Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• Uniswap Buys Marketplace Genie to Integrate NFT Trading Into its DEX

• Maple Provided $10M In Unsecured Loans To Babel Finance

• ‘All Operations Are Normal’ Says Bankman-Fried as FTX Provides $250M Credit to BlockFi

• Synthetix Now Among Top-Earning Crypto Protocols After Atomic Swaps Take Off

Markets

• Celsius Defies Fear of Implosion as Token Soars 218%

Metaverse

• Time Magazine and The Sandbox to Rebuild NYC in Metaverse

Video

• Quick Take: BAYC Nazi story threatens to overshadow NFT.NYC on the ground report

Elsewhere

• Doodles NFTs Announces Pharrell as Chief Brand Officer, Fundraise Led by Alexis Ohanian: Decrypt

• Alex Mashinsky, Celsius founder feeling the heat: The Financial Times

• My 40-liter backpack travel guide: Vitalik

• Vibe. Build. Ship. The devs at the Solana x @jump_Hacker House in London were building the future: Solana

Trending in The Defiant

• Uniswap Tops Ethereum in Terms of Daily Fees

• Lido Proposes ‘Dual-Governance’ Scheme to Quell Ethereum Centralization Fears

• Yuga Vows ‘Slow and Thoughtful’ Approach to Reviving CryptoPunks

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Market Action

🌡 Celsius Defies Fear of Implosion as Token Soars 218%

By Owen Fernau

HIGHER After crypto lending platform Celsius suspended withdrawals of deposits last week, it seemed unlikely that its native token would move higher. Yet the crypto bank’s CEL token has soared 218% since June 13. What gives? A short squeeze, that’s what. 

SQUEEZE It appears that investors have joined forces and started buying the token to put pressure on short sellers who were profiting from Celsius’ troubles. The move brings to mind the squeeze meme stonks fans exerted on hedge funds who’d sold short GameStop back in early 2021. The hashtag “#CelShortSqueeze” has gained momentum on Twitter.

BANK RUN According to the developing narrative, investors have targeted the CEL shorts as the same actors who triggered the bank run that caused Celsius to freeze withdrawals.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Deals

🤝 Uniswap Buys Marketplace Genie to Integrate NFT Trading Into its DEX

The Acquisition Amount was Not Disclosed

By Jason Levin

NEWS Uniswap Labs is planning to integrate NFTs into the largest decentralized exchange via the acquisition of Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator, according to a post on the company’s website. 

DEAL Genie, founded in 2021, allows users to buy NFTs from across different marketplaces in a single purchase. This acquisition comes less than two months after NFT marketplace OpenSea purchased Genie competitor Gem.

30 DAYS Genie had 18,061 transactions and 8,050 ETH ($14.2M) traded in the last 30 days, according to Dune Analytics. This compares with Uniswap V3’s trading volume of $129.35B over 483,562 transactions in the same time period, according to DappRadar.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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DeFi Lending

🌳Maple Provided $10M In Unsecured Loans To Babel Finance

By Samuel Haig

STRESS TEST The DeFi primitive of uncollateralized lending is undergoing its first major stress test. On June 17, Babel Finance, a Bitcoin financial services company offering lending and asset management services, suspended redemptions and withdrawals citing “unusual liquidity pressures” amid recent market volatility. On June 21, Maple Finance confirmed that one of its lending pools had previously provided a $10M loan to Babel. 

STRUGGLES Babel, which closed an $80M funding round in June, has a valuation of $2B and has raised $120M in equity financing since 2018 from Circle and other backers. Its troubles come at a time of acute stress in the crypto markets as the failure of the Terra ecosystem in May, followed by the struggles of Three Arrows Capital and Celsius, a crypto bank, have been whipping up fears that more disasters are looming.

EMERGENCY On June 20, Babel’s team stated that it had alleviated its liquidity situation after reaching preliminary agreements with major counterparties and customers regarding the repayment of debts. Babel also noted it had “carried out an emergency assessment of the company’s business operations to understand the company’s liquidity status.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Crypto Bailouts

💰 ‘All Operations Are Normal’ Says Bankman-Fried as FTX Provides $250M Credit to BlockFi

Credit to Be Used 'As Needed'

By Aleksandar Gilbert

CREDIT BlockFi, a crypto lending platform, has secured a revolving line of credit of $250M with FTX, the second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, leaders of both companies said Tuesday. 

BALANCES BlockFi CEO Zac Prince said the credit would be used “as needed” and would be “subordinate to all client balances across all account types.” The move was announced only days after Prince took to Twitter to quell rumors the lending platform, with about $15B in assets under management, would go the way of competitor Celsius, which froze withdrawals on its accounts. 

