🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of July 4
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Hello Defiers! In Greek mythology, the cornucopia was a horn that showered the land with an abundance of crops and other goodies. This week, we had plenty of developments great and small to savor in DeFi.
We had conflict — see Owen Fernau’s report in the dust-up between Chainlink and MakerDAO. We had innovation — Owen also brought us up to speed with London, the much-anticipated Ethereum upgrade, which will hit next month. There was fear — Masha Prusso’s provocative essay on the scams flooding DeFi is a must-read. And there was absurdity… Dan Kahan explained how the once and future Doge-killer meme coin, $SHIB, came back with a howl and has sent gas prices running. Just to round things off Bailey Reutzel unearthed a limited run of nasty NFTs that do things with CryptoPunks that truly don’t belong in a family DeFi news platform…
The Defiant was also delighted to host its debut jam session, Wagging the Tail, on our YouTube channel, hosted by the indomitable Robin Schmidt. The discussion explored the long-term viability of NFTs as artist/creator communities, and what we can learn from Hollywood and major platforms like Beats and the bright future of play-to-earn. Really kick-ass content.
Speaking of NFTs, At the top of the week we explored the maddening duality of DeFi in a research piece by guest writer Arash Ghaemi. It explored the question of why, with such such a steady flow of technology and biz model breakthroughs, crypto prices continue to sag. Not to get too mercenary about it, but is this a bear market or a bull market with bearish mini-cycles or are bear and bull labels kind of inapplicable to crypto, and certainly DeFi? Arash does the heavy lifting in what’s a nice weekend read.
And we’re just scratching at the abundance of stories and analysis that hit this week, so scroll through this recap to click on the links that grab you. Have a super weekend, Defiers!
ALSO, PSA: We are changing up our publishing schedule so that the weekly podcast will go out Mondays, and our jam-packed newsletter will go out Tuesday to Fridays, first thing in the AM.
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🙌 Together with:
Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!
Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
The DeFi Pulse Index, a capitalization-weighted index that tracks the performance of selected DeFi assets across the market.
Video
📺 ChainLinkGod vs MakerDAO - BEEF HANDBAGS A-GO-GO (sort of)
📺 Tuesday Tutorial: Partially Collateralized Options using Opyn
📺 Defiant Weekly: Is Ethereum REALLY ultra-sound money!?
📺 First Look: Railgun: The New Weapon in Privacy
📺 Jam Session No. 1: Wagging the Tail | WTF is buying this $#*% and will they be buying it in 2024?
Opinion
🦹🏻♂️ Crypto Scams are Out of Control, Again… Here’s How to Stop Them Forever
In this essay, Masha Prusso delves into the underworld of rug pulls, exit scams, and other digital swindles. Her takeaway: they’re endangering the DeFi experiment and need to be stopped. But the good news is there are clear paths to accomplishing this task, and she lays them out, one by one.
Inbox Dump #15
For paid subscribers only — The Inbox Dump is where we include the updates and announcements that flood our DMs each week and didn’t make it to The Defiant’s content platforms. We also include a compilation of DeFi and crypto funding rounds in the past week so you have these in one handy place.
Friday
Markets
ShibaSwap Is Dragging Ethereum By the Tail For any Defiers wondering why gas prices on Ethereum have been so high over the past few days, you can blame it on the dog — $SHIB, that is.
Crypto Drops Amid Large-Scale Macro Selloff Crypto prices have taken a hit in the past 24 hours with open finance’s leading index DeFi Pulse Index down 8.14% at the time of writing and Ether down 8.9% in that same span. Bitcoin too is down 6.1%.
Dives
EIP-1559 Locked In With London Upgrade on August 4 The upgrade, called London after Ethereum’s Devcon 1 location, includes the famous improvement proposal. EIP-1559, as the upgrade is labeled, will go live at block number 12,965,000. The launch date is expected to be August 4.
Cartoon Porn and Rugs: NFTs Get Nasty What are CryptoPunks packing down there? That’s what one new limited-run avatar NFT project, CryptoJunks, is sharing with the Internet. The CryptoJunks project uses the head and shoulders art of CryptoPunks to create matching genitalia.
Bytes
Even Presidents are Getting NFTs First it was the art auction houses, then professional sports leagues, followed by media stalwarts such as the Associated Press. Now the president of Israel is the latest denizen of the mainstream world to embrace that most exotic creation of the crypto space — the NFT.
Sygnum is the First Bank Offering Eth2 Staking Sygnum has become the world’s first bank to offer Ethereum 2.0 staking. The digital asset bank based out of Switzerland will allow clients to securely stake Ethereum through its banking platform. Currently, Ethereum staked through Sygnum can generate yields of up to 7% per annum.
The Sushi Community Is Cooking Up An NFT Platform SushiSwap will likely add an NFT platform soon. The decentralized exchange for swapping Ethereum-based tokens has been branching out into a one-stop shop for DeFi, with spin-off protocols for lending (Kashi), dapp usage (BentoBox), and yield farming (Onsen).
Meowshi Boosts Yields for SUSHI Stakers In Run-up to V3 It’s shaping up to be a big month for Sushiswap. The decentralized automated market maker (AMM) is slated to release its much-anticipated V3 upgrade, codenamed MIRIN, on July 20. A host of new features are expected including limit orders, improved support for multi-token yield farming, MEV protection, and an upgraded user interface.
Links
Thursday
Markets
Cronje’s Goerli Move Triggers Confusion and Dreams of Instant Wealth Yearn Finance’s founder Andre Cronje triggered a dustup on Twitter Tuesday when he announced a new Layer 2 scaling solution for multichain.xyz, a cross-chain token transfer tool.
Dives
MakerDAO Rebuts Accusations of Selling Oracle Data In the DeFi world, oracles aren’t the seers of Greek myth but handy tools that enable data to flow between blockchains and traditional networks in the form of smart contracts. Now oracles have landed right in the middle of a clash pitting two of the biggest players in the space against one another — Chainlink and MakerDAO.
Opinion
Links
Wednesday
Research
The Riddle of Ethereum: Bullish Signals Abound as Price Starts and Stops Bullish news continues to circulate as ETH price keeps dropping or moving sideways at best. Are we merely in an accumulation phase, or has the bear market started, and we’re all in denial?
Ethereum’s Ether is down 11% in the past 30 days and has plunged 46% since its $4,357 high reached in May. It has been inching its way up from this month’s low of $1,718 and is trading at around $2,300 currently. So the question investors are asking is: Is the bull market back or are we at the gates of a bearish cycle?
Let’s review the last month’s on-chain data from both a bullish perspective and a bearish perspective to find out.
Tuesday
Research
🛠️DeFi 101: A Visual Guide to Definitions and Data Sources Our very own Robin Schmidt, who you know from The Defiant YouTube, created this slideshow in May for CoinDesk’s Consensus 2021 conference. Last Friday, he presented it again in a livestream that you can check out here. Or flip through the slides on your own time.
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
The Defiant @DefiantNews
📊#DeFi options are far more capital-intensive than their #TradFi counterparts since most trades need to be fully collateralized. But things are changing🚀 In today's #TuesdayTut, @DirSchmidt explores partially collateralized options using @opyn_👇 https://t.co/dydNFDYDIX
The Defiant @DefiantNews
🎙️"There Will be Billion-Dollar Communities on the Internet” - @thattallguy The instigator of @seedclubhq talks to @CamiRusso about the difference between personal, creator, brand, and community tokens, and how value accrues to these instruments👇 https://t.co/JUpTynYZkn https://t.co/JQ47hAYK8D
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