Decentral Block Post

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.

Over two weeks after Curve Finance’s multiple pool exploits, the DeFi protocol has assured the hack victims that it is assessing each impacted user for reimbursement. This comes after the exploiter returned 73% of the stolen funds.

The DeFi ecosystem moved beyond the Curve dilemma only to face another set of exploits this past week, with Zunami Protocol seeing its stablecoins pools exploited, resulting in a net loss of over $2 million. However, the week was also filled with optimistic developments as ConsenSys completed the public launch of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM), Linea, with $26 million worth of Ether (ETH) bridged.

In another development, Fantom-based decentralized exchange SpiritSwap was rescued from its shutdown at the last moment through a community resolution.

Curve Finance vows to reimburse users after $62 million hack

Curve Finance has officially stated its intention to reimburse users impacted by its recent hack, which resulted in $62 million in losses. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post from its official account, ongoing investigations are yielding progress, with approximately 79% of the funds successfully recovered. The platform also said it would assess each impacted user for reimbursement.

A tight range usually resolves with a range breakout and that is what happened in Bitcoin (BTC) on Aug. 17. Bitcoin fell sharply, resulting in a $1 billion liquidation for derivatives traders, the biggest since the FTX collapse in 2022.

It is difficult to pinpoint any specific reason for the sell-off but analysts believe that the confusion arising from the alleged write-down of SpaceX’s $373 million Bitcoin holdings may have been one of the potential triggers.

Whatever the reason, the decline has started. The next major question troubling investors is how low could Bitcoin fall. Several analysts have turned bearish and expect Bitcoin to continue its downtrend in the near term.

Will Bitcoin continue to drop, dragging the rest of the cryptocurrency markets with it? What are the important support levels to keep an eye on? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Bitcoin price analysis

Bitcoin’s narrow range resolved to the downside on Aug. 17, triggering a long liquidation, which pulled the price to $25,166.

Update (Aug. 18 at 2:09 pm UTC): This article has been updated with both sides’ perspectives and additional information. Further commentaries are expected from both sides.

Crypto influencer Evan Luthra has brought a lawsuit against crypto exchange Bitget for freezing his account after a new token listing in March. According to Luthra, the exchange suspended his withdrawals and froze $200,000 in Tether (USDT) while attempts to seek clarification went unanswered. 

Luthra’s involvement with the ReelStar project serves as a backdrop to these events. The influencer was hired as an adviser to ReelStar, a startup developing a social media app for creators. As compensation, Luthra was offered Reel Tokens (REELT), the project’s utility token. Upon its listing, the influencer sold 1.3 million REELT tokens on Bitget. Luthra’s account was then frozen under suspicion of market manipulation. A spokesperson from Bitget told Cointelegraph about the decision:

“Bitget faced a manipulative attack by a group of traders attempting to profit by manipulating trades on the exchange. Their target was a new coin called REELT, which they tried to dump immediately after its listing on Bitget, causing a large drop in the coin’s price.“

Additionally, Bitget claims to have contacted the crypto influencer for an explanation: “In response, he admitted to selling the tokens. However, when we asked for the reasons behind this abnormal behavior, we did not receive active feedback or satisfactory response.“