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The U.S. Federal Reserve held its federal funds interest rate at 5.25%, following an extended period of consecutive rate hikes.

Bitcoin’s price gyrated in the aftermath of the announcement, dropping back below $26,000 after temporarily exceeding that value, according to TradingView data. Bitcoin is currently trading at around $25,830.

The top cryptocurrency by market capitalization has largely traded in a narrow range and is down about 0.5% today.

“Inflation remains elevated,” the Federal Reserve said in a statement. “The Committee is strongly committed to returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.”

 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The U.S. central bank signaled it might restart rate hikes in coming months if inflation doesn’t continue to recede.

The SEC-registered trading platform Prometheum pitched the House on Gary Gensler’s vision. But skeptical legislators highlighted that the platform won’t offer major assets, including Bitcoin.

The result could have a significant impact on Gemini and its stablecoin as MakerDAO’s reserve holds roughly 88% of total GUSD supply.

The payments processor also cited crypto market conditions as a reason for the exit.

Bitcoin nonprofit Brink raised $5 million from Jack Dorsey’s Smart Small funding initiative to continue financing independent Bitcoin developers.

“We plan to put the funding toward our grants program including sustaining our existing Bitcoin developer grantees and potentially adding any qualified new grant applicants as grantees,” said Brink co-founder Mike Schmidt. 

The funding will doled out in increments of $1 million each year over a five year period. 

In April 2020, then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he would give $1 billion of his equity in Block (then called Square) to a new fund called Smart Small. Its original purpose was to support Covid-19 relief, with the plan to expand beyond this after the pandemic. 

So far Smart Small, which reached a total of $1.4 billion in funding, has spent $515 million and has $900 million remaining. It has given funding to technology projects focused on privacy, including the Tor project and messaging app Signal.

Brink was founded in 2020 to boost the Bitcoin protocol through research and development, and by supporting the Bitcoin developer community. It has a fellowship program to onboard new software engineers into Bitcoin development and a grants program for existing Bitcoin developers.

In May, Brink said it has started supporting Bitcoin developer Fabian Jahr, who had previously received funding from crypto exchange Okcoin.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Trading firm Hashflow is facing an ongoing exploit that has taken at least $600,000 in ether and arbitrum.

The vulnerability appears to refer to the firm’s bridge contract, according to PeckShield. Hashflow offers cross-chain swaps as part of its trading service.

PeckShield said the exploit related to contract approvals. Since the exploit started, it seems that Hashflow has moved to revoke approvals for multiple tokens.

The affected address is the Hashflow deployer address labelled on Etherscan. The exploit affects the contract on at least the Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon and Avalanche chains.

Hashflow did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The Graph, a leading indexing and query protocol for organizing blockchain data, has entered the final phase of its migration to Arbitrum, a Layer 2 scaling solution built on Ethereum. The transition aims to reduce gas fees, accelerate transaction speeds and increase accessibility to the protocol.

Network participants voted on and approved the transition to Arbitrum via a Graph Improvement Proposal. According to a statement released on Wednesday, it aligns with the community’s desire for an enhanced network experience and lower participation costs. 

The process began in 2022 with the initial deployment as Phase One, with protocol rewards on Layer 2 enabled during Phase Two. Today marks the beginning of Phase Three of the integration — representing a complete migration to the Arbitrum network. 

“The Graph users have consistently sought solutions to improve gas efficiencies and other aspects of the network. After careful evaluation of available options, the ecosystem chose Arbitrum as the Layer 2 scaling solution to provide speed and affordability to protocol developers and network participants,” Tegan Kline, CEO of Edge & Node, one of the development teams behind The Graph protocol, said in the statement. The Edge & Node co-founder was appointed as CEO last week.

The Graph’s users will have the option to transition to Arbitrum across all of its products. Protocol rewards will gradually shift from Ethereum and eventually become fully operational on Arbitrum. The Graph’s core developers are actively building Layer 2 transfer tools to aid the transition for network participants.

Delegators can delegate The Graph’s native token, GRT, more efficiency due to lower gas fees available on Arbitrum. Delegators are network participants who delegate GRT to one or more Indexers. Indexers operate nodes in The Graph Network, and provide indexing and query-processing services. Indexers can claim GRT rewards, with gas fees reduced by up to 300 times following the transition, The Graph said.

“Blockchain data is a key component powering the next iteration of innovation in web3. With The Graph fully operating on Arbitrum, Arbitrum users can take advantage of data accessibility,” said Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder. Offchain Labs is the original developer of Arbitrum.

Following the announcement, The Graph and Arbitrum are hosting an event at the House of Web3 in San Francisco this evening.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Gauntlet, a project focused on DeFi risk management, issued an advisory to the governance body of lending platform Aave, recommending the freezing of Curve DAO Tokens associated with a loan position linked to Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov.

Gauntlet serves as a contributor to Aave, focusing on strengthening the security of the platform.

Gauntlet said it examined the risk profile of the wallet in question, which heavily relies on curve tokens as collateral. The account, said to be connected to Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov, has borrowed approximately $63 million in USDT  against collateral of 288 million ($180 million) in CRV, per on-chain data.

Egorov’s wallet recently deposited $24 million in CRV collateral to Aave as the token’s price decreased in order to prevent any risk of loan liquidation and maintain a healthy amount of collateral. The action is noteworthy due to the immense scale of the collateral he controls.

The 288 million CRV tokens account for more than 30% of the total circulating supply of CRV.

Gauntlet wants to mitigate bad debt risk

Gauntlet suggested that by freezing CRV, Aave can incentivize the account holder to either reduce borrowing or diversify collateral forms.

“Given the account is actively managed and frequently maintains its health, freezing CRV will incentivize the account to reduce its borrow or add other forms of collateral,” Gauntlet stated.

The goal of recommending the freezing of CRV from the mentioned loan was to prevent Aave from accruing bad debt due to the declining liquidity of these tokens on exchanges. Specifically, there is  concern over the sharp decrease in the liquidity of the CRV token, which has plunged by 50% both on-chain and globally over the last few months, Gauntlet said.

Despite the account maintaining a health factor of 1.6, indicating no immediate bad debt risk to Aave, Gauntlet implied there can be potential future risks. It stressed that if the account continues to use CRV as collateral, it could pose future risks, especially considering the recent reduction in CRV liquidity. 

Curve Finance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The transition is aimed at reducing barriers of entry for The Graph’s users by decreasing gas costs and speeding up transactions.