DeFi to be examined at inaugural CFTC tech advisory meeting: Finance Redefined

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you significant developments over the last week.

DeFi will be in focus during the inaugural Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) tech advisory meeting, where a panel will “explore issues in decentralized finance.”

Polygon, a layer-2 scaling protocol for Ethereum, has launched a zero-knowledge decentralized identity solution to the public nearly a year after announcing its development.

The cryptocurrency phishing scammer behind some of the most high-profile and high-value Web3 thefts claims to have packed up shop, saying it was “time to move on to something better.”

In another DeFi exploit-related development, Platypus Finance has created a portal that enables users to view how much the platform owes them following the recent $9.1 million exploit. The French police have arrested two suspects and seized 210,000 euros ($223,000) worth of crypto in connection with the Platypus exploit.

The DeFi market had a bearish start to March, where the price slump on Thursday wiped out most of the gains from the top 100 DeFi tokens. Barring a few, most of the top 100 tokens traded in the red on the weekly charts.

Decentralized finance to be examined at inaugural CFTC tech advisory meeting

The United States commodities regulator is set to take a close look at the decentralized finance space at an upcoming meeting of its tech committee, with crypto industry executives also invited.

The CFTC announced on March 1 that the agenda for the March 22 meeting of its Technology Advisory Committee will include a panel on “exploring issues in decentralized finance.”

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Notorious Monkey Drainer crypto scammer says they’re ‘shutting down’

The scammer with the pseudonym Monkey Drainer posted to their Telegram channel on March 1 that they “will be shutting down immediately,” and all “files, servers and devices” related to the drainer “will be destroyed immediately” and it “will not return.”

The scammer even advised budding “young cyber criminals,” saying they shouldn’t “lose themselves in the pursuit of easy money,” and only those “with the highest level of dedication” should operate a “large scale cybercrime” outfit.

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Polygon launches decentralized ID product powered by zk-proofs

The Polygon ID service uses zero-knowledge proofs, which use cryptographic techniques to allow users to verify their identity online without having their sensitive information passed or potentially stored with a third party.

Polygon Labs publicly released Polygon ID on March 1, almost 12 months after the project was officially launched in a closed-source environment. The Polygon team says Polygon ID was built to “solve the issue of digital trust.”

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French police arrest 2 people in connection to Platypus attack

French police have arrested two suspects in connection with the $9.1 million Platypus exploit, and 210,000 euros ($223,000) worth of cryptocurrency has been seized, according to the local authorities.

Investigations leading to the arrests were supported by on-chain sleuth ZachXBT and crypto exchange Binance, Platypus said. The same exploiter compromised the decentralized protocol in three flash loan attacks on Feb. 16.

According to the latest update from the protocol, it launched a page that lets viewers check how much compensation they can get from the platform. The page contains several sections that allow users to better understand how much they are owed after the exploit. This includes an overview, a pre-attack net value and post-attack adjustments.

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DeFi market overview

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total market value remained below $50 billion this past week. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bearish week, with most of the tokens trading in red, barring a few.

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.