Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• Three Arrows’ Su Zhu Breaks Silence Accusing Liquidators of Playing Dirty

• WZRDS Project Punishes Flippers By Burning Listed NFTS

• Gnosis Safe Raises $100M And Rebrands As Safe

Markets

• Soaring Inflation Wallops Crypto and Stocks as Investors Gird for Rate Hikes

Podcast

🎙Listen to this week’s podcast with Arthur Breitman here:

Video

• Quick Take: The Euro finally reclaims its dollar peg. Huzzah!

DeFi Primers

• What Are Layer 1 and Layer 2 Blockchain Networks?

Elsewhere

• Solana is Launching a Phone? | Co-Founders Anatoly & Raj: Bankless

• Multicoin Capital announces its third crypto fund worth $430 million: The Block

• Post-Merge, If Lido Becomes Dominant, What Does That Mean for Ethereum? – Ep. 372: Unchained

• #AvalancheHouse Brooklyn is almost here! This weekend, the

  @AVAXAndrettiFE team and leaders in blockchain will be joining the community for two days of sharing ideas, building relationships and looking ahead to the future: Avalanche

Trending in The Defiant

• Crypto Contagion: Mapping the fallout from $LUNA, 3AC, Celsius, Voyager and BlockFi

• Celsius Partner Details Inner Workings of ‘Ponzi Scheme’ in Lawsuit

• Voyager Delivers Painful Lesson on Perils of Counterparty Risk in Bankruptcy Drama

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Crypto Funds

😠 Three Arrows’ Su Zhu Breaks Silence Accusing Liquidators of Playing Dirty

By Aleksandar Gilbert

BAD FAITH Su Zhu, the co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, has accused the hedge fund’s liquidators of operating in bad faith, breaking a month-long silence during which his firm suffered a stunning fall from grace.

SCREENSHOTS “Sadly, our good faith to cooperate with the Liquidators was met with baiting,” Zhu wrote. The tweet included screenshots of a pair of emails his attorney had sent liquidator Russell Crumpler of Teneo.

RUMORS The last time Zhu tweeted or otherwise posted any public comments was on June 14, as rumors swirled that his $10B fund was insolvent. At the time, Su tweeted cryptically, “We are in the process of communicating with relevant parties and fully committed to working this out.” Who those parties were and what “this” was were left unsaid. But it didn’t take much time for people to figure it out. 

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Action

😬 Soaring Inflation Wallops Crypto and Stocks as Investors Gird for Rate Hikes

By yyctrader

NEWS Consumer prices in the United States rose a scorching 9.1% in June, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 830am ET.

RATES Coming in above the estimate of 8.8%, the elevated numbers make it all but certain that the Federal Reserve will continue to hike interest rates in its bid to tackle inflation. Indeed, the CME’s FedWatch tool indicates an 85% probability of another 0.75% increase at the Fed’s July meeting.

EXPOSURE Ether is down 9% in the last seven days and Bitcoin has dropped 4.5%, according to CoinGecko. The cryptocurrencies have been closely tracking stocks for the last few quarters. As investors have reduced their exposure to macroeconomic risk, they have sold off crypto along with equities.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

DeFi Saver offers convenient and safe access to borrowing, leveraging and yield farming, available using DeFi's most trusted protocols such as Maker, Aave and Liquity through a unified interface with additional automation and loan shifting options for complete management.

The famous DeFi app first started off as CDP Saver in early 2019 as a tool to help users protect their Maker CDPs (now Vaults) from liquidation and the dreaded 13% liquidation penalty. As DeFi started growing, they pivoted to DeFi Saver and over the past 3 years integrated protocols such as Aave, Liquity, Compound, Reflexer, Yearn, mStable and as of latest Convex.

As a complementary protocol to Curve, Convex brings users enhanced yield on their liquidity, and is the latest addition to DeFi Saver’s Smart Savings dashboard. With simple 1-transaction asset supply to the most famous yield farming protocols, it offers an easy access to some of the most popular DeFi protocol liquidity pools. The option to move your funds between pools and integrated protocols in a single transaction makes the dashboard especially convenient.

With an ever more expanding set of features, DeFi Saver is slowly becoming a truly robust solution for DeFi asset management with a safe and low-risk approach.

Check out this essential piece of anyone’s DeFi toolkit at DeFiSaver.com.

NFT Collections

🧙🏻‍♂️ WZRDS Project Punishes Flippers By Burning Listed NFTS

By Jason Levin

SACRIFICES Ritual sacrifices are being carried out on the blockchain.  An NFT collection called WZRDS has implemented a novel burn mechanism that allows NFT holders to vote to burn WZRDS NFTs listed below a certain price. 

WALLETS All NFT holders have to do to keep their NFTs safe is to stake them or just hold them in their wallets.  The floor price of the collection has risen from 0.1 ETH on July 8 to 3.2 ETH on July 12.

