Shields Up

Chart of the Day

The crypto market took a hit across the board on Wednesday, with many major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and other Layer 1 tokens suffering the worst blows. This pullback can be attributed to the high rates of leverage and euphoria with regard to memecoins, that significantly overheated the market. Despite this, however, there are still considerable bullish activities in ETH's 25Mar22 options, as evidenced by a surge in open interest and a positive RR skew. Significant demand for the $15k strike can be observed, which coincides with the highest pin mounting to 50k OI on expiry. This reveals that market participants are bullish on ETH in the near term, especially after the recent completion of the much-anticipated Altair upgrade that marks a huge milestone in progress towards the upcoming Merge. 

Talk of the Town

Ethereum DeFi protocol Cream Finance has fallen victim to yet another exploit, losing over $130 million worth of tokens overnight. The team confirmed the hack in a tweet on Wednesday, saying that they have identified and patched the vulnerabilities involved in the exploit. This is the third time within a year that Cream Finance got hacked, but yesterday's episode was by far the most severe of the rest, and constitutes one of the largest DeFi hacks to date. With this latest exploit, the total amount of funds drained by hackers within the DeFi space in 2021 alone has risen to more than $500 million.