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This little-known DeFi crypto token has rallied over 800% in a month

While an ongoing technical divergence between BOND's price and volumes suggests upside exhaustion.

A new and relatively unknown DeFi token called BarnBridge (BOND) has rallied over 800% to reach $20 on July 26.

The BOND price surge comes more than a month after bottoming out at around $2.19. In comparison, top coins, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) have only rebounded by 18% and 54% in the same period, respectively.

BOND/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView

Another pump and dump?

BarnBridge is a cross-chain risk management protocol that offers a suite of composable DeFi products for investors to hedge against interest rate fluctuations and price volatility.

Examples include SMART Yield — a product that enables investors to secure fixed rate yields from the debt pools of other projects such as Aave, Compound, Cream, or Yearn.finance — and SMART Exposure, which offers investors tools to rebalance portfolios.

BarnBridge SMART products explained. Source: Official Website

BarnBridge's latest product, SMART Alpha, allows investors to hedge against price fluctuations and provides them leverage for bullish theses. Meanwhile, BOND serves as a governance token to the Ethereum-based DAO representing BarnBridge.

On the surface, the latest BOND price pump should reflect a booming interest in risk-trenching protocols, primarily when many projects in the DeFi sector have failed. But the token's gains appear largely speculative if one focuses on its trading volume concentration.

Notably, more than 50% of BOND volumes have originated at Binance in the past 24 hours, according to data tracked by CoinMarketCap. At the same time, the daily trading activity of the benchmark BOND/USD pair has been declining during the price pump, as shown below.

BOND/USD daily price chart featuring price-volume divergence. Source: TradingView

The price-volume divergence suggests that fewer investors have been behind the BOND price pump, increasing the chances of a sharp correction in the coming days or weeks.

Next BOND price targets

Drawing a Fibonacci retracement graph from BOND's swing high of $37.50 to its swing low of $2.18 churns out a sequence of potential support and resistance levels, as shown in the weekly chart below.

BOND/USD weekly price chart. Source: TradingView

BOND has been retreating after testing $24 as its interim resistance, and now anticipates to undergo an extended correction toward $15.60, down 17.5% from July 26's price. A further breakdown risks crashing the price to $10.50, or a 45% decline.

Related: Institutional ETH sentiment turns positive after 11 weeks of outflows

Conversely, a rebound above $24 could have BOND test $30 as its next upside target. Another breakout move could shift the target to $37.50, up 95% from current price levels.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

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Small cap altcoins flash bullish signals even as Bitcoin revisits $42.5K

CREAM, ETN and RGT flashed green even as BTC price saw a sharp rejection at $44,000 that sent its price back into the $42,000 range.

The cryptocurrency market faced another day of erratic price movements on Jan. 13 after Bitcoin (BTC) bulls were soundly rejected in their bid to push the price above $44,000. This led to an abrupt sell-off that has thrust the price back into the high $42,000 range. 

Despite the mid-day struggle faced by Bitcoin and many of the other large market-cap cryptocurrencies, several small-cap altcoins managed to eke out notable gains.

Top 7 coins with the highest 24-hour price change. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the three biggest gainers over the past 24-hours were Cream Finance (CREAM), Electroneum (ETN) and Rari Governance Token (RGT).

CREAM token holders qualify for the Iron Bank token

Cream Finance, a DeFi lending protocol, led the altcoin market with a gain of more than 35% after its 24-hour trading volume surged 365% to $75.2 million.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that after dipping to a low of $37.10 on Jan. 10, the price of CREAM catapulted 112% to a daily high at $78.65 on Jan. 13 as its 24-hour trading volume jumped 351% to $75.3 million.

CREAM/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

The price spike comes after the announcement that CREAM token holders can now qualify to receive the upcoming Iron Bank token by staking their CREAM on the protocol for an extended lock-up period.

Electroneum focuses on the gig economy

The mobile phone-based cryptocurrency platform Electroneum saw the price of its native ETN token spike 75% to $0.0134 over the past day as its 24-hour trading volume rose by 1,552%.

VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for ETN on Jan. 11, prior to the recent price rise.

The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historical and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.

VORTECS™ Score (grey) vs. ETN price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score for ETN registered a high of 70 on Jan. 11, around four hours before the price spiked 77.5% over the next two days.

The sudden spike in the trading volume and price for ETN comes as the project refocused its efforts on marketing its AnyTask™ freelancer platform. This has also helped contribute to a rise in the VORTECS™ Score for ETN, which sits at 80 at the time of writing.

Related: Bitcoin cycle is far from over and miners are in it for the long haul: Fidelity report

Rari Capital adds new Fuse pools

Rari Capital is a non-custodial DeFi robo-advisor that enables users to autonomously earn a yield with their crypto holdings and it utilizes RGT to conduct governance votes on the protocol.

VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for RGT on Jan. 9, prior to the recent price rise.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. RGT price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score for RGT climbed into the green zone on Jan. 9 and hit a high of 83 around 21 hours before the price began to increase 60.35% over the next three days.

The price appreciation for RGT follows the launch of several new Fuse pools on Rari Capital for popular projects including OlympusDAO, Babylon Finance and BadgerDAO.

The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $2.041 trillion and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is at 39.8%.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

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DeFi Platform Loses $130,000,000 in Attack That Cost Over $37,000 in Ethereum Fees

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform Cream Finance (CREAM) says that its lending market suffered a hack resulting in the loss of crypto assets worth approximately $130 million. Cream Finance says in a tweet that the attacker exploited a vulnerability in the first version of the C.R.E.A.M. lending market platform. “Our Ethereum C.R.E.A.M. v1 lending markets were […]

The post DeFi Platform Loses $130,000,000 in Attack That Cost Over $37,000 in Ethereum Fees appeared first on The Daily Hodl.

