In this week’s review of the movements of decentralized finance, we will take a quick look at how the halving of BTC affected this sector of the cryptocurrency market, and briefly describe another of the most important assets within this sphere. Let’s begin:
via defipulse.com
And so it happened. In the afternoon hours of May 11th (EST), Bitcoin finally reached a block length of 630,000, which triggered the process of reducing the mining rewards in half (12.5 BTC per block) as an attempt to lengthen the time needed to reach the maximum of BTC in circulation. Its effects manifested as early as 2 days before, with a drop of $25 billion across the entire market in just 30 minutes, which translated to the DeFi landscape losing $70 million in a couple of hours (8% compared to crypto’s 12%).
However, the overall losses of the week got mitigated by the climb the market experienced in the days prior to the event. When we look at the entire week, we can see that the overall market only dropped by 5%, and DeFi even less at 4%, which paint the picture of less drastic short term effects than expected, but we still have to wait a little longer before giving a final veredict, and probably multiple months until the predicted growth that comes with a halving shows itself.
For this week’s second part, we will take a quick look at Synthetix, an Ethereum-based network that focuses of the creation and trade of digital assets that track the value of real-life assets, called Synths. It currently manages Synths for over 30 assets, including an assortment of fiat currencies, commodities and other cryptocurrencies, with plans to include stocks and indices in the future.
via defipulse.com
With a total value locked of $115.5 million (81% of its total value), it reaches spot #2 as the most influential DeFi platform in the market behind Maker. It’s also looked at for its positive reward percentages for both staking and lending SNX tokens and how easy it is to use and generate revenue. Its success of the long term will depend on how effective they are in implementing Synths for assets that present a higher volatility or require a much higher number of transactions, but it seems to be pulling its weight in these times.