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The Infinite Machine Movie

The Infinite Machine Collection’s First Mint Sells Out In 28 Hours, Raising $670K

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Trending in The Defiant

Yearn Finance Changes Up its Tokenomics and YFI Soars 85%
Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and Controversy
Polkadot’s Parachain Winners Make Strides in Building Sharded Ecosystem

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Web3

😤 Dorsey’s Caustic Tweet Sparks Debate About Who Truly Owns Web3

TRIGGERED To those working in web3, a new and fairer economic system underpinned by smart contract platforms feels like a given. Yet on Dec. 20, Jack Dorsey decried web3 as a domain controlled by venture capitalists and their limited partners in a tweet. It triggered disagreement among users of the microblogging service he founded and led until recently as CEO.

INCENTIVES “You don’t own ‘web3,’” Dorsey’s tweeted. “The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.”

ALLOCATED Dorsey does have a point — a chart from Messari, a crypto intelligence platform, shows blockchains with outperforming tokens like Solana allocating 48% of SOL to VCs, as well as the team and company behind the project. Binance, Avalanche, Celo, Blockstack, Flow, Internet Computer, and Near all allocated more than 38% of their respective platforms’ tokens, according to Messari’s chart.

NOT BUYING IT Mike Dudas, general partner at Red Pill Ventures, a web3 investment firm and founder of The Block, an information platform, isn’t buying Dorsey’s take.

“The public is often offered a direct opportunity to purchase tokens prior to any public listing on centralized or decentralized exchanges,” Dudas told The Defiant. He said average investors rarely get a chance to buy shares in the initial public offerings of non-web3 companies.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Lending

🏦 Aave Advances Institutional Strategy as Swiss Bank Seeks Whitelist Status

NEWS SEBA, a Swiss bank focused on digital assets, has published a governance proposal requesting to be a whitelister for Aave’s institutional lending platform Arc.

COMPLIANCE If approved, the role would task SEBA with onboarding users onto the platform and monitoring their KYC and AML compliance. It would also mark a big step forward for Aave’s strategy of catering to institutional investors.

COMMUNITY In July, the protocol announced it was developing a permissioned institutional platform and received mixed reactions from the crypto community. Some expressed anxiety about a leading DeFi team devoting energy toward building a closed protocol.

UNREGULATED SEBA said there is strong institutional demand for decentralized finance even though lawmakers worldwide are increasingly taking aim at the open and largely unregulated retail DeFi sector.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Algorithmic Stablecoins

💦 Fei Protocol Merges With Rari Capital To Create $2B Liquidity Player

TL;DR It’s official. Algorithmic stablecoin Fei Protocol is set to merge with Rari Capital, a DeFi protocol that facilitates permissionless lending markets, after both communities voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. The result: a player mustering $2B in liquidity.

GOVERNANCE RGT tokens will be exchangeable for TRIBE at the rate of 10 RGT = 267 TRIBE. Fei will also assume Rari’s liabilities stemming from the $10M exploit in May 2021. The merger proposal won the support of 90% of TRIBE voters. TRIBE is Fei’s governance token.

SOLUTIONS “I think the broader community really sees the vision of the proposal as reflected in the massively in-favor and high participation on-chain votes,” Fei co-founder Joey Santoro told The Defiant. Tribe is no longer about FEI or Fuse alone, but rather building tightly integrated DeFi solutions for DAOs such as LaaS and new upcoming offerings such as Turbo.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Stablecoin Market Caps

🏎 Terra’s Stablecoin UST Overtakes DAI in Market Cap: CoinGecko Data

NEWS The U.S. dollar tracking stablecoin of the Terra blockchain, TerraUSD (UST), has crossed ahead of DAI in terms of market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

DATA UST now has a market cap of $9.3B as opposed to DAI, which has a market cap of $9.0B on the site. However, DAIStats currently shows 9.3B DAI. CoinMarketCap still shows DAI ahead of UST by $84M, as of noon New York time.

MARKET CAP At the beginning of December, DAI was at $8.871B and UST was at $7.659B, according to CoinGecko. DAI’s market cap has largely trended between $8.5 and $9B since early November on the site.