STAKED Launched on June 29, WZRDS is a collection themed around the fictional world of the Kingdom of Tyrol.  There were originally 10,000 NFTs, but over 50% are staked and are “exploring the forest.”  At least 1,000 owners of burnt WZRD NFTs have received new Half-Skull of Wizard NFTs, which are trading for 0.17 ETH.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Crypto Fundraising

💰Gnosis Safe Raises $100M And Rebrands As Safe

By Aleksandar Gilbert

REBRAND Multi-signature wallet protocol Gnosis Safe has raised $100M in a funding round led by venture capital firm 1kx and will rebrand as “Safe”.

HOLDERS Gnosis Safe users – a group that includes Bitfinex, BitDAO and Vitalik Buterin – manage more than $38B in assets, according to data from Dune analytics (that figure was just over $100B in February). Earlier this year, holders of Gnosis’ governance token GNO voted to spin off Gnosis Safe.

PROPOSAL “In order to get Gnosis Safe to the next level, an ecosystem should be established around this new account standard,” co-founder Lukas Schor argued in the proposal to separate the protocol from Gnosis. “The spin-off will also enable the Gnosis Safe project to have an even stronger focus on its mission: increase adoption of smart-contract-based accounts.” 

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Explainers

👨🏻‍🏫 What Are Layer 1 and Layer 2 Blockchain Networks?

By Rahul Nambiampurath

SMART CONTRACTS As the smart contract wars heat up, Layer 1 vs. Layer 2 blockchains are differentiating. From Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake blockchains, each has its own way to scale to accommodate transaction volume. 

SCALING All computer networks rely on bandwidth to relay data, including blockchain networks. However, the latter are more susceptible to a bandwidth scaling problem than highly centralized networks:

What Is the Blockchain Scalability Problem?

• Blockchain networks are decentralized, composed of nodes (computers in a network holding the entire ledger). This means that each node has to exert considerable computing, bandwidth, and storage resources to provide and maintain access to the ledger.

• The more decentralized a blockchain is, the more nodes it will have. While this redundancy is great for the network’s security, it is not good for its speed. That’s because more nodes are contributing to transaction verification. 

BALANCE This balancing act between security, decentralization, and scalability is known as the Blockchain Trilemma. Simply put, if a blockchain network is highly centralized, it is less secure and more scalable. The low node count would make transactions faster because the computing power would be less distributed. 

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 The Euro finally reclaims its dollar peg. Huzzah!

Shoutout

📢 Web3 with a16z is a new podcast about the next internet, from a16z crypto. Click here to listen now. 

We know you’ve been hit over the head with discussions on web3 this year, which is why we’re so excited to recommend the definitive podcast for understanding and going deeper on crypto and web3. 

It is hosted by Sonal Chokshi, former showrunner and longtime host of the a16z Podcast; along with frequent guest appearances and hosting by Chris Dixon. 

Elsewhere

🔗 Solana is Launching a Phone? | Co-Founders Anatoly & Raj: Bankless

Solana just released a flagship Android phone for web3 called Saga. And it really begs the question: does a blockchain need to have its own phone? Well, we brought on Co-Founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal to make the case.

🔗 Multicoin Capital announces its third crypto fund worth $430 million: The Block

Multicoin Capital, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, announced on Tuesday its third fund worth $430 million.

🔗 Post-Merge, If Lido Becomes Dominant, What Does That Mean for Ethereum? – Ep. 372: Unchained

Ryan Berckmans, Ethereum investor and community member, and Alexandre Bergeron, Bitcoin investor, discuss Lido’s dominance as a liquid staking provider, whether that issue can be resolved, and how it could be a centralizing force for Ethereum.

Avalanche 🔺 @avalancheavax

#AvalancheHouse Brooklyn is almost here! This weekend, the @AVAXAndrettiFE team and leaders in blockchain will be joining the community for two days of sharing ideas, building relationships and looking ahead to the future. 🎟️ Get your tickets now! avalanche.houseAvalanche House | FE Brooklyn: July 15 - July 16Participate in keynotes and panels, networking, live music, and more. Accelerate progress towards a Web3-enabled future.avalanche.house

July 12th 2022

161 Retweets345 Likes

Trending in The Defiant

• Crypto Contagion: Mapping the fallout from $LUNA, 3AC, Celsius, Voyager and BlockFi You’ll no doubt be hearing the word contagion from all corners but didn’t we just escape the clutches of the pandemic. Well yes. But crypto is really like a house of mirrors where nothing is ever what it seems.

• Celsius Partner Details Inner Workings of ‘Ponzi Scheme’ in Lawsuit The crisis engulfing Celsius, the embattled centralized crypto lending platform, took a strange turn on July 7 when a former partner that helped manage assets for the firm accused it of running a “Ponzi scheme.”

• Voyager Delivers Painful Lesson on Perils of Counterparty Risk in Bankruptcy Drama In late June, the top executives at Voyager Digital, a cryptocurrency exchange with 3.5M users, knew they were in deep trouble. Three Arrows Capital, the Singapore-based hedge fund, owed it hundreds of millions worth of crypto and showed no signs of servicing the debt.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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.

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.