OP Summer Incentives Begin

Quick Take

• Optimism projects begin distributing OP incentives.
• Angle protocol integrates LayerZero Labs.
• Akula is now listed as an execution layer client on ethereum.org.
• Uniswap community proposes the launch of the Uniswap Foundation.

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Superchain Highlights 🔴✨

OP Summer Incentives Begin
Optimism governance fund recipients have started their incentivized liquidity mining programs. A total of 36.6 million OP tokens were distributed to 27 projects as part Phase 0. The tokens were given to existing Optimism projects to be used for driving sustainable growth to the Optimism ecosystem. Aave is currently running the largest OP liquidity mining program. The lending protocol is distributing 5 million OP tokens to Optimism Market users over the next 90 days. Aave received the 5 million OP allocation as part of Optimism’s Partner Fund. Other projects that currently have an OP liquidity mining program include PoolTogether, Lyra, Rubicon, Thales, StarGate, and Velodrome.

Velodrome Loses $350k From Team Wallet Hack
Velodrome, a liquidity protocol on Optimism, suffered a compromise on one of its team wallets leading to the loss of $350k in operational funds. Velodrome has since stated that all veVELO positions have been recovered. User funds were not impacted by the breach. According to data from DeFiLlama, Velodrome holds $129.7 million in TVL on the Optimism network.

Angle Protocol Integrates LayerZero

Angle Protocol has integrated a LayerZero Omni-chain Fungible Token (OFT) implementation directly onto its application. Users can now bridge Angle’s agEUR stablecoin between Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum within Angle’s web interface. Users can also borrow and leverage agEUR on any of the four chains. According to Angle, the bridge contracts are fully owned and maintained by the Angle DAO. Amid recent bridge exploits, the Angle DAO has set a limit on the amount of assets that can be bridged at any given time. LayerZero Labs is a cross-chain messaging protocol that uses Ultra Light Nodes to connect dapps across chains. Applications built using LayerZero’s OFT standard enable users to move assets between all chains on LayerZero. Angle is an over-collateralized, decentralized and capital-efficient stablecoin protocol.

Akula Execution Layer Client

Akula, an Ethereum client written in Rust, is now listed as an Execution Layer (EL) client on the Ethereum website. The client supports Ethereum Mainnet, Görli, Rinkeby, Ropsten, and Sepolia. Akula claims to be the fastest Ethereum Node, capable of bootstrapping a full validation archive node in under 3 days. Akula also supports networks using Ethash, Clique, and Ethereum beacon chain consensus engines. The client requires less than 2TB of storage for an Ethereum mainnet archive node and less than 600GB for a pruned node and can even be run on a HDD.

Uniswap Proposes Uniswap Foundation

Former Uniswap Labs Chief of Staff Devin Walsh and former Ethereum Foundation Grants Lead Ken Ng have submitted a proposal for the creation of the Uniswap Foundation. As per the proposal, Walsh would serve as Executive Director while Ng would serve as Head of Operations. The Uniswap Foundation would be tasked with growing the Uniswap ecosystem. The proposal seeks a $74 million budget from the Uniswap DAO treasury, which currently holds $3.9 billion worth of assets. The budget is broken down into $14 million for an operating budget to cover a team of 12 and $60 million for an expanded Uniswap Grants Program (UGP) with a runway of 3 years. The proposal also seeks 2.5 million UNI tokens for the foundation to participate in governance.

A Temperature Check Snapshot poll for the proposal will go live on Monday, August 8th. If the Temperature Check poll passes, the proposal will move into a Consensus Check. Walsh and Ng plan to attend the Uniswap Community call at 4 PM EST on Wednesday, August 10th, and will host a Twitter Spaces at 11 AM EST on Monday, August 15th.