What's Driving Token Prices? December 7, 2022

MPL (-31%) - One of the largest borrowers on Maple’s uncollateralized lending platform, Orthogonal Trading, defaulted on a $10M loan it was due to pay back over the weekend. As a result, Maple Finance severed all ties with Orthogonal, claiming it had misrepresented its financial status over the last 4 weeks to M11 Capital, the loan underwriter. This has left Maple with $36M of outstanding debt.
ANKR (-8.8%) - An exploit rocked the liquid-staking protocol Ankr last week to the tune of $5M. The attacker used an exploit in the liquid staking contract on Ankr to mint trillions of aBNBc (the reward token for staked BNB). After minting these tokens, the hacker sold them across multiple venues, effectively draining all liquidity for the token within the BNB chain and crashing the price of aBNBc by 99%.
NEXO (+0.8%) - Centralized borrow/lend platform Nexo announced it intended to withdraw from the U.S. after being unable to work with regulators. The company specifically will end support for its Earn product in 8 states. The move comes after centralized lenders and “earn” programs have suffered heavily following lending blowups from Celsius, 3AC, and Genesis over the past few months.
UNI (+2.6%) - Decentralized exchange Uniswap announced last week that it would launch its NFT trading platform with an interface similar to the look and feel of OpenSea. The trading platform is an aggregator of other NFT platforms and is the result of Uniswap’s acquisition of Genie, an NFT aggregator. So far, the platform has seen just over $1.2M in volume. A proposal was also posted to Uniswap governance proposing a fee switch. However, it only proposes that earnings are retained, not paid out to token holders.

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