What’s New in DeFi, 2/9/20 - 2/22/20

It’s been a bombastic couple of weeks within DeFi — it seems like there have been quite a few more hacks and acquisitions than usual.
It’s just a sign that this niche within financial technology is starting to gain some major momentum. As DeFi recently crossed the billion-dollar threshold, it’s becoming an increasingly hot topic within the crypto world.
Here’s a condensed roundup of the latest DeFi News that matters.
The Tron Foundation acquired Steemit.
Much to investor and block producer dismay, Steemit CEO Ned Scott sold the company to Justin Sun of the Tron Foundation. The specifics of the deal are mostly fuzzy and unknown, but Steemit is only the latest in a series of acquisitions by Sun.
ETHDenver, a major DeFi event, took place!
The crypto community was recently in Colorado to talk all things DeFi. Various companies and projects trotted out their latest and greatest offerings while speakers and panelists dissected topics within the space.
There’s a new initiative to build a bridge between Ripple and Ethereum’s DeFi market.
Ripple’s development arm Xpring is funding an effort to gain access to Ethereum’s significant portion of the decentralized finance market. The announcement came out during ETHDenver — Ethereum’s ecosystem simply has too much talent and capital to ignore.
bZx was hacked twice within four days.
It’s not necessarily easy to be in the crypto business, but no one deserves this. First a bug exploitation in the exchange’s smart contract, then an oracle manipulation attack — the total loss between two attacks amounted to $954,000.
A hacker made $360,000 in ETH via a “flash loan.”
Now crypto businesses have to worry about a new kind of vulnerability: flash loans. This basically entails borrowing an asset without putting down any collateral — you get it for free if you pay it back in the same transaction, profiting on any price differences. This article goes into great detail about how flash loans actually work.
DeFi Pulse is launching a system to enable easier listings on the analytics site.
DeFi Pulse is the analytics site that keeps tabs on all the relevant statistics pertaining to decentralized finance. When DeFi crossed the $1 billion threshold a couple weeks ago, most people citing that news item were referencing DeFi Pulse data.
Now the company is rolling out an improved listing system to make it easier for smaller projects to be included among the tallying.
Equilibrium framework launches Korean website
After maintaining our English and Chinese sites for as long as we have, Equilibrium framework announced the launch of our site’s Korean edition.You can check it out right here in case you read Korean, but we hope that this move makes our framework more accessible and useful to the Korean crypto community.