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News

Opinion

Why Democratizing Access to Pre-chain Data is Critical for Web3

DeFi Primers

What are Stablecoins?

Podcast

🎙Listen to this week’s podcast episode with Ken Seiff:

Video

Tutorial: Stargate Finance is open for business. Omnichain: fast, cheap and on Layer Zero

Elsewhere

Trending in The Defiant

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Exploited For More Than $600M
The Defiant Weekly: There are NFTs buried in the Arctic. We went to find out why
MakerDAO May Hook Up With Traditional Bank

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Markets Action

✊🏼 Do Kwon’s Treasury Play Allies LUNA and BTC Maxis in a Pumped Market

Skeptics Question Security and Wisdom of UST Backstop

By Owen Fernau

BET Earlier this month, Terra ecosystem co-founder Do Kwon bet $11M that its token, LUNA, would be higher a year from its March 14 price of $88. With LUNA hitting an all-time-high of $109 on Mar. 29, according to CoinGecko, it looks like Kwon is well on his way to winning the bet.

*LUNA’s 30-day chart.* Source: CoinGecko

ASCENT The token’s ascent comes at a time when the Terra ecosystem co-founder has made a splash in deFi with his commitment to acquire $10B of BTC to serve as a reserve currency for UST, Terra’s flagship stablecoin.

REDEEM At a high level, users will be able to redeem their UST for roughly an equivalent amount of BTC, though the details of the system appear to be still up in the air — Terra tweeted a proposal by Jump Crypto, outlined specifics of how the BTC reserves could be used on Mar. 22.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Exploits

🦹🏻‍♂️ Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Exploited For More Than $600M

By yyctrader

NEWS The Ronin Bridge that connects Axie Infinity’s Ronin sidechain to Ethereum has been drained of 173,600 ETH ($590M) and 25.5M USDC in what may be DeFi’s biggest exploit yet.

POST MORTEM The Ronin team announced the exploit on Twitter along with a post-mortem that notes the team discovered the attack earlier today when a user tried to withdraw 5,000 ETH from the bridge. Etherscan records show that the bridge was drained six days ago on Mar. 23.

MISSING This begs the question: How did over half a billion dollars in assets go missing for a week without anyone noticing? Even stranger, security researcher Igor Igamberdiev noted that the exploiter has been sending ETH to crypto exchanges including FTX and Crypto.com.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Deals

🌊 OpenSea Adds Solana to Its Quiver of Networks

Tezos Supporters Grouse About Being Passed Over

By Samuel Haig

BIGGER OpenSea is already the No. 1 NFT marketplace with $2.3B in monthly volume. Now it may be about to get a lot bigger. OpenSea will launch on Solana, a leading rival to the Ethereum network, in April, the company tweeted on Tuesday.

SHOT That will be OpenSea’s fourth network after Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn. Solana is a high-speed Layer 1 offering transaction fees equal to just fractions of a cent. The deal could be a shot in the arm for Solana.

OUTAGES The network suffered six outages during the month of January. Solana’s leading cross-chain bridge, Wormhole, also lost $320M worth of Wrapped Ether to an exploit in early February. The funds were replaced by Solana ecosystem backer, Jump Crypto. Not everyone is happy with OpenSea’s deal with the network.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Venture Capital

💰 Gumi Cryptos Launches Fund to Back 50 Web3 Startups

By Samuel Haig

NEWS On March 30, early-stage venture capital firm, Gumi Cryptos Capital (GCC), launched its second fund targeting web3 startups. The new fund aims to back 50 start-ups during their earliest stages. Each project will be allocated between $500,000 and $5M including follow-up investments. The fund will target the DeFi, gaming, metaverse, infrastructure, and developer tooling sectors.

RAISE The raise highlights the institutional appetite for early-stage web3 investments despite the selloff in the crypto markets. Ken Seiff, the co-founder of Blockchange Ventures, said that the first quarter downtrend would be short-lived due to the scale of investment capital earmarked for crypto waiting to be deployed.

DEMAND “I don’t know that a 50 or 60% drawdown… means much,” Seiff said in a podcast with The Defiant this week. “We’ve seen extraordinary capital raises and announcements of capital raises in the last sixty days. Many of the funds, including our own, that went out to raise capital in the fourth quarter or the third quarter had more demand than they could supply.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Opinion

👀 Why Democratizing Access to Pre-chain Data is Critical for Web3

The Battle for Digital Truth Starts in the Mempool

Guest writer John Jefferies makes a case for liberating data before hitting blockchains.

