Lido the Leader

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and it's time to start the 2023 journey.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 💎Lido Finance overtakes MakerDAO
• 💰Venture Monday
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

LIDO FINANCE OVERTAKES MAKERDAO

New year, new news. As the world is getting older, the stakes are getting higher.

We're talking about Lido Finance, the liquid-staking decentralized solution for blockchains (such as Ethereum).

While the crypto world was experiencing the FTX apocalypse, Lido Finance sat in the back row and was casually earning $1 million in daily fee revenue for nearly a month.

The way Lido Finance earns that buck is by charging a 10% fee on total Ethereum staking rewards generated from user deposits.

The pool of staked Ethereum is dominated by several companies and Lido Finance has been the #1 for some time already. Today Lido has achieved a new milestone - the #1 protocol in DeFi when it comes to Total Value Locked.

Lido's TVL has increased to more than $5.9 billion.

This makes them the #1 decentralized application with more funds locked in it than anywhere else in DeFi. MakerDAO takes second place(from today).

The increase in Lido's TVL corresponds to new daily users the staking platform has acquired, as well as the fact that Ethereum switched to Proof Of Stake.

So this signifies growth in all shapes and forms.

BTW, why is TVL one of the most important features in DeFi, and why do we see its increase?

A record number of people switched to decentralized wallets this year because FTX undermined trust in the big exchanges.

That means a lot of people are relatively new to DeFi and don't realize all the pitfalls that potentially await them in this industry.

TVL (Total Value Locked) is the sum of all assets that are frozen in the smart contracts of a particular DeFi-protocol.

The higher the value, the better. A high TVL means that the project is used by a huge number of people and is "doing well".

For example: a high TVL on the decentralized exchange Uniswap simplifies exchanges and reduces slippage (meaning that your swap from one token to another will remain in the same value).

The price of DAI stablecoin is being supported by the TVL on Maker.

Of course, there are exceptions: LUNA and UST collapsed almost to zero in spite of high TVL. But this was due to errors in their tokenomics.

This indicator is more for a superficial evaluation of DeFi protocols before using them. For a more in-depth evaluation, other indicators should be used as well.

So that's that. May this year be a time of wiser, and safer decisions.

TL;DR: Lido Finance overtakes MakerDAO and becomes the #1 TVL protocol with $5.9 billion worth of locked funds.

VENTURE MONDAYS

This year we'll continue with the 'Venture Mondays' tradition. Every Monday we'll check out what companies were at the center of investors' attention during the last week.

Hardware wallet Cypherock raised $1M in a seed funding round. ConsenSys Mesh, Infinite Capital, Orange DAO, Gnosis DAO and others are among investors.

All hardware wallets today require users to maintain some form of seed phrase backup. Cypherock uses an algorithm called Shamir Secret Sharing to shard the private key into 5 components each stored on a piece of hardware - the device and 4 cards.

Revel Social platform for storing NFT collections raised $7.8 million. Polygon, Dragonfly Capital, 6th Man Ventures, are among investors.

Revel is a platform that found their niche by combining social media self-expression with the trading opportunities of a marketplace.

Finterest – The first crypto-lending protocol on Internet Computer raised $1.5 million. Investors consist of Polychain and 9YardsCapital.

What they do is provide users with the ability to become depositors or borrowers.

Depositors provide funds to borrowers in return for interest on their deposits. Borrowers are willing to pay interest on the amount they borrowed in exchange for having a lump sum of crypto available immediately.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Bitcoin Core Developer Lost "Basically" All of His BTC Holdings in a Hack. The attacker got away with around $3.6M worth of BTC.
• Sam Bankman-Fried Denies Transferring Funds from Alameda-Related Wallets. At this point it's not that easy to trust his words.
• Investors of Bankrupt Crypto Firms are Looking to Sell Their Claims. Cashing out on what's left.