In recent weeks, the Defi space has experienced fast expansion and has gotten a lot of mainstream attention in the financial industry. With many Web2 companies and individuals considering what financial services and technologies to leverage for the next few years, DeFi has successfully captivated them, thus increasing the level of activity across different chains and ecosystems. The majority of users want greater security, transparency, and autonomy, and DeFi enables broader access to financial services in these areas. Particularly on EVM chains, the last week was jam-packed with events. OpenSea, one of the world’s largest NFT marketplaces, recently announced a significant reduction in its creator and operational fees.
We’re making some big changes today:
1) OpenSea fee → 0% for a limited time
2) Moving to optional creator earnings (0.5% min) for all collections without on-chain enforcement (old & new)
3) Marketplaces with the same policies will not be blocked by the operator filter— OpenSea (@opensea) February 17, 2023
Due to the excessive attention being given to Blur, one of OpenSea’s competitors in the NFT market, the team decided to cut the 2.5% creator royalty fees attached to every NFT sale for a limited time. Another critical piece of information is the adoption of optional royalties, which have been in use on other NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden. The NFT market has been very competitive in recent months, with many competitors seeking the best strategy to adopt to get more users and beat their competitors to it.
Furthermore, Arbitrum, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, has surpassed the daily transaction volume of Ethereum’s Layer 1 (L1) network. According to CoinDesk, Arbitrum processed over 1.1 million transactions on February 21, while Ethereum L1 processed around 1 million transactions, a 590 percent increase in daily transactions on Arbitrum since the beginning of the year.
The surge in usage of layer 2 scaling solutions like Arbitrum can be attributed to the high gas fees and congestion on the Ethereum L1 network, which have made it difficult and expensive for users to transact on the network. Layer 2 scaling solutions offer users of the Ethereum mainnet more utility at cheaper gas fees, thus successfully driving some of the transaction volumes from the L1 network to the L2 chains. The Arbitrum ecosystem has been leading the optimistic rollups game for a while, with many developers and founders opting to launch their projects on Arbitrum.
With the hype surrounding the DeFi space, Coinbase, a centralized exchange based in the United States, announced the testnet launch of its layer 2 chain, Base. Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 chain created to provide a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for DeFi folks to develop decentralized applications on-chain anywhere in a more convenient manner.
This past week also saw some projects already existing on BSC and other chains launch an IDO as well as a token migration event on Arbitrum, some of which include Ede Finance, a perpetual dex on BSC, and RoseonExchange, a Gamefi ecosystem building on BSC. These events are more than enough to spike interest in the DeFi space, as it further proves to be an industry worth paying attention to.