TURMOIL Crypto traders have become concerned plummeting digital asset prices and turmoil in multi-billion dollar hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which have already destabilized firms including Celsius and Babel Finance, could cause other dominoes to fall. Some investors worried BlockFi could be one of them.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

📈 Synthetix Now Among Top-Earning Crypto Protocols After Atomic Swaps Take Off

By Owen Fernau

TRADE SPEED Synthetix is taking off after a proposal to increase trade speed was approved. Synthetix’s token SNX, fees generated by the protocol and volume are soaring after Synthetix Improvement Proporsal 120 passed, removing a previous buffer between trades of synthetic assets, called Synths and increasing trading speed.

FEES Daily fees have jumped by a multiple of over 19 to $718,500 in the last month, making it the fourth-highest earning blockchain protocol tracked by cryptofees.info. The protocol ranked third in terms of fees on June 19, when SNX stakers earned over $1M. 

Synthetix’s token is also soaring. SNX is up 56.5% to $2.92 in the past week.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Trading

😡 Bancor Suspends Impermanent Loss Protection in ‘Hostile Market’ 

One of the First DeFi Platforms Takes Fire from DeFi Community

By Aleksandar Gilbert

MARKET CONDITIONS Bancor, one of the first DeFi trading platforms, suspended its impermanent loss protection program over the weekend due to “hostile market conditions,” prompting cries that it was decentralized in name only. 

POOL Liquidity providers on automated market makers such as Uniswap can suffer so-called impermanent loss (IL) if the value of their deposited tokens rises on the secondary market. In such a scenario, liquidity providers would earn more by simply holding their tokens instead of depositing them in the liquidity pool. 

LOSS Since introducing impermanent loss protection in late 2020, Bancor has compensated liquidity providers who suffered impermanent loss with the protocol’s native token, BNT, which they could then sell to recoup their loss. 

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Metaverse

🌃 Time Magazine and The Sandbox to Rebuild NYC in Metaverse

By Samuel Haig

APPLE Mainstream media outlets just can’t get enough of NFTs. First it was the Associated Press, then The New York Times. Now Time magazine, the 99-year-old publication that once set the agenda for the most powerful people in the world, is taking a bite from the, ahem, apple.

DOUBLE-DOWN The publication has joined forced with The Sandbox, an Ethereum-based metaverse, to create a virtual space inspired by the biggest apple of them all, New York City. “Time double-down on their metaverse play by partnering with The Sandbox is massive news for anyone in the space,” Kieran Warwick, co-founder of metaverse game Illuvium, told The Defiant. “The more mainstream brands we can get transitioning into web3, the quicker we can reach mass adoption.” 

LAND The collaboration was unveiled on June 21 as part of the NFT.NYC event. Time’s NFT initiative, TIMEPieces, will launch the space on a virtual land plot in The Sandbox. The project, inevitably, is dubbed TIME Square.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Quick Take: BAYC Nazi story threatens to overshadow NFT.NYC on the ground report

Elsewhere

🔗 Doodles NFTs Announces Pharrell as Chief Brand Officer, Fundraise Led by Alexis Ohanian: Decrypt

Ethereum NFT project Doodles made a pair of significant announcements at an event hosted alongside the NFT NYC conference tonight, revealing that musician and producer Pharrell Williams will join the project and that it has raised its first round of funding led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.

🔗 Alex Mashinsky, Celsius founder feeling the heat: The Financial Times

Crypto lending group faces crisis of trust after blocking its 1.7mn customers from making withdrawals.

🔗 My 40-liter backpack travel guide: Vitalik

I have lived as a nomad for the last nine years, taking 360 flights travelling over 1.5 million kilometers (assuming flight paths are straight, ignoring layovers) during that time.

Solana @solana

Vibe. Build. Ship. The devs at the Solana x @jump_ Hacker House in London were building the future 🛠 @hackerhouses are coming soon to a city near you. Next up is Barcelona 🇪🇸 June 22nd-26th Register now: solana.com/events

8:12 PM ∙ Jun 20, 2022

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Trending in The Defiant

• Uniswap Tops Ethereum in Terms of Daily Fees There’s always a bull market somewhere. Today, that somewhere may be Uniswap, one of DeFi’s most recognizable decentralized exchanges. With $4.3M in fees generated in the past 24 hours, Uniswap has surpassed even its home network, Ethereum, as of June 20. In fact, the decentralized exchange (DEX) has jumped to the top of CryptoFees’ leaderboard.

• Lido Proposes ‘Dual-Governance’ Scheme to Quell Ethereum Centralization Fears Wary of “cartelization”, core members of the Lido team have proposed changing the way the liquid staking protocol is governed.

• Yuga Vows ‘Slow and Thoughtful’ Approach to Reviving CryptoPunks

  CryptoPunks are done playing second string. That’s the upshot of the news that Yuga Labs, the NFT studio that manages the CryptoPunks collection as well as the blockbuster Bored Ape Yacht Club franchise, has poached Noah Davis from Christie’s as a brand lead for the punks.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content.Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr.