Cryptocurrency markets have rebounded slightly following last week’s decline as investor activity subsided during the holidays.
Bitcoin (BTC) fell to a weekly low of $86,561 on Tuesday, but rebounded above $88,600 on Friday, according to TradingView data.
Demand for Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) remains weak, with $175 million in outflows on Wednesday, the fifth consecutive day of net outflows, according to Farside Investors.
In the broader crypto space, members of the Aave community criticized the decentralized lending and borrowing protocol as a premature push to advance governance proposals regarding ownership of branded assets.
The proposal, which would have returned control of the Protocol’s brand assets and intellectual property to entities controlled by the DAO, was defeated by a majority on Friday.
Aave governance vote ends in failure after community backlash
Aave token holders have voted against a controversial governance proposal that would have brought control of the protocol’s brand assets under DAO ownership.
On Friday, the Snapshot poll ended with 55.29% voting “no” and 41.21% abstaining. Only 3.5% of voters supported this proposal.
The proposal asked whether Aave (AAVE) token holders should regain control over Aave’s domains, social handles, naming rights, and other intellectual property through an organization under a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Supporters framed the move as a step toward decentralization and clarified questions about brand management.
The rejection ends a tense governance episode for Aave, one of the largest lending protocols in decentralized finance (DeFi). This highlighted how timing, escalation, and participation can shape governance outcomes in DAOs.
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DEX Adoption, HIP-3 Fuel $200 HYPE Lawsuit, Rivals Threaten Hyperliquid’s Advantage
HyperLiquid, a decentralized perpetual exchange, is poised to be one of the crypto breakthrough projects of 2025, but rival companies are competing to lure away investors with their hefty reward systems.
Cantor Fitzgerald predicts that HyperLiquid’s HYPE (HYPE) token will soar to $200 by 2035. Hyun-soo Jeong, CEO of HYPE finance company Hyperion Defy, claims that this surge will be driven by Hyper Liquid Improvement Proposal 3 (HIP-3).
“We believe HIP-3 is a key driver of HyperLiquid’s next phase of growth and a key enabler of Kantar’s proposed valuation framework,” Jung told Cointelegraph.
Perpetual swaps are futures derivative contracts that track the price of an underlying asset but have no expiration date. The contract maintains a price close to the physical asset through a funding mechanism that transfers payments between long and short position holders.
According to a report by data aggregator CoinGecko, the market share of perpetual futures DEXs rose from 2.1% in January 2023 to a record high of 11.7% in November 2025.
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CZ proposes amendments to address poisoning after investors lose $50 million
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao suggested additional security measures to “eradicate” address poisoning, such as wallet warnings and blacklisting of suspicious accounts.
“All wallets should simply check whether the receiving address is a ‘poison address’ and block the user. This is a blockchain query,” Zhao wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Address poisoning is a type of phishing in which scammers trick victims into sending cryptocurrency to an illicit wallet by first sending a small transaction. Unsuspecting users often copy and paste the attacker’s address from their wallet history.
According to Scam Sniffer data, phishing scams cost 6,344 victims more than $7.7 million in November. This number is expected to skyrocket in December, mainly due to the $50 million USDT lost by one victim on Friday.
“Finally, wallets should not show these spam transactions anywhere. If the value[of the transaction]is small, filter it out,” Zhao added.
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Etena’s USDe has lost $8.3 billion since October crash amid ‘loss of confidence’
Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDe has reduced net outflows by approximately $8.3 billion since the October 10 mass liquidation event, as confidence in leverage and synthetic collateral structures continues to decline.
According to a report by 10x Research, the October selloff marked a turning point for the crypto market, turning a bullish phase into a period of deleveraging. The crash wiped out an estimated $1.3 trillion in cryptocurrency market value, nearly 30% of total capitalization at the time.
Etena USDe (USDE), which relies on synthetic collateral and hedging mechanisms rather than traditional fiat reserves, is facing a “rapid loss of confidence” under these circumstances, analysts wrote.
USDe’s market capitalization was around $14.7 billion as of October 9, but its value has fallen to around $6.4 billion in just over two months, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
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Uniswap fee switch begins after community vote passes
The highly anticipated Uniswap protocol price changes, dubbed “UNIfication,” have been passed and are expected to go live later this week, reaching the 40 million vote threshold needed to trigger one of the biggest upgrades in the decentralized exchange protocol’s seven-year history.
Hayden Adams, CEO of Uniswap Labs, said on Thursday that a successful vote would take place after a two-day timelock period during which the Uniswap v2 and v3 price switch flips on the Unichain mainnet, triggering the burning of more Uniswap (UNI) tokens.
The proposal would burn 100 million UNI tokens from the Uniswap Foundation’s treasury, as well as introduce a protocol fee discount auction system to increase profits for liquidity providers.
This change is expected to significantly improve the supply and demand dynamics of the UNI token, making it an attractive token to hold for the long term.
News of the unification proposal in early November spurred a nearly 40% rally in the UNI token, rising from around $7 to $9.70 on November 11th.
Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange, processing over $4 trillion in trading volume since its founding in November 2018. According to CoinGecko data, UNI is the 39th largest token by market capitalization at $3.8 billion.
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DeFi market overview
Most of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the black, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.
The PIPPIN meme coin was the biggest gainer this week, rising over 41%, followed by the Canton (CC) token, rising over 25% on the weekly chart.
Thanks for reading our overview of this week’s most influential DeFi developments. Tune in next Friday for more stories, insights, and education on this dynamically evolving universe.
