine liquidity from Arbitrum-based exchanges including Balancer, Uniswap, Sushiswap, and others to increase efficiency and reduce slippage in decentralized swaps.

Just like L1’s, L2’s will have their time too…

and the good news is @1inch is now deployed on #Arbitrum 🎉

This expansion to Arbitrum is set to offer 1inch users lower transaction costs, higher transaction speeds and fast withdrawals. 🤝

For more info checkout the thread 👇 https://t.co/Vt2BpM4QDU

— Axel Bitblaze (@Axel_bitblaze69) September 23, 2021

Shapeshift announced another distribution of FOX tokens to DeFi community members, this time targeting those who may have been left out the last time on account of having staked or otherwise contributed their tokens to DAOs and other governance schemes. Contributors to more than a dozen DAOs left out of the original airdrop will be eligible for the 6.6 million FOX tokens being ‘fairdopped’.

As part of a decentralization pledge, ShapeShift has issued a second “fairdrop,” its airdrop of FOX tokens.

The 6,613,000 token airdrop was distributed to over 33,000 DAO community members. https://t.co/BxKV02L3NF

— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) September 24, 2021

Harvest Finance is making moves this week, integrating with Coin98 wallet to ease access to yield farming for 400,000 users, mostly concentrated in the Indo-Pacific region. Harvest has also begun collaborating with Stakewise for the Fertilizer program, giving additional rewards to randomly selected liquidity providers to the Stakewise pool.

Harvest now supports @coin98_wallet 🔥

Starting today, over 400,000 users can connect to Harvest with the comfort of the Coin98 Wallet & put their assets to work 🌱

This integration is a big milestone for the #HarvestInAsia campaign 📈

👉 https://t.co/gSwladLf25 pic.twitter.com/cmfLGUqc6W

— Harvest Finance (@harvest_finance) September 21, 2021

And Polygon has initiated a bug bounty program, with maximum rewards of up to $2 million for critical security issues uncovered. Even low-level threats uncovered are worth a $1,000 payment, and a robust bounty program should help reduce losses to hacks as more users and liquidity join the Polygon ecosystem.

Polygon Bug Bounty is live on @Immunefi with a maximum bounty of $2,000,000 per critical bug found!

Security is our top-most priority & not an afterthought. This bug bounty will help reward the hard work & efforts of all the security researchers.

🌐: https://t.co/QMaxax0Xny pic.twitter.com/kTa2eqoXSp

— Polygon | $MATIC (@0xPolygon) September 20, 2021

With the proliferation of competing scaling solutions and huge demand for greater transaction speeds, the attack surface for malicious actors is as large as it has ever been, with only a limited amount of developer resources available to build and provide quality assurance for DeFi applications going out the door. And while mostly similar to Ethereum coding, most L2s also present unique differences and challenges that can make hacks even more difficult to prevent. The lag in removing assets from L2s offers some protection, but many hackers are not opposed to waiting months or years to finally make off with their ill gotten gains.

But the DeFi community is a resilient and resourceful bunch, and while much treasure has been allocated to juicing growth on these platforms to capture market share, it seems likely we’ll soon see a turn towards reputation management and security. As with the overall L2 race, Polygon is leading the way here too with a serious commitment to providing counter-incentives to taking advantage of uncovered exploits and having vulnerabilities reported to be patched instead.

As the hype fades away from simply getting scaling solutions out the door and gathering their initial liquidity, branding, collaboration and integration will become increasingly important alongside security concerns, and we may see protocols and L2 communities looking more and more like corporations, focused on managing their brand and public perceptions as moving fast and breaking things. Here’s hoping these budding giants, with all their decentralized governance built in, will ultimately be more responsive to the desires of their stakeholders than their centralized counterparts are today.

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $67,97B (down -25.2% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $111.924B (down -13.57%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $15.53B (up 5.43%)

DAI Supply: 6.12B (down -3.32%)

Total DeFi Users: 3,367,000 (up 2.09%)

[William Peaster – Bankless] – How to lend crypto to institutions

[DeFiYield.App] – The Ultimate Yield Farming Guide at Arbitrum

[Ben Giove – Bankless] – How to onboard your friends to crypto

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Decentralize Everything – The Daily Gwei #340

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] – Robinhood’s New Crypto Policy Poised to Bolster DeFi and NFTs

Alex is a Content Writer at Circle, with previous experience at tech startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and as a freelance writer and analyst. Interests include cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and he has been in the crypto community since 2014.