What's Driving Token Prices? April 12, 2023

SUSHI (-2.4%) - Decentralized exchange Sushiswap fell victim to a hack over the weekend. The hack was resulted from a bad contract upgrade which allowed hackers to steal money from the wallets of users that had granted their wallets permission to use Sushiswap in the last few days. Not many users were impacted, however, one user lost $3.3M in ETH. On a positive note, the team has recovered about $3M of the user’s funds through “whitehat security processes.”
LOOKS (-1.6%) - NFT marketplace Looksrare released its V2 version last week which included several new features such as bulk buys and bulk listings, lower ETH fees, lower protocol fees, and more. Looksrare has fallen behind its competitors as of late with the rise of zero-fee marketplaces such as Blur, and now makes up only 1.2% of the $1.4B in NFT monthly volumes.
ETH (-0.7%) - The day has finally arrived; ETH is expected to undergo the Shanghai hard fork at around 3.30 pm Pacific. The hard fork will introduce the ability for Ethereum stakers to unstake their ETH and claim accrued ETH rewards (there are over 1.1m in ETH rewards). Many have speculated that the ETH price could plummet following the upgrade as users unstake and sell. However, to unstake, users must enter a withdrawal queue and wait their turn. Currently, the withdrawal queue has 3,900 validators, which puts the withdrawal queue at just over 2 days.
MPL (+23%) - Uncollateralized lend/borrow platform Maple is launching a lending pool that allows accredited investors and corporates outside the U.S. to earn yield on Treasury bonds. Previously, the team announced that they were planning to pivot to offering fully collateralized products, especially as a number of their borrowers went under. The team also announced they are planning to revamp MPL tokenomics later this year. Maple currently only has $26M of loans outstanding.

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