Welcome to Finance Redefined, a weekly newsletter designed to bring you the most important events of the past week, providing essential insights into decentralized finance (DeFi).
This week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is gearing up to launch a DeFi platform that will likely include crypto lending and borrowing capabilities. The candidate is “embracing the future with crypto.”
In the broader crypto space, Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams has denied allegations that he requested funds to build DeFi protocols via a decentralized governance vote on Uniswap.
Trump to Launch World Liberty Financial Cryptocurrency Platform on September 16
Former President and Republican presidential candidate Trump’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency project has announced that it will launch on September 16.
In a video posted to X on September 12, President Trump said he would go live on the platform to launch a project managed by his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
“We are embracing the future with cryptocurrencies and leaving behind the slow, outdated big banks,” he said.
World Liberty Financial Announcement. Source: Donald Trump
President Trump has previously made several vague posts about World Liberty Financial, vaguely describing it as a DeFi platform for lending and borrowing.
Continue reading
Uniswap CEO Denies Allegations of Fee Charges for Protocol Distribution
Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams has refuted X’s claims that Uniswap was asking for money to distribute to its decentralized finance protocol.
The CEO contacted X on September 12th and stated that neither Uniswap Labs nor the Uniswap Foundation charges fees for deploying the protocol.
source: Hayden Adams
Adams said that protocol deployment is done through governance voting. He explained that for the Uniswap interface, the requirements for deploying to a new chain are determined based on the amount of activity and effort required.
The Uniswap CEO’s response comes after X user Alexander claimed that Uniswap had asked developers to “fork out $20 million for an inefficient Uniswap deployment.”
Continue reading
Sonic Blockchain Achieves Record Finality of 720ms During Testnet Phase
Sonic Blockchain has achieved transaction finality of 720 milliseconds (ms) on its testnet.
In blockchain, finality refers to the guarantee that a transaction cannot be reversed, which happens after the transaction is added to a block in the ledger.
According to Andre Cronje, creator of the Fantom Network and chief technology officer at Sonic Labs, Sonic claims to be the world’s fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine chain, with a “true” 720ms finality.
After a transaction is executed, most blockchains require a few additional blocks to make the transaction irreversible. However, Sonic increases this transaction finality to just over 700ms.
Continue reading
Cryptocurrency Platform Friend.tech Tokens Drop 26% After Admin Transfer
The native token of Friend.tech, a cryptocurrency social media platform, has plummeted after the team transferred control and ownership of its smart contract to a null address on Ethereum, permanently giving up all control over the contract.
Friend.tech said on X that the move was made “before September 8th to avoid any future changes to fees or features.”
According to CoinGecko, the platform’s FRIEND token fell by about 26% to $0.067 in the 24 hours following the transfer.
Coinbase Launches Bitcoin Digital Asset ‘cbBTC’
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has launched the cbBTC token, a wrapped version of Bitcoin (BTC) on the Ethereum network and its second-layer scaling network, Base.
According to the September 12 launch announcement, cbBTC is backed 1:1 by Bitcoin held by Coinbase, and there is no separate order book or trading pair on the exchange platform.
Coinbase’s Wrapped Bitcoin works by automatically minting cbBTC at a 1:1 ratio when a user sends bitcoin to a Base or Ethereum address. The reverse is also true: when a user sends cbBTC to a Coinbase address, tokenized bitcoin is automatically converted to standard bitcoin.
Continue reading
DeFi Market Overview
According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap ended the week in the red.
Among the top 100 tokens, the BinaryX (BNX) token recorded the largest gain this week at 31%, followed by the Solana-based mimecoin Popcat Sol (POPCAT), which gained 28% last week.
Total value locked in DeFi. Source: DefiLlama
Thanks for reading our roundup of the most impactful DeFi developments of the week. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights, and education on this dynamic and evolving space.