DIGITAL TRUTH We are in the midst of a web renaissance based on user and pre-chain data. Cryptocurrency and web3 promise new forms of ownership, access, and transparency. Indeed, anyone with an internet connection can now go on-chain and see verifiable, permanent digital truth.

BATTLE But there’s a battle being fought in the dark and chaotic moments leading up to this truth. That’s where expectations are being dashed in a pre-chain layer known as the mempool.

COMMODITIZED In world where each on-chain interaction is categorized as a transaction, ceding this pre-chain data isn’t that different from the Web2 model, where data is commoditized and controlled by a few big players. The stakes are high. To construct platforms integral to the Web3 philosophy of transparency and decentralization, builders need equal access to the same pre-chain infrastructure.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi 101

🧐 What Are Stablecoins?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Stablecoins and Their Role in DeFi

By Rahul Nambiampurath

CASH Electronic cash is nothing new. In fact, over 150 years has passed from the first wire payment made by Western Union in 1871. Since then, people have gotten used to cashless payments via e-banking, credit, and debit cards. But electronic money is not digital money.

TRUE DIGITAL MONEY It may feel like you’re using digital cash when you buy something with a smartphone app. However, these are just communication systems interacting with traditional banks and their supply of paper money issued by a central bank. Stablecoins differ from this in that they are true digital money, native to the internet.

DIRECTION Anyone familiar with penny stocks knows how volatile they are. Because these companies have low market capitalization, it doesn’t take much for a whale to drastically shift their stock’s price in either direction. The same is true of cryptocurrencies. Here’s a primer on what that means and why stablecoins are so important for the future of finance:

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

Galaxis

It’s becoming clear that utility is the future of NFT technology, and no launch platform does utility better than Galaxis. Galaxis’s Launchpad is quickly gaining notoriety as a platform that can be used by anyone to launch an NFT collection with dynamic, interactive utility traits that allow the creator to issue traits that make sense within their own community.

For example, an artist can issue traits that allow the owner to collaborate on the original artwork, a musician or athlete can offer event tickets or in-person meetings, and a retailer can issue exclusive discounts to its most loyal customers. The number of use cases is only limited by the imagination of the creator. This feature separates Galaxis from NFT launch platforms that only allow a creator to randomize art layers.

Soon, anyone with a community can use this tool to engage with, incentivize and monetize their following with no coding required.

Many high profile clients, such as Lamelo Ball, Mike Tyson and Steve Aoki have already used Galaxis to launch their collections with many more to come. The Galaxis ecosystem is also quickly becoming a “community of communities” who support and collaborate with one another in new and exciting ways.

The Tube

📺 Tutorial: Stargate Finance is open for business. Omnichain: fast, cheap and on Layer Zero

Elsewhere

🔗 The roads not taken: Vitalik Buterin

The Ethereum protocol development community has made a lot of decisions in the early stages of Ethereum that have had a large impact on the project's trajectory.

🔗 The Return of Aave | Stani Kulechov: Bankless

Coming off the heels of Aave's huge v3 release a couple weeks ago, we wanted to bring on Founder and CEO, Stani Kulechov to unpack it for us.

🔗 Community Alert: Ronin Validators Compromised: Ronin’s Newsletter

There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network.

Mars Protocol @mars_protocol

🛰️ INCOMING PROPOSAL Delphi Labs proposes adding $ANC as a collateral asset for borrowing & lending in the Red Bank The debate will be open for at least 7 days (5 days + 2-day editing freeze) before potentially moving to on-chain voting Join the debate: forum.marsprotocol.io/t/mrc-1-new-as…

Polygon | $MATIC 💜 @0xPolygon

Keep personal details, personal. Introducing Polygon ID - a self-sovereign identity solution powered by zk cryptography. - Complete user-privacy - Scalable on-chain verification - Open attestation ecosystem #OwnYourIdentity TL;DR 👇 [1/7]

Trending in The Defiant

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Exploited For More Than $600M The Ronin Bridge that connects Axie Infinity’s Ronin sidechain to Ethereum has been drained of 173,600 ETH ($590M) and 25.5M USDC in what may be DeFi’s biggest exploit yet.
The Defiant Weekly: There are NFTs buried in the Arctic. We went to find out why On the 17th March Top Dog Studios made history by initiating the first NFT deposit in trctic World Archive.
MakerDAO May Hook Up With Traditional Bank The line between DeFi and the traditional finance world continues to blur.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, DeFiDad, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader, and Camila Russo. Videos are produced by Robin Schmidt, Alp Gasimov and Daniel Flynn. Podcast is led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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DeFi, NFT & Web3 Insights - The Defiant

🌗 Do Kwon’s Treasury Play Allies LUNA and…