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BEQUANT Crypto&Coffee
The sentiment took a dive in the wake of reports that a skilled farmer used flash loans to reap $24 million from the FARM_USDT and FARM_USDC pools. Looking at the arbitrage analysis, fUSDT fell 13.7% and $FARM fell 67% over two hours as the hacker took out a $50m USDT flash loan, then used the Curve Finance Y pool to swap funds and stretch stable coin prices out of proportion. According to some reports, the price calculation mechanism for LP deposits and withdrawals was the source of the exploit, meaning this attack could have carried over to the renBTC pool, the FARM_TUSD pool, and the FARM_DAI pool. However, the hacker chose to stop after draining $25m or 17% of what was available in the FARM_USDT and FARM_USDC pools, although they could have easily continued to drain the entire pool for a total of $400m if they had so desired. As a result of all of the above, volume on Uniswap surged to over $2bln and FARM token crashed over 50%. In turn, much of the DeFi ecosystem traded lower as market participants were reminded of the high-risk vs high-reward profile of their operations. In terms of news flow, CoinDesk writes that the BIS is planning its own trial of a CBDC in collaboration with the Swiss central bank. Revealed by Benoit Coeure, head of the BIS Innovation Hub, at the Bund Summit in Shanghai, Oct. 23–25, the proof-of-concept initiative would be underway before then end of the year and would open a route to experimentation looking at use cases for a retail – i.e. cash equivalent – CBDC. Elsewhere, Silvergate Bank added $586 million in new deposits from firms and individuals in the cryptocurrency industry in the third quarter of 2020, according to an earnings report released before market-open on Monday. This growth was around half of competitor Signature Bank’s increase of $1 billion in deposits from digital asset companies, but it’s the largest deposit increase Silvergate has seen since the bitcoin bull market in Q4 2017 when the bank saw quarter-over-quarter deposit growth of $835 million. According to The Block, DBS, Singapore's biggest bank, is launching a fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchange. Dubbed "DBS Digital Exchange," the trading platform would allow users to trade in four crypto assets: Bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), ether (ETH), and XRP.
Also from The Block, major Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer will also be available via NEAR, an Ethereum competitor that just fully opened its mainnet last week. The team behind the smart contract platform, which promises reduced latency and fees compared with Ethereum, announced the news on Monday.
