Blockchain Bites: Digital Yuan's 4M Transactions, Bitcoin's 33-Month High, Uniswap's Second Governance Vote

DeFi contractionIn the last week of October, DeFi protocol tokens were bleeding red.

MakerDAO, one the largest and most successful decentralized lenders, started the week at $2.1 billion locked in.

In aggregate, DeFi lost $1.5 billion in the last five days of the month, according to DeFi Pulse.

With those losses, October marked the first time since the sector's bull market began that the amount of cryptocurrency "Locked in" DeFi contracted compared in the span of a month.

DeFi's cumulative valuation stood at $11.28 billion on Oct. 1, and only retreated to $11 billion locked up on Oct. 31.

Industry publication Decrypt called the ecosystem's monthly top at $12.4 billion.

With prices reverting back to over $11 billion, it doesn't appear that DeFi is dead. Top shelf.

Digital transfersOver 4 million transactions totaling more than 2 billion yuan have been conducted using China's digital yuan, Yi Gang, governor of the People's Bank of China, said.

Announced via tweet Friday, Maggie Valentine's development work will answer the question: "How can we provide an intuitive experience for non-crypto users while preserving the security of a user's funds?" The award comes less than a month after Square said it had purchased 4,709 bitcoins for $50 million, representing 1% of the firm's assets.

Voted downA proposal to distribute UNI tokens to those left out of a previous airdrop was not adopted in Uniswap's second governance vote.