🦸🏻‍♂️ EBay Has BitBoy But its ‘Strange’ NFT Strategy Risks Missing a Boom for the Ages

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Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

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Weekend Read

🦸🏻‍♂️ EBay Has BitBoy But its ‘Strange’ NFT Strategy Risks Missing a Boom for the Ages

In which Brady Dale plumbs the mystery of why eBay is approaching NFTs with the same timidity of retailers confronting the auction giant in the ‘90s…

REVOLUTIONARY NFTs are huge here in crypto, but the old web is not sure. Digital collectibles on the blockchain have captured the imagination of crypto heads and attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Players ranging from the Walt Disney Co. to Super Bowl champion quarterback Tom Brady are embracing their revolutionary marketing potential. Newcomers such as OpenSea and Rarible are rapidly expanding.  

CHAINSAWS And then there’s eBay. The online auction pioneer has been hosting sales of NFTs on its site for several months, but don’t feel bad if that comes as news to you. In stark contrast to the buzz surrounding most NFT ventures, eBay has set about offering digital collectibles with the same vibe it brings to peddling used chainsaws, vintage jewelry, old toys or any of the other staples on its site since the ‘90s: Business as usual.

PROFITS It’s barely even trying. The company has earned the trust of mainstream America and could rake in some very easy profits if it just tried to be a little crypto-credible in the way it’s running these sales. It’s not, though, and the quality of its efforts show in the quality of NFTs available on the site.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Scoop

🍣 0xMaki Is Leaving Leadership at SushiSwap to Take on an Advisory Role

NEWS 0xMaki is stepping down from leadership in the community-run decentralized automated market maker, SushiSwap, to take an advisory role in the decentralized autonomous organization, a person with knowledge of the matter told The Defiant. A statement from 0xMaki will come out on Friday. 

DETAILS Another knowledgeable source verified these details. Sources did not provide details about why 0xMaki was leaving, but he’s recently commented on Twitter about compensation, noting that core developers own less than one percent of the platform.

UPSHOT 0xMaki confirmed that an official statement would be forthcoming to The Defiant and declined to say more. The DeFi community first noticed that something was afoot when 0xMaki was removed from SushiSwap’s operations multisig on Sept. 14.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

NFT Marketplaces

🌊 OpenSea’s Struggles Embolden Rivals with New Ways to Play Booming NFT Market

NEWS The insider buying scandal at OpenSea has hit just as a crop of rivals are circling the NFT marketplace leader. 

SO WHAT On Sept. 15, a startup called NFTX launched what it called “the world’s most liquid decentralized marketplace,” meaning the exchange operates “on chain.” It also permits buyers and sellers to make deals without the need of finding a counterparty. NFTX is betting its model will offer NFT collectors a different way to play the market. It allows users to earn a yield when they deposit their NFTs in what are called vaults, which is a unique feature. 

EDGE NFTX’s approach differs from that of OpenSea, which partially relies on off-chain mechanisms such as servers to facilitate trades. Crypto diehards tend to believe the more on-chain, the better, which might give NFTX an edge. OpenSea’s servers have been overwhelmed at times, and become something of a running joke — a vulnerability that may embolden serverless exchanges like NFTX to gain ground.

SERVERS “We don’t really have any servers,” NFTX’s protocol lead, who goes by Kiwi, told The Defiant. “Everything we do is directly with a smart contract.” 

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 SuperMassive NFT Show: CrypToadz, CryptoDads, Sevens, & Lost Poets

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🔗 $1.2B in Ether withdrawn from centralized exchanges in record daily outflow: CoinTelegraph

More than $1 billion worth of Ether has been removed from centralized exchanges in 24 hours, leading to speculation about imminent price gains for Ethereum as supply shrinks on many trading venues.

🔗 Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Lead $230M Investment in Avalanche Ecosystem: CoinDesk

Fresh on the heels of a $180 million incentive program, the Avalanche Foundation announced on Thursday a $230 million raise to jumpstart liquidity in the network’s burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

🔗 LayerZero- An Omnichain Interoperability Protocol: Medium

For cross-chain bridging and messaging, almost every existing approach falls into one of two broad categories. The first is having a consensus forming middle chain validate and forward messages between chains. The second is running a light node on-chain. Let’s discuss.

🔗 The beguiling promise of decentralised finance: The Economist

The sceptics have plenty of fodder. The earliest adopters of bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, used it to buy drugs, while cyber-hackers now demand their ransom in it.

🔗 Katy Perry, Nas, and Jason Derulo Are Investing Big in a Spotify Rival: Rolling Stone

When you play a song on major streaming platforms, money doesn’t just zoom straight into an artist’s pocket. But what if it did? That’s how payments are designed to work on Audius, a platform built on a blockchain — yes, the same technological network that NFTs run on.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale and Owen Fernau and edited by Bailey Reutzel and Edward Robinson. 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.

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