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

News

Markets

Privacy Coins Shake Off Their Slumber and Spike 25% in 24 Hours

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with author Laura Shin in this week’s podcast episode:

Video

Links

Join us for our very first Community Call today, 09 March, at 12:00 UTC. No specific topic - we have plenty of stuff to reflect on and excited to hear everyone’s voices!: UkraineDAO
Avalanche Foundation Launches Multiverse, an up to $290M Incentive Program to Accelerate Growth of New Internet of Subnets: Medium
Secret Surveillance Program Collects Americans’ Money-Transfer Data, Senator Says: The Wall Street Journal
US Senator Warren Drafting Bill to Ensure Crypto Can’t Be Used to Evade Sanctions: CoinDesk
Top Blockchain TVL Performance Last 1 Month: Terra Daily

Handpicked by The Defiant Team

The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

Subscribe now

🙌 Together with:

Verse Network by STP, is a Layer 2 for DAOs. Redefining value one DAO at a time.
Eden Rocket RPC, providing the fastest private transactions on Ethereum (90%+ hashrate). Trade better anywhere on Ethereum with Eden Rocket RPC.
Zerion is Mission Control for Web3: an intuitive DeFi portfolio manager, multichain tracking & trading and the best place to show off your NFT collection
Unstoppable Domains, the #1 provider of NFT domains. Own your name on the internet and web3. With no renewal fees you own it for life. Get yours today!

The Defiant Interview

EXCLUSIVE: Finally Web3 has REAL lobbying power || head to head w/ Andrew Yang

Web3 Regulation

🏛 EXCLUSIVE: Andrew Yang Urges Web3 Community to Rally and Shape Inevitable Regulation

By Samuel Haig

REGULATION If there was ever a time when the crypto community believed it would operate unfettered by state rules it’s over. Regulation is coming, and time is running out for DeFi to influence and shape this looming regime.

MESSAGE That was the message Andrew Yang delivered in an exclusive interview with The Defiant’s Robin Schmidt in a video posted Tuesday. Yang, an entrepreneur and Democratic Party candidate for president in 2020 who made a splash in the campaign with his unvarnished opinions and humor, has now jumped into web3 with a DAO called Lobby3. Formed in February, the organization is designed to rally the DeFi community and push for favorable regulations in Washington.

TOOLS “Lobby3 is an initiative to take the voices of wWeb3 to Washington DC, where we can hopefully expand people’s understanding of what these tools can do to improve the public interest [and] improve people’s lives,” Yang said.

INTELLIGENT “My goal is to make it so that the rules are intelligent, understand the space, and properly prioritize the [innovation] side of the equation,” he continued. “Right now, if you’re a regulator, unfortunately, they are very focused on risk.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Founders

😲 Andre Cronje’s Sudden Exit Leaves DeFi Agog But It’s Right in Character

By Owen Fernau

HOSTILE Andre Cronje’s relationship with DeFi has never been simple. Back in February 2020, the founder of Yearn Finance wrote a blog post called Building in #DeFi Sucks. “Not a sensationalist title, honestly it sucks,” he said. “It’s expensive, the community is hostile, the users are entitled.”

TOIL A year later, Cronje was back with another rant, warning entrepreneurs about the years of toil it takes to bring ideas to fruition in DeFi. “This in itself can be demotivating. But now, add hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people shouting on telegram, discord, and twitter, ‘When will it be released?’, ‘Why hasn’t it been released?’, ‘give us an update’, and significantly more hostile messages.”

QUIT Now it appears Cronje has finally quit DeFi for good. “Andre and I have decided that we are closing the chapter of contributing to the defi/crypto,” tweeted Cronje’s longtime collaborator Anton Nell on March 6. “There are around ~25 apps and services that we are terminating on 03 April 2022.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

GameFi

🎮 EXCLUSIVE: Aavegotchi Poised to Morph into Play-to-Earn Game on March 31

By Brady Dale

CHARACTERS Aavegotchi, the playable characters loaded with Aave’s interest-bearing tokens, are getting their own little gaming universe. The Gotchiverse will launch March 31, The Defiant has learned.

EVOLUTION Aavegotchi are NFTs that work now somewhat like Tamagotchis of the late ’90s and somewhat like digital piggy banks. Owners have to care for them so they grow and also so they don’t decay. But the Gotchiverse is the next phase of these characters’ evolution. It’s a 3D space where the characters can move around, meet each other, gather fresh tokens, make stuff and eventually battle against invaders.

LAUNCH The Defiant talked about the launch with Jesse Johnson, the chief operating officer of Pixelcraft Studios, the company that works for the AavegotchiDAO and has built the game up to this point. “We are basically taking on a very ambitious job here,” Johnson said. “We are experimenting with everyone in the same world on the same instance.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Action

📈 Privacy Coins Shake Off Their Slumber and Spike 25% in 24 Hours

By Owen Fernau

SURGING Privacy coins were dead in the water, an afterthought for most of last year as the crypto market hit all-time highs and they languished. Now, the top two privacy coins, Monero’s XMR, and Zcash’s ZEC, are both up more than 25% on Tuesday before settling at 21% and 16% respectively in early morning trading U.K. time. What’s going on?

MOVING It’s a surprising pocket of resurgence in a generally bleak crypto market that has dropped 11.1%, in the last week. It’s hard to know precisely why these coins are moving. A well-known trader, who goes by Cuban, told The Defiant there are two potential catalysts for XMR and ZEC’s explosive price action.

BILL First is a new bill that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced this week. According to her Twitter, the bill will “ensure crypto isn’t used by Putin and his cronies to undermine economic sanctions.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

Coming of Age: Indices and the Phuture of DeFi

"Aiming for average" may not seem particularly exciting, but the rise of crypto indices that leverage the power of DeFi indicates at least three developing trends in crypto investing.

Index Funds Indicate Market Maturity

Index funds generated controversy when first proposed. Today, they don't seem particularly new or radical; funds like the Dow Jones Industrial Average are everyday names even to non-investors.

In this vein, the rise of crypto index funds demonstrates a maturing industry. DeFi is still only a small part of crypto - but it’s currently worth over $103 billion with room for growth.

Index Funds Encourage Stability

Aiming for average with an index fund brings much-needed stability to the world of crypto investing. Individual tokens may still be subject to wild swings in value, but larger swathes of the market remain stable. Projects like Phuture encourage stability by automatically rebalancing on the go and by boosting liquidity through token-incentivized programs.

The Phuture of Index Funds

Index funds mark a shift towards passive crypto investment vehicles, tools that open the DeFi and crypto worlds to a broader audience. The Phuture model leverages both approaches, with the goal of launching macro index products that will be relevant for years. The result is a sophisticated, hands-off approach to crypto investing in line with similar approaches to the stock market.

The Tube

📺 Tutorial: XDeFi - the last wallet you’ll ever need?

Promotion

Defiant newsletter subscribers are invited to the Blockchain Oracle Summit’s free pre-event webinar, taking place Wednesday 23 March at 9am ET, 2pm CET.

A panel of pioneers will be discussing prediction markets – one of the quintessential examples of the oracle problem in blockchain, register for free now!

Links

UkraineDAO @Ukraine_DAO

Join us for our very first Community Call today, 09 March, at 12:00 UTC. No specific topic - we have plenty of stuff to reflect on and excited to hear everyone’s voices! ❤️ #StandWithUkraine https://t.co/rMxc7qxrWP

🔗 Avalanche Foundation Launches Multiverse, an up to $290M Incentive Program to Accelerate Growth of New Internet of Subnets: Medium

The Avalanche Foundation has launched Avalanche Multiverse, an up to $290M (up to 4M AVAX) incentive program focused on accelerating the adoption and growth of its novel “subnet” functionality, which enables a rich ecosystem of scalable app-specific blockchains.

🔗 Secret Surveillance Program Collects Americans’ Money-Transfer Data, Senator Says: The Wall Street Journal

A law-enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security participated in a secret bulk surveillance program that collected millions of records about certain money transfers of some Americans without a warrant, according to officials and a U.S. senator.

🔗 US Senator Warren Drafting Bill to Ensure Crypto Can’t Be Used to Evade Sanctions: CoinDesk

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is preparing a bill to make it more difficult to use cryptocurrency to circumvent sanctions.

Terra Daily 🌖 @TerraLUNADaily

Top Blockchain TVL Performance Last 1 Month 🥇 $WAVES @wavesprotocol 🥈 $LUNA @terra_money $ETH $BNB $AVAX $FTM $TRX $CRO #TERRA #LUNATICS #LUNA #DEFI #cryptocurrecy

Handpicked by The Defiant Team

Polkadot’s Gavin Wood on Building a Layer 0 to Underpin the Entire Blockchain-Based Economy Gavin Wood’s crypto journey started with Ethereum – he was one of the eight original founders and the project’s CTO in the early days.
BitDAO’s War Chest Quietly Grows $2M Per Day After Token Sales to Thiel and Pantera The BitDAO treasury is the largest for a DAO you’ve never heard of.
NFT Collectors Love Space Doodles Imagery But Not Its Confusing Valuation Model For all the mojo in NFTs, there’s still a lot of experimentation under way. And sometimes buyers aren’t sure what to make of a new crop of imagery, or new minting systems.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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.

Subscribe now

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

📺 EXCLUSIVE Andrew Yang Interview: Finally…