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Cream Finance Suffers $130 Million Hack

Cream Finance Suffers 0 Million HackEthereum defi protocol Cream Finance suffered an exploit yesterday that allowed attackers to steal $130 million from its holdings. The news was first revealed by Peckshield, a blockchain analytics company that discovered a flash loan had exploited the platform. This is the third hack the protocol has suffered in its history, being exploited for $36 […]

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C.R.E.A.M. launches Iron Bank flash loans, eyes cross-chain capital efficiency

Iron Bank is ready to reenter the spotlight after the Alpha Homora hack, and plans are underway to take the lending protocol to new heights.

In a press release today, C.R.E.A.M. Finance announced a new feature for (and, by proxy, an unofficial relaunch of) Iron Bank, the protocol-to-protocol lending platform designed for flash and undercollateralized loans. 

C.R.E.A.M., which founder Leo Cheng describes as “the yolo-est Compound fork,” is a money market designed to cover assets that are “underserved” and allow for greater capital efficiency for decentralized finance power users, listing assets such as Yearn vault tokens and liquidity pool tokens.

“We’re adding assets that people want to have but others may be scared of,” said Cheng.

Iron Bank is, in many ways, an extreme implementation of that ethos. The protocol, which allows for undercollateralized protocol-to-protocol lending, is meant to serve as DeFi’s equivalent of the $10-trillion corporate debt industry, allowing the principle of “corporate credit” to function between whitelisted protocols. 

Some critique the idea conceptually — undercollateralized lending is still an exotic niche in DeFi — and those critics took a victory lap in the wake of the Alpha Homora hack that led to an exploit of Iron Bank. This despite Iron Bank bearing little responsibility for the vulnerability, and the fact that the Iron Bank has quietly continued to function across multiple Yearn vaults for months — though not nearly at the scale to which it’s capable. 

Now, with a new feature release and Alpha Homora gearing up for a relaunch of its V2, Iron Bank is ready to reenter the spotlight — and it may be poised to do so in a major way. 

DeFi Voltron

Cheng speaks with a touch of pride about C.R.E.A.M.’s status as a member of “DeFi Voltron” — the body of high-profile protocols that “merged” with or were “acquired” by the Yearn.finance ecosystem at the end of last year. 

What started as a casual conversation about getting DeFi maestro Andre Cronje involved in the project quickly became a team-level integration between Yearn and C.R.E.A.M., said Cheng. To this day, the practicalities of the integrations/mergers/collaborations between the protocols largely remain a mystery to outsiders, and as a recent rupture with Cover has demonstrated, the “mergers” are not always etched in stone.

In Cheng’s view, right now, the various projects/protocols can be thought of as the pre-Constitutional United States: Separate state-level entities are linked through the Articles of Confederation, and each leverages its own currency.

He hinted that one day it might be a “possibility” that all tokens under the Yearn banner merge to create a single, unified token.

“I’m not saying that’s where we’re headed, but I think it’s a possibility in the long run — I don’t know.” 

C.R.E.A.M’s purpose in the Yearn DeFi Voltron machine is to be the one-stop all-things-lending solution, and as the Iron Bank proves, lending is a wide umbrella. While Iron Bank can be difficult to grasp conceptually, ultimately what it creates is simple capital efficiency, said Cheng. 

“Look at the anatomy of a flash loan,” said Cheng.

A flash loan might interact with multiple protocols at once and trade between multiple assets, but Ethereum “doesn’t quite care, and it doesn’t quite see the borders with the smart contract projects.” They jump between protocols and assets in a “flash,” enabled by open liquidity.

If this borderless vision is taken to its extreme, “any asset a user has on Ethereum, they should be able to leverage it to borrow anything else anywhere else,” and if liquidity can be achieved through an arbitrage trade via a flash loan, that alone counts as a form of asset — at least in an ideal, capital-efficient future.

Iron Bank brings this principle of open liquidity to protocol-to-protocol relationships. Cheng said that C.R.E.A.M. is looking into working with projects, such as Saffron Finance, which are developing risk-based tranched debt. If users think that Iron Bank debt is riskier (especially at the upper end of its possible leverage, up to 95x), Saffron has the infrastructure to support that.

What’s more, Cheng said that C.R.E.A.M is working to expand the horizons of liquidity even to other chains.

Capital efficiency squared

If Ethereum doesn’t care about the borders between assets and protocols, then why can’t the same liquid efficiency logic apply to all Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible chains? This would allow for loans, undercollateralized loans and flash loans across multiple ecosystems, bolstering liquidity across the space. 

“Cross-chain lending. That’s the thing where people stop and say, ‘wait, hold on, what?’” Cheng laughed. “That’s something we’re prototyping right now. It’s not something on the roadmap, blah blah, we’re prototyping it right now.”

In its early form, users would be able to deposit assets on C.R.E.A.M.’s V1 and unlock a loan on another chain, allowing them to access an alternative ecosystem while maintaining their assets on Ethereum. The more exotic lending types will come later.

The problems in creating ideal, safe capital efficiency across all EMV-compatible chains are significant, but they’re currently being worked through, said Cheng. Eventually, the goal is to enable Yearn vaults to go cross-chain via a “generalized wrapper,” which could expand the tools available to vault strategists by orders of magnitude.

It’s a vision of open liquidity and capital efficiency enabled, in part, due to an open developmental ethos across the DeFi Voltron:

“We have so many channels open. If you had my Telegram open… so many working groups. I think that story is underplayed. The whole idea of this merger, it’s so powerful — we can hop in these channels at any time, ask each other anything. It’s letting us move so quickly.”

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