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How Pepe the Frog Was Born a Meme, Survived the Alt-Right, and Became a $4M NFT

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Ukraine

Do you want to make a real difference in the Ukraine crisis? Until March 24th, if you donate to help improve the situation in Ukraine on Gitcoin your funds will be matched by a pool of over $700,000 using the power of quadratic funding.

In some cases, 1 DAI can be matched up to 50x, so even small amounts are meaningful. Peace is a global public good, and it's become increasingly clear that we have to work to collectively maintain it. For more details, check out http://gitcoin.co/grants and go to the "Support for Ukraine" category.

Public goods are good.

Gitcoin grants sustain web3 projects with quadratic funding

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).

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NFT Cycle

📈 NFT Market Shifting Into New Growth Phase: Report

Nansen Finds Industry is Maturing Amid Spike in Profitable Projects

By Owen Fernau

FALLEN With every week that goes by it becomes clearer that peak NFT has passed. Or does it? It’s true. Google searches for the term “NFTs” are down by almost a third from mid-January. And daily volume on OpenSea has fallen more than 65% since Feb. 1, according to data from DuneAnalytics.

FAD Don’t dismiss NFTs as just another crypto fad just yet. Even as the buzz gets lets buzzy, the number of successful NFT projects is quietly increasing, according to a report released today by Nansen, a blockchain analytics platform, and shared with The Defiant.

SCAMS The proportion of minted and profitable NFT projects recently hit an all-time high, according to a graph provided in Nansen’s Minters Report. This indicates that a market known for froth and scams (Pixelmon notwithstanding), may be growing up.

MATURE MARKET “I think we’re seeing more successful projects,” Paul Harwood, a product manager at Nansen, told The Defiant. “We’re seeing the market mature and the real innovative projects really taking off and maybe the cash grabs not doing so well.”

*Minted NFTs that are in profit, underwater, or dead collections per month.* Source: Nansen

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Parachains

🔴 Polkadot Parachains Launch $250M Fund To Grow Ecosystem

Fresh Starup Activity Supports Acala's aUSD Stablecoin

By Samuel Haig

STARTUPS Polkadot’s network is rallying behind Acala’s aUSD stablecoin. Nine Polkadot parachain teams launched a $250M Ecosystem Fund to support early-stage startups building Polkadot and Kusama-based dapps that support Acala Network’s aUSD stablecoin, according to a March 23 announcement from Acala.

STABLE ASSET aUSD is a crypto-backed and overcollateralized decentralized stablecoin designed to provide a fiat-pegged stable asset for use across Polkadot’s multi-chain ecosystem. The stablecoin was launched by Acala on Feb. 9 and can be minted against DOT, and LCDOT — the token representing DOT locked during Polkadot’s parachain auctions. Other assets are expected to be supported as collateral in future.

PARACHAINS The aUSD Ecosystem Fund is supported by some of Polkadot’s top parachains including Moonbeam, Centrifuge, Efinity, HydraDX, OriginTrail, Parallel, Zeitgeist, Manta, and Acala. Leading VCs supporting the Polkadot ecosystem are also contributing to the fund, including Alameda Research, Digital Finance Group, and LongHash Ventures.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Stablecoins

🇦🇺 Australian Bank Drops Anti-Crypto Stance and Embraces Stablecoins

By Samuel Haig

MINT In an about face, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), has become the country’s first bank to mint an Ethereum-based, AUD-denominated stablecoin dubbed the A$DC, the bank said in a statement on March 23.

SKEPTICISM The move follows years of skepticism toward crypto from Australia’s banks. In 2018, ANZ refused to bank businesses operating with crypto. In 2020, local stablecoin issuer, Chrono Bank, revealed that none of the country’s Big Four institutions were willing to provide banking services to the company, despite the project securing the required regulatory licensing.

