What's Driving Token Prices? January 3, 2024

ORC (-33%) - Orbit Chain, cross-chain communication and transactions project, suffered an exploit this past Sunday that drained $81M of TVL from its bridge. The hackers have been linked to the Lazarus group out of North Korea, who were also responsible for other high profile hacks such as the 2022 hack on Ronin. The stolen funds have not yet been moved by the hacker and Orbit has started working with exchanges and law enforcement agencies to recover the assets.
INJ (-12.9%) - Layer-1 project, Injective Protocol, agreed to change to its tokenomics last week. The project, which uses the Cosmos SDK and focuses on DeFi applications, passed a vote to burn any INJ tokens used to purchase Injective domain names (similar to Ethereum’s ENS). The change follows a rollout of the “INJ Burn 2.0” released last October which enables any dApp on Injective to contribute INJ fees collected to a weekly burn auction. Injective was a big outperformer in 2023, up over 2700%, and boasting a market cap of $3.1B. Despite this, the protocol only has about $17M in TVL.
CAKE (-8.6%) - Decentralized exchange, Pancakeswap, voted to reduce the max supply of its token from 750M to 450M via a governance proposal. The circulating supply of CAKE is currently about 388M tokens indicating that approximately 86% of the new max supply has already been issued. These updates are a sharp change from CAKE’s initial token design which featured an infinite supply of tokens that were constantly being emitted. Pancakeswap is currently the second largest DEX by volume overall and is the largest DEX by volume on BNB Chain trading $110B worth of tokens in 2023.
RDNT (+1.3%) - Money market protocol, Radiant Capital, suffered an exploit yesterday for $4.5M. The multichain lend/borrow project paused its markets on Arbitrum in response to the exploit. While the project also has markets on BNB Chain and Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum currently makes up over 50% of Radiant’s $556M in TVL. According to the team, none of the funds are at risk but further details around the exploit have not been shared. According to a report from audit firm Peckshield, the exploit was related to the creation of a USDC market on Arbitrum with the attack occurring within 6 seconds after the new market deployment. The RDNT token has managed to buck news of the hack and is up 6.7% in the last 24 hours and is up 1.3% in the last week.

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