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DAO Governance

👨🏼‍🍳 SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ May Pocket a Third of All Tokens Paid to Staff

Battle Over Howard's Hiring Intensifies Amid Vote by DAO

By Samuel Haig

THIRD The proposed new “head chef” of SushiSwap could pocket more than a third of the crypto exchange’s total SUSHI coins allocated to staff over the next four years, according to an analysis of the compensation package by The Defiant.

TARGETS The token would have to hit some ambitious targets and trigger performance bonuses to reach that level. If you add up salary, guaranteed SUSHI, and incentives, using current prices, the tally comes to a potential $10.6M payday.

TENSIONS The news may enflame tensions in the SushiSwap community as it clashes over the proposed hiring of Jonathan Howard to head the fifth-largest decentralized exchange and ease a leadership crisis that’s been brewing since last year.

PRESSURE The donnybrook also casts a spotlight on the thorny governance challenges DAOs are grappling with as the bear market cranks up fiscal pressure on projects. SushiSwap is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Analysis

🐂 Summer Rally Spurs Hopes Bear Market is Shifting into Bull Run — But is It?

By Claire Gu

RALLY When does a bear morph into a bull? That’s the question crypto investors are asking as the fire and brimstone of the last three months has suddenly given way to a rally.

GAUDY This month, the market seems to be gone on a run. Ether has skyrocketed an astonishing 50% in the last 30 days, Bitcoin has popped 18%, and other DeFi blue chips — Polkadot, Uniswap, Aave — are posting gaudy performances of their own. In a throwback to last summer, Solana has soared 80% in the last month.

*Ether has outpaced Bitcoin* *since mid July.* Source: Defiant Terminal

CROSSCURRENTS Now the question on everyone’s mind is: Is the worst over? Is it time to get back in? While it’s hard to navigate the crosscurrents of a shifting market, studying previous market downtrends is always helpful to give us some reference as to what the end of the bear would look like. Yet that’s easier said than done.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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Stablecoins

🌈 MakerDAO’s Quest for ‘The One, True DAI’ Drives Development of New Feature

By Aleksandar Gilbert

LAYER 2s Do you really own DAI? If you aren’t on Ethereum or a handful of select Layer 2 blockchains, the answer is likely “no,” according to MakerDAO, the organization behind the fourth-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

CANONICAL DAI In a blog post published without much fanfare last week, MakerDAO detailed “canonical DAI” — “the one, true DAI,” according to Sam McPherson, a member of the organization’s protocol engineering team.

ROLLOUT “This is just sort of a first step in our phased rollout of the entire Maker protocol,” McPherson told The Defiant. “Currently, we’re just on Ethereum, and it’s our goal to support all these chains where the users are. We want Maker to be usable by retail users that maybe can’t pay for the gas fees on Ethereum. … canonical DAI is just one of the steps we need to take to get there.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT Roundup

💰 Yuga Labs to Collect 5% Royalty On Meebits

By yyctrader

MONETIZE It was bound to happen eventually. After buying the rights to CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs in March and bringing on Noah Davis from Christies to manage the Punks brand, Yuga Labs is making moves to monetize its purchase.

ROYALTY On July 28, Yuga Labs said that it would immediately start collecting a 5% royalty on all secondary sales of Meebits. Following the move, CryptoPunks is now the only major NFT collection that doesn’t charge royalties on secondary sales, though perhaps not for long.

FUNDING Web3 identity startup Unstoppable Domains has raised $65M in Series A funding. The round was led by Pantera Capital and values the company at $1B. Similar to ENS domains, Unstoppable allows users to purchase NFT-based domain names for their blockchain wallets.

Bridges

🌉 Synapse to Roll Out Blockchain as Part of Major Upgrade

By Owen Fernau

DEBATE There’s long been a debate in crypto about when a token is needed for a project to flourish. Now, more projects are asking themselves when a blockchain is needed, and the answer increasingly appears to be yes.

TESTNET Enter Synapse, which bills itself as a universal interoperability protocol that enables secure cross-chain communication. Synapse introduced a plan to deploy its own blockchain on July 28, saying that the testnet would come within a few weeks with a mainnet launch “shortly after.”

EXECUTION The chain is part of an overhaul of the protocol, which Synapse is calling its V2. The blockchain will be an optimistic rollup, like Arbitrum and Optimism, serving as an execution layer for smart contract-enabled transactions. Transactions will settle on Ethereum and as such transaction fees will be paid in ETH.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 The Open Metaverse Show: Juicebox supercharges funding, guest starring Metatope

Elsewhere

🔗 Crypto Lender Voyager Ordered by US Regulators to Stop Misleading Customers: Coindesk

Crypto lender Voyager Digital has been ordered by U.S. banking regulators to stop making incorrect claims that the company was insured by the government.

🔗 Variant raises $450 million for two new venture funds: The Block

Crypto venture investment firm Variant has raised $450 million across two new funds targeting the beleaguered market for Web3 and decentralized finance.

🔗 "StarkWare isn't Leaving Ethereum" - Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny | EthCC Experience: Bankless

Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience.

Aave @AaveAave

Voting is now open, ready set GHO snapshot.org/#/aave.eth/pro…

Aave @AaveAave

Greetings AAVE fam, the snapshot for the GHO proposal is now public. It's time to read📄with voting🗳️ starting tomorrow https://t.co/HCbFLZ3O4G

Trending in The Defiant

Defiant Data Dive: Airdrops are Mostly Fool’s Gold…But They Have Their Uses Who doesn’t love free money? Airdrops have become one of the most popular features of crypto. By giving away free tokens to investors, they epitomized the easy money to be made in the blockchain world. Airdrops also became a potent way to draw users and build critical mass on platforms.
EthCC Journal: Exploring the Network State and a Decentralized Future As the summer sun shone down on the Parisian streets, builders, creators, and everyone in between made their way to this year’s edition of EthCC.
The Merge Draws Ever Closer as Ethereum Passes Another Critical Test Passing the latest in a series of critical tests ahead of The Merge, Ethereum completed the tenth mainnet shadow fork on July 27. The result: It went off without a hitch.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was 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. 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

👨🏼‍🍳 SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ May Pocket a…