What's Driving Token Prices? September 4, 2024

PNP (-28%) - Yesterday, DeFi protocol Penpie was hacked, draining about $27M in user funds. Penpie offers yield optimization strategies for users in DeFi and integrates with other large protocols such as Pendle. Users can stake, farm, and provide liquidity through Penpie to maximize yield earned. Before the hack, the protocol had ~$127M in TVL and now has roughly $90M in TVL following the hack and consequential withdrawal of user funds. The contracts on Penpie remain paused as the team investigates the exploit.
MATIC (-13%) - Beginning today, Layer-2 protocol Polygon will see some significant changes for its MATIC token, which is being migrated to POL. The upgrade process began early this morning, and POL will be the native gas and staking token for Polygon going forward. The other significant change is that the POL token will inflate at 2% per year to pay for staking and the community treasury. Polygon is also planning to upgrade the protocol at the end of this month via hard fork to introduce some other technical improvements and officially change the ticker from MATIC to POL.
ZK (-5.2%)—Matter Labs, the company behind Layer-2 scaling solution zkSync, announced it laid off 16% (or 24 employees) of its workforce on Tuesday. In a statement from the CEO, the layoffs were not performed due to financial stress but more in an attempt to stay “lean” and as part of Matter Labs’s next step to decentralize the protocol.
SAFE (-3%)—Web3 wallet Safe released its first monetization proposal, which proposes using fees from its in-wallet DEX aggregator to automatically buy SAFE tokens on the market and add them to the treasury. As most users are crypto-native and less likely to use the DEX aggregator feature, this might not have that large an impact on Safe’s revenues. However, the project estimates it can generate $2.5M in annualized fees based on the past month’s activity since introducing in-wallet swaps.

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