The United States Department of Justice announced on February 8, that law enforcement had seized 94,000 bitcoin (~$3.6B) linked to the 119,754 bitcoin stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack.
The Acala team announced an allocation of 1M ACA tokens to the Acala Kickoff Rewards liquidity mining program starting on February 10.
On February 2, the Optimism team was alerted to the existence of a critical bug in Optimism’s Geth fork that would have allowed the creation of ETH by a repeated triggering of the selfdestruct opcode on a contract that held an ETH balance.
The Helium blockchain halted at block #1215286. The blockchain has resumed block production, and pending transactions have been cleared.
The 1inch team has announced the launch of 1inch Earn, a set of concentrated liquidity pools optimized for stablecoin swaps.
Notable Messari Governor Updates
The B.Protocol DAO has introduced a proposal that aims to add a veTokenomics design for B.Protocol that would enable users to lock their BPRO in exchange for veBPRO and bSTABLE tokens for a lockup period comparable to those of veCRV (up to 4 years). Voting is currently active.
The Gnosis DAOhas submitted a proposal that aims to spin-off the Gnosis Safe project from Gnosis Ltd in order to create a SAFE Token to govern the Gnosis Safe ecosystem and infrastructure through an independent SafeDAO and setup an independent Safe Foundation in Switzerland to protect strategic off-chain assets (IP, Github repositories, strategic investments), issue the SAFE Token, and foster the Gnosis Safe ecosystem. Preliminary discussions are ongoing.
The Uniswap DAO has submitted a proposal that aims to create and fund an Ultrasound UNI Fund with 0.3-1M UNI. The Ultrasound UNI Fund directive will be to utilize the protocol fee switch, which can redirect 0.05% of 0.3% fees accumulated to any Uniswap Governance see fit, towards a distribution that brings some portion of swap fees to UNI holders. Voting will start in two days.
The Shapeshift DAO passed a proposal from Messari that aims to commission an initiation of coverage report, via the Messari Hub. The report would touch on key performance indicators and fundamental metrics while also discussing the token mechanics and value accrual mechanisms.
The Compound DAO denied a proposal that aimed to add TrueUSD to the Compound protocol with a 80% collateral factor (from 0% currently) and distribute COMP rewards to TUSD market participants.
Sector Returns
For the first time in over one month of Weekly Recaps, all sectors covered have finished with double digit positive returns. The Gaming sector, which has been one of the worst performers the past five weeks has finally set itself apart, bringing in the highest returns for the week with 26.94%. Even though the DeFi sector took the last spot, it brought an impressive 11.44% return.
Top Assets
Top Assets was the second best performing sector of the week with Ripple (XRP) leading the group, finishing the week with a massive 45.4% gain. The driver for XRP’s substantial outperformance compared to other assets in the sector could be attributed to positive sentiment related to the blockchain-based payments firm’s recent court case news. Avalanche (AVAX) took the second spot with a similarly impressive return of 31.0%. Unlike the top two performing assets of the sector, the rest of the assets traded with high synchrony and ended the week with returns ranging from 19.6% to 12.0%., Solana (SOL) was the laggard of the group.
DeFi Assets
Although DeFi was the least performing sector, it was by no means unimpressive. The sector saw a $7 billion influx of fresh TVL since last week, bouncing from the $200 billion support line. Thorchain’s RUNE was the best performer of the week, returning a 24.2% gain, closely followed by Aave (AAVE) with 23.0%. PancakeSwap performed the worst of the pack with a 4.2% return.
Smart Contract Platforms
Avalanche (AVAX) demonstrated resilience as most of the Smart Contract Platform assets experienced a mild drawdown mid week, AVAX continued its “up and to the right” trajectory allowing it to secure the top performer position for the week. The alternate Layer-1 assets returned a 31.0% gain on the week while the next best performer, Ethereum (ETH) was more than 10% away with a 19.5% return. Algorand returned 11.4% for the week, making it the least underperformer of the group.
Currencies
Amongst the Currencies sector, Ripple (XRP) was the outperformer of the week by a large margin. While the rest of the assets were losing upward momentum, XRP managed to maintain its strength, breaking away from the pack mid week. It closed the week with a 45.4% return while the second spot was taken by Monero (XMR) with a 28.5% return. Dogecoin (DOGE) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) performed the least in the group, with weekly returns of 15.6% and 12.8%, respectively.
Web3
Arweave (AR) was the Web3 sector leader for this week. The data storage protocol brought in a 23.5% return this week marking the first time the protocol claims the best performing asset of the sector since bringing back Weekly Recaps. Basic Attention Token (BAT) was on track to end the week as the worst performer but was able to regain territory allowing it to secure the second to last position with a 15.0%. Ultimately Stacks (STX) took the last spot with a 14.1% gain.
Gaming
Gaming had an impressive week, taking the spot as the top performing sector. Leading the pack with the highest return was Axie Infinity (AXS) which brought in a 36.0% gain. Next up was Chiliz (CHZ) returning 34.5% for the week. Out of the top 10 gaming assets by market capitalization, Yield Guild Games (YGG) was the only one not to finish the week with a 20%+ gain, returning 10.1%.
