Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Curve liquidity issues dominated the news this week

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Happy Friday!

Adam Morgan McCarthy here to run you through this week’s biggest stories.

An exploit on Curve Finance has dominated the news this week. The protocol’s Ethereum trading pools were drained of more than $60 million, with the exploit linked to a bug in an older version of its code. Curve’s CRV token plunged following the event.

Michael Egorov, founder of Curve, stole the focus afterwards. Egorov had an Aave loan, backed by CRV tokens, that was suddenly at risk of liquidation — raising contagion worries.

Our very own Tim Craig wrote about the intricacies of the exploit and Egorov’s loan in this week’s DeFi newsletter, The Decentralised. The founder is currently engaging in over-the-counter trades to avoid liquidation.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong granted its first two crypto exchange licences this week. HashKey and OSL received the virtual asset exchange licences.

Circle’s market cap reached a more than two-year low this week, as its decline continued. The second-largest stablecoin by market cap has been falling steadily since the US regional banking crisis in March. Tether has benefited from its fall, hovering around a record high of $84 billion.

Have a great weekend,

Adam Morgan McCarthy

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Coinbase walks back Brian Armstrong’s assertion SEC asked exchange to delist every token but Bitcoin

On Monday, Coinbase walked back CEO Brian Armstrong’s latest reported bout of criticism.

The co-founder and chief executive said the Securities and Exchange Commission asked the crypto exchange to delist more than 200 tokens before it sued the company in June, according to an article in The Financial Times.

Both the exchange and the SEC refuted this when asked by DL News.

Aave DAO governance dispute pits delegate bigwig against service provider Llama

Aave DAO, which runs DeFi’s biggest crypto lending protocol Aave, is embroiled in a governance dispute between a major delegate and one of its service providers. Marc Zeller, founder of Aave Chan Initiative proposed the DAO cancel its contract with the provider, Llama, which claims he has it in for them.

Coinbase’s Base had 24 hours of meme coin frenzy, rug pulls and $58m in deposits

The Base network experienced a wave of memecoin activity this week. The frenzy began when one wallet deposited $12 million worth of Ether on July 30 and created a token called BALD. The token price soared after a wave of deposits, before it crashed almost 90% after its creator removed $13 million worth of liquidity from the market.