SHIFT Banks in other nations, including the U.K. and the U.S., have also been reluctant to provide services for cryptocurrency businesses even as their own research and development arms studied digital assets and introduced new blockchain-based offerings in the marketplace. The shift by ANZ may augur more openness by other lenders to embrace stablecoins or other forms of crypto.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Saga

🐸 How Pepe the Frog Was Born a Meme, Survived the Alt-Right, and Became a $4M NFT

Popular Amphibian Has Come Home to Web3 After a Wild Journey

In which Mason Marcobello tells the tale of the omnipresent amphibian and his metamorphosis into a DeFi icon.

EVERYWHERE It’s no secret to veterans and newly indoctrinated DeFi “degens” that memes are as indelible a part of web3 as NFTs. And when it comes to anthropomorphic characters nestled throughout the NFT world, there’s nothing more at home than Pepe the Frog. You see this character everywhere, on Discord servers, Twitter, Telegram channels, and at crypto events.

BUZZ While Pepe may not be getting the kind of buzz that Bored Ape is, check this out In October, a one-of-one Rare Pepe NFT called “Pepenopoulos” sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $3.6 million. It was created in 2016.

MEME Pepe the Frog dates back to 2006, when it appeared in a Matt Furie comic called “Boy’s Club.” Several years later, due to the Cambrian-like explosion of social media, the character quickly evolved into a standalone meme, gaining popularity on Myspace and 4chan. It was first released as NFTs six years ago on a peer-to-peer marketplace called Counterparty.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 First Look: Aave V3 launched: Higher Borrowing Power, Cross Chain Txns, & Improved Risk Management

Promotion

CryptoCompare's Digital Asset Summit is returning on 30th March at Old Billingsgate, London. As Europe's flagship institutional summit for digital assets, this is the perfect opportunity to connect with key industry decision-makers and leading names in finance who are adopting and embracing the digital asset revolution.

Time is running out to secure your place at CCDAS! The Defiant readers can save 10% today with code THEDEFIANT10. You can find more information here.

Elsewhere

🔗 Ukrainian refugee flees to Poland with $2,000 in bitcoin on a USB drive: CNBC

On the morning that Russia went to war with Ukraine, Fadey woke up at 9am to a deluge of Telegram messages from friends asking him what was happening on the ground in the western city of Lviv. After a quick scan of the news, he realized his country was under siege. He decided to get out.

🔗 Trading giant Jane Street backs NEAR-based lending protocol in new funding round: The Block

Jane Street is backing an upstart project in the decentralized finance space, representing the latest sign that the global trading firm is prioritizing crypto.

🔗 Almost half of Germans to invest in crypto: Report: CoinTelegraph

The richest country in Europe is coming round to crypto. That’s according to a report by KuCoin which shared some flattering statistics towards the future of crypto in Deutschland.

Terra Daily 🌖 @TerraLUNADaily

Top Gainers in Terra Ecosystem Last 24H $LUNI @LUNIonTerra $MIR @mirror_protocol $LOOP @loop_finance $SKUJI @TeamKujira $ANC @anchor_protocol $LUNA @terra_money $STLUNA @LidoFinance $SPEC @SpecProtocol #TERRA #LUNATICS #DEFI

Austin Griffith @austingriffith

🏃‍♀️ SpeedRunEthereum.com is a great place for good coders to get started building decentralized applications. 🎥 Catch the intro. 🛠 Then, test your skills: 🚩 Challenge 0: 🎟 Simple NFT Example 🚩 Challenge 1: 🥩 Decentralized Staking App 🚩 Challenge 2: 🏵 Token VendorSpeed Run EthereumCreated using 🏗 scaffold-ethspeedrunethereum.com

Trending in The Defiant

Web3 Salaries Soar to $750,000 for Rank-and-File Devs Web2 giants like Google and Facebook have long been beacons for talent seeking cushy paydays, and for good reason — senior software engineers at all five FAANG companies make well over $300,000 a year, according to levels.fyi.
What is Uniswap? In 2021, the GameStop/AMC short squeeze episode demonstrated how traditional finance is full of obfuscation. Retail traders expected their trades to execute immediately.
Ether Bulls Ascendant as Anticipation Builds for The Merge After a bearish start to 2022, Ethereum market sentiment appears to be flipping bullish.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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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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. Signest, 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

📈 NFT Market Shifting Into New Growth Phase…