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NFTs Are Dead? OpenSea Just Set a New Daily Trading Record of $476M in Ethereum: Decrypt
Crypto Stories: Ethan Lou shares experience of crypto conference in North Korea: CoinTelegraph
Devconnect recap, Optimism token and much more: The Daily Gwei
Uniswap V3 is conceived as the most successful AMM protocol: Uniswap

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NFT Mints

🤯 Soaring Gas, Simmering Suspicion, and 50,000 NFTs: Inside Yuga’s Zany Metaverse Mint

Creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club May Build its Own Blockchain

By Owen Fernau

MINT Ungodly hype creates ungodly expectations. That’s what happened when Yuga Labs, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched the balleyhooed mint of their Otherside NFTs on May 1.

UNHAPPY Yuga, which is worth $4B, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the mint of 50,000 NFTs called Otherdeeds. They were designed to let owners claim land in Otherside, Yuga’s forthcoming metaverse world. Yet the sale, with soaring gas prices, thousands of failed transactions, and profuse apologies made the offering instantly infamous. There were plenty of unhappy customers.

APE DOWN “They managed to do terribly in both the minting process and the ‘sorry’ thread aspects,” hildobby, a data scientist who builds Dune Analytics dashboards, told The Defiant. In the wake of the stormy mint, Bored Apes and associated assets haven’t been doing too well. APE, the newly introduced token, is down 7.7% in the past 24 hours compared to a 0.4% slip by ETH. The floor for Bored Apes NFTs has skidded 24% since Sunday, according to CoinGecko.

*Average Ethereum Gas Price Over the last three years.* Source: Etherscan

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Drama

💦 Fantom Shakes Off Fears of a ‘Catastrophic Liquidation Cascade’

Things Got a Little Hairy When a Whale Got Liquidated

By Samuel Haig

NEAR MISS The Fantom network has dodged a near miss. For the last few days, the low-cost Layer 1 blockchain has been the subject of fearful speculation it couldn’t handle the liquidation of a whale in its native token, FTM, and might trigger a wave of liquidations.

LIQUIDITY Despite the majority of the investor’s position being liquidated in batches on May 1, the price of FTM has since rebounded 20%, showing that there was sufficient liquidity to absorb the capitulation.

BULLISH? One investor, CryptoDinduz, expressed the relief of many: “FTM just dealt with a catastrophic liquidation cascade without going down for a second. Am I the only one that’s still bullish?”

*FTM/USD weekly chart.* Source: TradingView

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Exploit Flurry

🦹🏻‍♂️ Spate of Exploits Snares Rari Capital and Saddle Finance for $90M

Escalation of Malicious Attacks Shows No Sign of Abating

By yyctrader

PROWL While all eyes were on Yuga Labs’ Otherside mint over the weekend, the malicious actors that prowl DeFi didn’t take any time off. In the early hours of Apr. 30, decentralized lending protocol Rari Capital was hit by a re-entrancy attack, resulting in a loss of $80M worth of Ether from the protocol’s Fuse lending pools.

EXPLOIT All borrowing was halted once the exploit was flagged by audit firm BlockSec.

RE-ENTRANCY A re-entrancy attack refers to a vulnerability in smart contracts that allows an attacker to loop withdrawals inside a legitimate transaction. DeFi security firm Hacxyk released an analysis of the exploit shortly after it occurred.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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NFT Galleries

🖼 SuperRare is Coming to SoHo

By Jason Levin

POP-UP A few years before NFTs captured global attention, NFT marketplace SuperRare hosted pop-up art exhibits at major tech conferences like DevCon. People were mostly confused and uninterested.

SCIENCE FICTION We’re about to see how much times have changed. SuperRare is planning to open a gallery at 417 West Broadway in SoHo, New York on May 19, the company said in a press release Thursday. The first exhibit’s theme is science-fiction and futurism, and it will feature a curated selection of 15 SuperRare NFT artists. It will run through Aug. 28.

INCLUSIVE The gatekeeping involved in running galleries and museums might seem counter to the idea of an open and inclusive crypto ecosystem, but SuperRare CEO said this curation continues to be important in the NFT space.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Domains

📈 Ethereum Name Service Domains Surpass 1M and Stoke Burn Rate

By Samuel Haig

MILESTONE Demand for Ethereum Name Service domain names is surging. On May 2, the blockchain-based naming protocol known as ENS surpassed the milestone of one million created names.

RECORD A record 63,723 names were registered on May 2, and10,000 to 20,000 were registered daily over the past seven days according to Dune Analytics. Prior to the surge, the daily record for new ENS registrations was 7,125 on Nov. 10, 2021.

PROTOCOL The spike in registrations has seen ENS overtake OpenSea to rank as Ethereum’s top gas-burning protocol for the past 24 hours with 1,274 ETH destroyed.

*Ethereum burn leaderboard.* Source: Ultra Sound Money

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 The Defiant Weekly: BAYC, APE, the OtherSide and Kodas - everything you need to know

📺 Quick Take: Otherside Hangover - what the hell happened?! BAYC-hem

Elsewhere

🔗 NFTs Are Dead? OpenSea Just Set a New Daily Trading Record of $476M in Ethereum: Decrypt

This weekend’s launch of deeds for virtual land plots on Otherside—a metaverse game from the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club—generated hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of NFT sales and played havoc with the Ethereum network.

🔗 Crypto Stories: Ethan Lou shares experience of crypto conference in North Korea: CoinTelegraph

A Canadian journalist recounts the story of when he went to North Korea to participate in a crypto conference that was full of surprises.

🔗 Devconnect recap, Optimism token and much more: The Daily Gwei

The Daily Gwei Refuel #355 - Ethereum Updates.

Uniswap Labs 🦄 @Uniswap

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The DeFi Titan⚔️ @billionxdev

Uniswap V3 is conceived as the most successful AMM protocol. But few people know it can also be an Option protocol. Want to know a secret? Here is my research on Uniswap V3 (@Uniswap)🧵👇

Trending in The Defiant

Anything But Boring: How Yuga Labs Became a $4B NFT Juggernaut in a Year NFTs are irrational. They don’t make any sense.
DAO Buys a Team in Ice Cube’s Basketball League On Apr. 28, the DeGods NFT community acquired a basketball team in Ice Cube’s BIG3 league.
DeFi Lender Goldfinch Hits $100M in Loans as Crypto-to-Real World Model Picks Up Steam Crypto is a circular system where whales borrow money against their assets to pump up ponzi schemes and dump those tokens on retail traders betting those coins are the future of finance.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, Jason, Levin, 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

🤯 Soaring Gas, Suspicion, and 50,000 NFTs…