Finance Redefined: DeFi 'Godfather' Cronje quits, CAKE launches $100M venture arm and more

The decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem had quite an eventful week with several new developments and price action. The week started with DeFi “Godfather” Andre Cronje announcing his departure from most of his projects, leading to a massive drop in prices of projects that Cronje was associated with.

CAKE DeFi launched a new $100 million venture fund to support Web3 initiatives, ThorChain spiked over 34% after activating synthetic assets and Polygon network suffered an extended outage post new upgrade that impacted its price momentum.

DeFi “Godfather” Cronje quits as TVL and tokens tank for related projects
DeFi architect, Fantom Foundation technical adviser and Yearn.finance founder Andre Cronje has left the decentralized finance space reeling after deactivating his Twitter account.

Cronje’s long-time colleague at the Fantom Foundation Anton Nell stated in a Sunday tweet that both he and Cronje were leaving the crypto space entirely. However, concerns arose about the fate of roughly 25 decentralized applications (DApps) and services they have been operating up to now. Among the affected apps and services are yearn.fi, keep3r.network, multichain.xyz, chainlist.org, bribe.crv.finance and the new solidly.exchange.

Cake DeFi launches $100M venture arm for Web3, gaming and fintech initiatives
Singapore-based decentralized finance services firm Cake DeFi announced the launch of a $100 million venture arm dedicated to serving as accelerators for Web3, gaming, nonfungible tokens (NFT) and other crypto initiatives.

The newly launched $100 million venture arm, Cake DeFi Ventures (CDV), will fund crypto startups that complement the company’s core business. According to Cake DeFi, the venture firm “will be focused on investing in tech startups across Web3, the metaverse, the NFT space, gaming, esports and fintech spaces.”

THORChain spikes by 34% after activating synthetic assets
The price of the native asset for cross-chain decentralized exchange THORChain (RUNE) has spiked by 34% in a day following the activating of synthetic assets on the network.

THORSwap Finance highlighted the advantages of the synthetic assets via a Thursday blog post, noting that “synths have great utility for traders and arbitrageurs, as they can be transacted nearly instantly and at a fraction of the cost compared to native L1 swaps.”

Polygon network suffers from extended service outage after upgrade
Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has not produced a new block for over 11 hours, with developers attributing the issue to a technical upgrade on the network.

On March 10, 4:20 pm UTC, Polygon network developers notified users on the project’s forum that there would likely be downtime starting at about 5:50 pm UTC due to maintenance required on one of the network’s three layers. A recent upgrade is thought to have caused an error in the network’s ability to achieve consensus.

DeFi market overview:
Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked has maintained a similar value to the last week with a minor increase, reaching a figure of $111 billion.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization performed reasonably well across the last seven days.

The weekly performance of the majority of the DeFi tokens has remained flat, with most of them either traded in green/red with a single-digit percentage change. Terra (LUNA) maintained its dominance for the third week in a row, rising by over 8% in the past week, rising to a new all-time high above $104. Ankr (ANKR) registered a 7% gain over the past week, followed by ThetaFuel (TFUEL) with a 1% overall gain.

Before you go!
A week that didn’t see much in terms of price action, but the likes of ThorChain and LUNA continued to defy the market trends aided by their synthetic asset ecosystem. The gas fee on Ethereum has plummeted to a nine-month low. Data shows that the average gas price on Ethereum has been dropping rapidly since the start of the year, plunging from 218 Gwei on Jan.10 to 40.82 on Wednesday.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.