GAINS UST has been trending up more sharply over that same time period. It started Nov. at under $3B. A major portion of its gains came in mid-November after the Terra community voted to burn 89M LUNA accumulated in the Terra treasury in exchange for UST. According to Do Kwon, $2.7B had been minted this way.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Infinite Machine Movie

🎬 The Infinite Machine Collection’s First Mint Sells Out In 28 Hours, Raising $670K

FUNDS The Infinite Machine Collection, the NFT project organized to raise funds for the production of Camila Russo’s best-selling book on the story of Ethereum, raised 168 ETH in just over a day.

COLLECTION The project sold all the 2,100 NFTs it offered in its first sale, dubbed the “OG Mint,” in 28 hours, with the NFTs priced at 0.08 ETH per token. The remaining NFTs in the collection of 10,499 will be offered in two subsequent sales in the coming weeks. Exact dates will be announced on the project’s Discord and Twitter.

MOVIE BUDGET Most of the funds, which equal $672K with ETH at $4,000, will go towards The Infinite Machine movie budget, which producers have tentatively set at $16M. The project’s artists will receive 22.5% of the proceeds, and 10% will go to a community treasury pool.

IMPACT The collection is a collaborative effort by 36 emerging artists mainly from countries where decentralization has had a major impact on lives and finances, including Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, Kenya, India, Bolivia and Chile. They will each get 1.05 ETH, or $4,200, from this first sale alone. For context, the average monthly salary in Cuba and Venezuela is around $25.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 First Look: Level up your NFT game with wallet to wallet encrypted messaging

Links

🔗 Play to earn economies as base layer protocols for games: Medium

Player retention in gaming is everything. Despite this, publishers optimize for company profit at the cost of player value and well-being.

🔗 El Salvador buys 21 Bitcoin to celebrate Dec. 21, 2021: CoinTelegraph

The government of El Salvador continues celebrating significant days by buying more Bitcoin (BTC), with President Nayib Bukele announcing a new purchase of 21 BTC on Tuesday.

🔗 Kraken to Allow a New Way to Earn Crypto Rewards With Staked Acquisition: Kraken

Kraken is thrilled to announce that we have acquired Staked, an infrastructure platform that allows for secure, cost-effective, and non-custodial crypto staking.

🔗 Under Armour Steps Into the Metaverse With ‘Wearable’ Steph Curry Sneakers: CoinDesk

Golden State Warriors star guard Stephen Curry is partnering with sports apparel brand Under Armour on an NFT drop to celebrate his new record as the National Basketball Association’s all-time top three-point shooter.

🔗 Arsenal adverts for cryptocurrency ‘fan tokens’ banned: The Guardian

The UK’s advertising regulator has banned two promotions for “fan tokens” from Arsenal Football Club, saying they were misleading supporters over the risks of investing in cryptocurrencies.

Daniel Ambrosi @danoramas

Happy Holidays! Here's the 5th of 12 artworks in my new @SuperRare series. It's called "Double Arch Alcove Infinite Dream" and is based on a scene I captured in Kolob Canyon in Jun 2014. Collect this unique #NFT artwork here: superrare.com/0x8c0db114087e… #creativeAI #nftphotography

Solana @solana

7/ ☀️ The Solana community has taken off in 2021 — and next year promises to be even better. Let’s keep building together. wagmi 🤙 #SolanaSolstice Read more about how the community has grown: solana.com/news/happy-sol…

Happy Solstice 2021! Celebrating Solana’s sunny yearLook back on all the Solana ecosystem has accomplished in 2021.solana.com

Trending in The Defiant

Yearn Finance Changes Up its Tokenomics and YFI Soars 85% It’s been a tough year for many DeFi protocols originating on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite being up in dollar terms, top tokens like UNI, MAKER, AAVE and Yearn Finance’s YFI have bled double digits against ETH in 2021.
Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and Controversy In web3, there aren’t many words more fought over than “decentralization.” So if someone calls a blockchain’s decentralization into question, it’s going to draw a crowd.
Polkadot’s Parachain Winners Make Strides in Building Sharded Ecosystem Polkadot’s first round of five parachain auctions have concluded and the winners are now producing blocks, setting Polkadot’s sharded ecosystem into motion for the first time.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, 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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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).

DeFi, NFT & Web3 Insights - The Defiant

😤 Dorsey’s Caustic Tweet Sparks Debate About…