2024 started strong for DeFi, with a mix of events through the first month. Restaking was one of the strongest narratives within the sector witnessing over $1.7B worth of inflows.

There were multiple developments within the leverage landscape throughout the month.

• Starting with MakerDAO passing two executive votes, with the key highlight being an increase of Spark’s DAI debt ceiling from 800M to 1.2B.

• Morpho labs continued to ship, with Blockanalytica together with B.protocol co-curated a flagship USDC vault on Metamorpho, and the transfer of ownership to Morpho DAO.

• Euler launched Ethereum Vault Connector, to connect ERC4626 with other vault types, and support the development of lending protocols, stablecoins, yield aggregators, margin trading apps, etc.

• Chainlink proposed building the DeFi Yield Index for lending rates for 4 largest assets

• Curve hinted at launching LlamaLend

Stablecoins

• One of the key events this month was USDC filing for an IPO. The stablecoin giant’s step will be a major headwind for the web3, especially the DeFi ecosystem. It can be particularly beneficial for the growth of Maker, USDC’s biggest decentralised competitor.

• Growth of PYUSD (Paypal’s stablecoin) within DeFi also made noise - with FRAXPYUSD becoming one of the largest pools on Curve with competitive yields.

• Parallelly, there were multiple developments within the decentralised stables ecosystem, starting with Aave labs proposing the integration of GHO across multiple networks, which was followed by a GHO hackathon that saw 777 participants.

• LUSD’s presence also continued to expand, getting integrated on Wirex.

Security incidents

• Radiant capital, a leading lending protocol on Arbitrum and BSC suffered a flash loan attack worth $4.5M in the first week of Jan. The DAO proposed to deal with the same through recapitalisation and debt resolution using the DAO treasury. Radiant soon introduced its v3 in the very next proposal.