Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter.
Although markets may be down and technical indicators based on AWS malfunctioning, fear not young degens, fundamental news and the spirit of Wagmi abound as ever. So, read on and find out everything you need to know about this week’s biggest events.
What you are about to read is a shorter and more concise version of the newsletter. For a full rundown of DeFi developments over the past week, subscribe below.
The AWS outage highlights the need for truly decentralized exchanges.
An Amazon web service outage this week produced major cascading effects on the global supply chain and delivery industry, as well as multi-hour operational outages on the decentralized exchange dYdX and major centralized exchanges Binance.US and Coinbase.
AWS is the world’s largest cloud services infrastructure, providing a variety of services, including network servers, storage capabilities, remote computing, and mobile development, to name a few.
According to data released this year by Synergy Research Group, the tech titan has a 33% share of the cloud infrastructure market, followed by Microsoft and Google with 20% and 10%, respectively.
Details about the incident were largely undisclosed; however, it was noted on the company’s service status page that “multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 region,” located in Northern Virginia, were experiencing connectivity issues.
In a Twitter statement shared Tuesday, and into the early hours of Wednesday, dYdX spoke about improved latency across the network, as well as website load failures, before revealing its over-reliance on centralized servers, one of which is AWS.
Unfortunately, there are still some parts of the exchange that rely on centralized services (AWS in this case). We are deeply committed to full decentralization and this remains one of our top priorities as we continue to repeat the protocol. We apologize for this interruption.
– dYdX (@dydxprotocol) December 8, 2021
DappRadar analytical data reveals that dYdX is the thirteenth largest decentralized financial application built on the Ethereum network, recording approximately $ 1.5 billion in daily trading volume. In September of this year, dYdX achieved a historic transactional milestone by surpassing Coinbase’s volume over the course of a single day, at $ 4.3 billion compared to $ 3.7 billion.
Many early adopters of cryptocurrencies understand that decentralization is a central component of the industry architecture. Alongside security and scalability, the former constitutes the so-called blockchain trilemma, a concept coined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to denote the need to sacrifice one side of the triad to experience the benefits of the other two.
In the world of crypto exchanges, many choose to prioritize security and scalability in pursuit of mass adoption, but therefore operate with largely centralized Web 2.0-like structures.
Related: Decentralization versus Centralization: Where is the Future? The experts respond
Joseph Delong concludes his time as CTO of SushiSwap
SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong announced his immediate departure from the decentralized exchange this week, pledging to honorably pass the proverbial baton on to the next leader, along with the necessary accounting and informational data.
Delong explained the reasoning behind his decision in a candid Twitter thread, citing internal conflicts and a lack of a unified vision for the project, stating:
“I wish Sushi the best and it saddens me that sushi is in such danger inside and out. The chaos that is occurring now is unlikely to result in a resolution that will leave the DAO much more in a shadow than it was before without radical structural transformation. “
Delong has experience working in the Web 3.0 space as a blockchain engineer and developer. Previously employed as a Senior Software Engineer at ConsenSys, Delong took over as CTO at SushiSwap in early 2021 following the infamous exodus of Chef Nomi in the previous months.
Over the past year, Delong guided SushiSwap to the 12th position in total face value blocked (TVL) at $ 2.85 billion, but also suffered hurdles with strict acceptance of the white list in the Optimism layer two protocol, as well as a $ 3 million supply chain. exploit on the MISO launch pad and, more recently, a rumored vulnerability in its $ 1 billion worth of smart contracts.
Related: SushiSwap Denies Billion Dollar Bug Reports
Coinbase Opens Crypto Library to Promote Innovation
One of the major cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, announced this week the launch of an open source library-themed platform, titled Kryptology, designed to provide developers with a set of “safe, audited, and easy-to-use application program interfaces.” (API) “.
In an official blog post, Coinbase outlined its intentions for the library in promoting the continued development of this long-standing technology:
“While our primary goal is to enable further innovation, we also aim for Kryptology to raise the bar for what is considered a robust and usable cryptographic library.”
Related: Coinbase Announces Support for Hardware Wallets, Starting with Ledger
Token performances
Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total locked value has decreased 11.3% over the week to a figure of $ 143.95 billion.
Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView Data Reveals Top 100 DeFi Tokens by Market Cap Above Bearish the last seven days.
Terra (LUNA) was the only top 100 winner this week with a mere 1.81%. It’s not the most memorable technical week for DeFi, let’s put it that way, but it’s not surprising considering the broader context of the crypto market pullback.
Interviews, reports and other interesting things
Thanks for reading our roundup of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, ideas, and education in this dynamically moving space.