Price Preview: August 17 - August 23
ETH 2 Medalla testnet suffers a setback that could delay launch and DeFi continues to set records as risk mounts.
Hello Ethereans!
Before we dive into the preview, a brief update on some of the wild events that have recently unfolded.
Last week was filled with more market insanity than I have ever witnessed in all my years in crypto. Hence the relative silence. Things got… busy.
In a period of 36 hours the Ethereum token, YAM, climbed from a market capitalization $0.00 to $57,500,000 and back to $0.00 in what was a nail-biting event that saw explicitly unaudited code attract $500 million in assets before failing (in a semi-catastrophic way), only to have a subsequent rescue attempt fail and fail again before it was announced that YAM would indeed, be reborn…
Mere hours after YAM failed in spectacular fashion, a curious new development took its place. The stablecoin exchange, Curve Finance, had been due to release their CRV token in “early August” amid huge anticipation. After weeks of waiting with no clear date for launch, an impatient user going by the name of “0xchad” posted to Twitter that they had taken the open source contracts from the Curve team’s repository and deployed it on their behalf.
After hours and hours of due diligence by the Curve team, it was decided that 0xchad’s deployment had not been malicious and that these contracts could indeed be considered the launch of Curve. What transpired, however, was a little murkier than most had realised. It turned out that 0xchad (most likely) and a number of other users, had “pre-mined” the early deployment, earning millions of dollars while the Curve team carried out their due diligence before making the public user interface available.
What was originally planned as a fair and thorough launch quickly descended into chaos, with a lot of questions that still remain unanswered as to why Curve decided to use 0xchad’s deployment (instead of dismissing it for their own), and who is 0xchad?
I plan on penning a full write-up of the above. What’s unfolding on Ethereum right now is momentous and worthy of being documented.
In this preview we look at:
ETH price breaks $400 and rockets to nearly $450.
ETH 2 faces major setback as Medalla testnet suffers huge outage.
DeFi TVL continues to break records as risk mounts.
Media roundup for the week ahead.
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