Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph's decentralized finance newsletter.

As the crypto community filled its crypto stockings for the holiday season, the Grinch emerged to souvenir a grimacing fate to 2 DeFi platforms, stealing their festive spirit and a whole lot of dollars.

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Binance VC arm leads $60M circular in cross-chain protocol Multichain

Binance Labs, the venture capital side of global crypto exchange Binance, facilitated a $60-million capital funding raise for cross-chain router protocol Multichain. Other notable participants included Sequoia China, IDG Capital and Three Arrows Capital.

Amid Multichain's corporate rebrand from AnySwap last calendar week, analytical estimates placed the protocol's total value in a higher place $5 billion and reported over 300,000 users on the platform. The funds raised will be utilized beyond various domains, including research and development of crypto algorithms, audits, security and full general ecosystem growth.

In addition to the capital support, Binance has also pledged to develop a broader human relationship with the protocol, announcing that Multichain volition exist officially recommended as a tool to span bToken beyond chains through Binance's smart contract platform, the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

BSC expressed loftier praise of Multichain, noting that it is "one of the biggest routers on BSC." Zhaojun, a co-founder of Multichain, stated that the protocol connects "more public blockchains and crypto assets than anyone else, with lower transaction fees, shorter bridging time and college security levels."

Related: Binance to launch $1B fund to develop BSC ecosystem

Interlay raises $half dozen.5M to accelerate Bitcoin DeFi interoperability

DeFi infrastructure startup Interlay announced a $six.5-million Series A funding round led by venture fund DFG Capital with additional participation from Hypersphere and Nexo Finance, among others.

The funding is ready to back up the construction of DeFi applications cross-chain to Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot, as well equally onboard new developers to the team.

Interlay was designed to enhance the interoperability of crypto assets such equally Bitcoin (BTC) to networks that typically facilitate DeFi activity such as Ethereum and Polkadot, a vision that the Web3 Foundation understood when information technology invested in the platform via a grant in March 2022.

Interlay's core product, a Bitcoin-backed digital asset titled InterBTC, can be utilized within the Polkadot ecosystem for various DeFi activities such as yield farming, lending and acting equally a collateral asset. Tokenizing a Bitcoin derivative opens the possibility of greater utility for the asset in comparison to the functional capacity of the Bitcoin network.

Speaking on the funding enhance, James Wo, founder and CEO of DFG, stated that Interlay'due south solution would "expand the cross-concatenation possibilities for Bitcoin" before tweeting:

Related: Crypto interoperability evolves: From blockchain bridges to DeFi transfers

Bent Finance and Grim Finance exploited for multi-millions

DeFi protocol Grim Finance reported over $thirty 1000000 in losses this calendar week after an "external assailant" gained admission to the protocol'due south vault contract via five reentrancy loops. This made information technology the sixth platform to encounter a security breach in the month of December, following high-profile hacks such as BadgerDAO's $120 million loss.

In a damning explanatory tweet thread, DeFi security service RugDoc stated that Grim Finance's largest fault was non implementing a reentrancy guard on the earlier-afterward pattern in the protocol's smart contract coding. Another error was granting the user "more than privilege than is necessary" in enabling them to choose the preferred deposit token. RugDoc farther explained:

"Hopefully, all projects tin draw lessons from this incident that there is much cognition most experienced solidity devs have at mitt. If you haven't acquired this still, don't build multi-million dollar projects. Don't get audits from companies which everyone knows are useless."

Similarly, fellow DeFi platform Bent Finance, known for its capabilities of staking and yield farming, also suffered a malicious exploit this week to the tune of 440 Ether (ETH), or but above $ane.6 million at the time of writing.

Related: Crypto could save Millennials from the economic system that failed them

Token performances

Analytical data reveals that DeFi's total value locked has increased 15.74% across the week to a figure of $142.58 billion, engulfing the losses printed in concluding calendar week's market downturn.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals DeFi's top 100 tokens past marketplace capitalization have mainly been bullish over the last seven days.

Yearn.finance (YFI) registered two weeks of gains with 53.28%. Terra (LUNA) rose 36.6%, while Aave (AAVE) printed gains of 34.ii%. Curve DAO Token (CRV) and Compound (COMP) claimed 4th and fifth places this week with 28.half-dozen% and fifteen.iv%, respectively.

Interviews, features and other cool stuff

  • Three smart contract platforms that could see deeper adoption in 2022
  • The boxing of banks vs. DeFi is a win for private crypto investors
  • From DeFi year to decade: Is mass adoption here? Experts Answer, Function 1

Thanks for reading our summary of this calendar week's well-nigh impactful DeFi developments. Join us once more next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.