🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of Feb. 15
| Feb 21 | 2 |
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up: The week started out with yet another hack in DeFi, this time the exploit used Alpha Finance’s unpublished contracts to drain $37M+ from CREAM (no users’ funds were lost). If you want to hear the complex attack sung to you in R&B tunes, watch our video on the ordeal. Speaking of security, ArmorFi CTO is offering $320k of his own funds to whoever catches a critical bug in any Ethereum dapp.
The crypto market continues to heat up with some notable effects in DeFi: Uniswap has now processed $100B of volume, while its $SOCKS tokens (redeemable for real socks) have surged to more than $80k. Meanwhile, MakerDAO is on track to generate more than $70M in annual fees, and with hype driving much of the market, we dove into meme-nomics of Dogecoin. In digital collectibles craziness, someone bought a CryptoPunk for $1.2M and a Beeple NFT will be auctioned by Christie’s.
In notable dapp developments, HiFi is the latest fixed-rate lending protocol, Vesper’s automated investment platform came out of beta, private AMM SecretSwap is live on mainnet, Bitwise launched its Decentralized Finance Crypto Index Fund.
We interviewed partner at the DeFi Alliance and former head of product at Messari Qiao Wang on this week’s podcast, who talked about his favorite tokens and made a price prediction for the top of this bull run. Blake Ho of Furucumbo wrote an opinion piece on how to avoid pumps & dumps in token offerings.
And there was more! There’s a lot going on, but we’ve got you covered :)
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🙌 Together with:
Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance
Ledger, a hardware wallet combined with the Ledger application to securely buy, sell, exchange, stake, lend & manage your crypto
Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
Casper, an enterprise-focused blockchain which aims to introduce unprecedented security, speed and scale for businesses
Video
📺 Defiant Weekly: You Stole $37M, Now What?
📺 Tuesday Tutorial: How to Yield Farm
📺 Quick Take: What is EIP-1559
Interview
"We Haven't Seen Anything Yet, So Hold Your Long-Term Bag:" Qiao Wang
In this week’s podcast episode, we speak with long-time crypto investor Qiao Wang. Wang is a partner at the DeFi Alliance and former head of product at Messari. Unlike many Bitcoiners who get into crypto because of their ideological views, or Ethereans attracted by the possibility of building decentralized apps, Wang had been a quant trader for 10 years when he first learned about Bitcoin, and it was the asset’s volatility and potential upside what drew him in. Years later, he’s still actively trading.
We talk about his portfolio and which coins look the most promising. He looks at all sorts of metrics to come to his trading conclusions. In the end though, he says, the market is purely driven by memes and Twitter influencers. About the current bull market, Wang says he’s 90% confident prices will go a lot higher. And while he doesn’t like to give price estimates, he still told me what he thinks the top for BTC and ETH will be for this cycle.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
📺 Or watch here:
Op-ed
"How to Avoid Pumps & Dumps in Your Token Offering," By Furucumbo's Blake Ho
The cryptocurrency space has provided investors and entrepreneurs a range of fundraising options. The first of these more decentralized fundraising mechanisms was the initial coin offerings (ICO). The open nature of ICOs led to scams and manipulation, so the more controlled and centralized initial exchange offering (IEO) followed. DeFi is enabling a new kind of fundraising, the initial DEX offering (IDO). IDOs are as decentralized in nature as ICOs, but they’re done through decentralized exchanges —most commonly through Uniswap— instantly providing a market for the new token.
This column dives into a lesser-known type of IDO, which is being pioneered by Balancer Labs through its Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools. Blake Ho of Furucombo, a platform which provides a drag-and-drop interface for DeFi traders, dives into her project’s experience with fundraising via LBPs. She believes this fundraising mechanism enabled a more stable price for the COMBO token when it was first issued, and helped the DeFi aggregator, raise over $4.5M in just 48 hours.
Thursday
Dives
Cypherpunk Stablecoin RAI is Live on Ethereum: Rai, a stablecoin for decentralization purists, is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. It’s not pegged to fiat, it’s not backed by fiat, and it’s designed to run completely by computer programs. If it had a physical bill it would carry the inscription, “in code we trust.”
Ethereum OG Raises $18M With First Reversible ICO: LUKSO’s Reversible ICO has ended with nearly $18M USD collected. The Reversible ICO (rICO)—the latest brainchild from Ethereum dapp developer and ERC 20 creator Fabian Vogelsteller—is a new model for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings used to fundraise for start-ups) where investors reserve tokens instead of buying them outright.
Bytes
DeFi Dev Offers $320k to Whoever Finds Critical Bug: ArmorFi’s CTO Robert Forster is partnering with bug bounty platform Immunefi to personally offer the equivalent of $320k to anyone who can find a critical smart contract bug in any Ethereum ecosystem project.
Billions of Users Can Now Access .Crypto Domains: Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure provider, now supports Unstoppable Domains’s .crypto domain name resolution. This will allow billions of users to access web content hosted on decentralized storage like IPFS and routed using blockchain-based domains.
Links
Wednesday
Dives
$SOCKS is Worth $85k. That’s it. That’s the Headline: Right now, one single $SOCKS token (redeemable for one real pair of Unisocks, which are cotton socks with printed Unisocks branding) will set you back $85k. That’s down from the Feb. 16’s previous high of nearly $93k.
MakerDAO is Piling on Fees: MakerDAO backend and oracles engineer Nik Kunkel tweeted that if the current market conditions remain stable, the protocol would generate ~$71M in annual stability fees. Stability fees paid by Maker borrowers (similar to borrowing costs), are then burned by the protocol, indirectly benefiting MKR holders by reducing the token supply.
Markets
The Meme-enomics of Dogecoin: Another week, another wild, Elon Musk-tweet driven, Dogecoin gyration. The latest one has chart arrows pointing down. But beyond what’s behind the most recent swing, let’s look at what’s driving the whole pendulum: hype.
Bytes
Vesper Comes Out of Beta With VSP Token: Vesper, a DeFi investment platform, came out of beta and launched its VSP governance token.
Fixed-Rate Lending Protocol HiFi Launches: The field for fixed-rate lending protocols is becoming more dense as HiFi has joined the fray.
Links
Tuesday
Dives
Uniswap Hits $100B in Trading Volume: Uniswap became the first decentralized trading platform to process over $100B in trading volume.
Alpha Finance $37.5M Hack Recap: DeFi experienced one of its more complex exploits over the weekend. An attack which resulted in ~$37.5M drained from CREAM Finance’s Iron Bank using Alpha Homora’s leveraged debt.
NFT Sales Boom Past $100M in 30 Days: There was over $100M in NFT sales over the last 30 days, according to Crypto Slam, which tracks the data, and a large part of the trading action is taking place on secondary markets.
Links
Love & coordination at the frontier of governance: How Yearn minted $300 million: CoinTelegraph
Bitcoin Trust Launched Today Takes Aim At $37 Billion Grayscale: Forbes
✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories this week were written by Dan Kahan, Owen Fernau, Sydney Lai and Cooper Turley, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila and edited by Alp.
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
The Defiant @DefiantNews
🚨 @ArmorFi’s CTO Robert Forster is partnering w/ bug bounty platform @immunefi to personally offer the equivalent of $320k to anyone who can find a critical smart contract bug in any @ethereum ecosystem project. Read more on how to grab that 💰:
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