GeckoPulse: March 6-13 Crypto News

In this new edition of GeckoPulse, we summarize the key happenings of the crypto space this week from March 6-13. Subscribe to our free daily newsletter to be the first to receive breaking updates!

Notable Coins of the Week

Across Protocol (ACX)

Across announced big with the intention to sunset their current DAO structure and move towards being a US-listed corporation. Most importantly, they said that they would buy out current ACX holders at the price of $0.04375/ACX. ACX exploded past this price on this news, rising from $0.035 till about $0.066 before it cooled.

Hyperliquid (HYPE)

Hyperliquid rallied (+21.4%) this week on the back of record Open Interests (OI) following heightened interests in commodity trading (Oil) on the Hyperliquid platform. Influencer Arthur Hayes renewed his bullish thoughts on HYPE projecting a $150 target while calling it the “AWS of liquidity”.

Derive (DRV)

After announcing a significant token buyback program, DRV quadrupled in price, reaching a peak of $111M in market capitalization before cooling off. Derive is an on-chain options protocol that ranks 3rd among DeFi protocols by open interest.

Pi Network (PI)

PI surged nearly 30% after it was announced that the coin would be listed on Kraken crypto exchange. Pi is a Layer-1 network popular for its feature of crypto mining through mobile phones.

Mantra Network (MANTRA)

The MANTRA token (formerly OM) experienced a steep 75% price decline but this is by design as the protocol rebranded its OM token to MANTRA, offering a 1:4 token split.

DeFi News

Not Aave’s Finest Week. DeFi lending platform Aave was recently under fire after an oracle bug cost the platform $27M in funds. In the same week, an attempted to buy AAVE with $50M USDT only to experience extreme slippage, receiving only $36K in AAVE.

Big Week for xStocks. Tokenized stocks platform xStocks announced the start of their points program shortly after positive news of Nasdaq teaming up with Kraken parent company, Payward to introduce tokenized stocks on the Nasdaq using xStock’s framework.

Perp DEX Lighter is under pressure as crypto billionaire Justin Sun pulled $152M of USDC liquidity from Lighter’s LLP vaults.

Sui Stablecoin. Sui network officially launched their own stablecoin, USDsui in collaboration with Bridge, a Stripe company.

Regulatory News

The End of War Bets. US lawmakers are currently in talks of banning harmful prediction market bets, proposing the Discouraging Exploitative Assassination, Tragedy, and Harm Betting in Event Trading Systems Act, (.

NFT/Gaming News

NFT collection Pudgy Penguins continues to position itself as a global entertainment powerhouse with the launch of their new browser game, Pudgy World. The game is reminiscent of the old social club game, “Club Penguin”.

Others

The popular Solana news desk outlet has been bought out by Jito so that their operations may continue. Solana Floor was previously slated for closure after its parent company Step Finance was exploited for $27M.

That’s it folks, we hope you enjoyed this weekly roundup and we’ll see you next week!