Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

News

• Washington Forgets About Crypto With Infrastructure Bill Set to Pass

• Circle Dials Back Risk in USDC Reserves Ahead of Going Public

• Defiers Are Apeing Into Avalanche Pushing Benqi Finance to $1B in TVL

Video

• Quick Take: What are fractionalized NFTs and why is Feisty Doge $NFD mooning?

Links

• MicroStrategy Acquires 3,907 Additional Bitcoins with Proceeds from ATM Facility Sales: MicroStrategy

• Project Galaxy Announces “Shadowy Super Coder” NFT Pack with $300 Million Worth of Perks: Medium

• Penguin Finance Will Integrate Chainlink VRF to Secure the Penguin Arena Gamified dApp: Medium

• Sushi Joins Avalanche Rush Incentive Program with Combined $15M Allocation: Avalanche

• Philippine regulator tells Axie Infinity players they must pay tax on income from game: CoinTelegraph

Podcast

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

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• The DeFi Pulse Index, by Index Coop - DPI is the easiest way to capture the upside of DeFi with the benefit of diversification.  Buy DPI today on your favorite DEX.

Crypto State

🏛 Washington Forgets About Crypto With Infrastructure Bill Set to Pass

TLDR The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, on Tuesday committed to pass the President’s bipartisan infrastructure bill by the end of September. Many in the cryptocurrency industry in the past few weeks have rallied to fight the legislation under the argument that the Internal Revenue Service will place excessive reporting requirements for participants in blockchain’s consensus-making process. But D.C. is in a giant political quagmire right now and the last thing on its mind is Bitcoin, Ethereum and their offspring.

MISGUIDED “This whole package is at the whim of broader politics which is one of the reasons why attaching a provision like this to a 2,600-page infrastructure bill is just baseline misguided,” Miller Whitehouse-Levine, the policy director at the DeFi Education Fund told The Defiant.

SO WHAT That’s too bad for blockchain investors, because a new definition of what it means to be a cryptocurrency broker is set to pass within President Biden’s $1 billion infrastructure plan. The bill passed the Senate in early August.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Stablecoins

💵 Circle Dials Back Risk in USDC Reserves Ahead of Going Public

NEWS Corporate debt is no longer good enough for Circle, the blockchain powerhouse. That’s the upshot of a move Circle announced on Sunday as it unveiled a rebalancing of the reserves that support USDC, its widely used stablecoin. Circle, a peer-to-peer payment platform powered by blockchain technology, will now solely use cash and short-duration U.S. Treasury instruments instead of a mix of government and corporate bonds. 

POOL By committing to the lowest risk financial instruments on the planet, Circle is abruptly reversing direction in its reserve policy. In May, it expanded its pool beyond cash and cash equivalents to include unsecured corporate bonds and commercial paper, which are ultra-short term debt instruments. According to a July report, private sector debt accounted for 14% of the company’s reserves.

From Circle’s Reserve Account Report for May 2021

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Jam Session

📺🎙🗯 Join us for a live jam session on #Ethereum Scaling, hosted by @CamiRusso

Tokenomics

🦧 Defiers Are Apeing Into Avalanche Pushing Benqi Finance to $1B in TVL

NEWS Avalanche, a smart contracts platform, now has its first DeFi protocol with $1B in total value locked. The protocol, Benqi Finance, launched just four days ago on Aug. 19 and has been distributing $3M in AVAX tokens to users. AVAX tokens are from Ava Labs, the company that created Avalanche, and the distribution is part of its recent announcement to offer $180M in liquidity mining incentives to DeFi apps built on its blockchain.

MINING Benqi is also running its own liquidity mining program, distributing 20M of its QI tokens during the first 90 days after launch. Benqi is similar to Compound Finance in that it allows users to supply and borrow against assets. 

LAUNCH The stacked AVAX and QI rewards have certainly attracted users — Benqi is Avalanche’s first unicorn in TVL terms. And users don’t appear to be just dumping QI either — the token is up over 390% to $0.28 since launch and boasts a $100M-plus market cap, according to CoinGecko.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

SPONSORED POST

Molly Wintermute Releases Hegic V8888: 0% Trading Fees and Gas Fee-Free Options Trading

Hegic V8888 is live in mainnet: 

https://www.hegic.co/

Hegic is an on-chain peer-to-pool options trading protocol built on Ethereum. With Hegic, DeFi and crypto users can trade 24/7 American, cash-settled, on-chain ETH and WBTC call / put options with no KYC or registration required for trading.

Hegic was founded 1.5 years ago in February, 2020. Hegic V888 (the previous version) was live for 10 months. The results achieved by V888:

● $492,075,000 total volume

● $22M record daily volume

● 6,450 options traded

● 2,825 unique users

● $10,415,000 earned by HEGIC staking lots holders

Introducing Hegic V8888

Trading Options on Hegic V8888

● 0% trading fees: pay only a premium

● 100% gas fee-free options trading

● The lowest prices for ETH and WBTC call / put options

● Auto-exercising of in-the-money options

● Tokenized options for trading on the secondary market

● 90 days is the new maximum period of holding options

Earning Yield on Hegic V8888

● Zero-loss options selling pools with auto-hedging

● x2 higher capital efficiency with flexible collateralization

● Independent pools for selling call and put options

● Individual lock-ups for each liquidity tranche deposited

● Pools’ unrealized profits front-running prevention

● Real-time data on pools APY and P&L per each option sold

Use Hegic now: 

https://www.hegic.co/

Video

📺 Quick Take: What are fractionalized NFTs and why is Feisty Doge $NFD mooning?

Links

🔗 MicroStrategy Acquires 3,907 Additional Bitcoins with Proceeds from ATM Facility Sales: MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is the largest independent publicly-traded business intelligence company, with the leading enterprise analytics platform.

🔗 Project Galaxy Announces “Shadowy Super Coder” NFT Pack with $300 Million Worth of Perks: Medium

Project Galaxy partners with Tenderly, Alchemy, Polygon, Gitcoin, Ankr, Parsiq, Torus, Quicknode, Curvegrid, and OneKey to offer “Shadowy Super Coder” NFT Pack to over 100,000 eligible blockchain developers. The package includes a specially-designed Shadowy Coder NFT, and various exclusive perks that are worth $300 million USD.

🔗 Penguin Finance Will Integrate Chainlink VRF to Secure the Penguin Arena Gamified dApp: Medium

We’re excited to announce that Penguin Finance — the leading gamified DeFi hub on Avalanche — will integrate Chainlink Verifiable Random Function (VRF) on the Avalanche blockchain.

🔗 #AvalancheRush is welcoming a new member to the lineup!: @avalancheavax

Avalanche 🔺 @avalancheavax

#AvalancheRush is welcoming a new member to the lineup! Hope you’re coming with an appetite because @SushiSwap is now on the menu. The largest DeFi incentive program ($180M) now just got better. #AVAX Sushi Joins Avalanche Rush Incentive Program with Combined $15M AllocationThe Avalanche Foundation has announced an expansion to its newly-launched Avalanche Rush liquidity mining program to incorporate Sushi, one of the largest DeFi applications by total value locked…medium.com

August 24th 2021

378 Retweets1,344 Likes

🔗 Philippine regulator tells Axie Infinity players they must pay tax on income from game: CoinTelegraph

Amid the enormous success of crypto-powered game Axie Infinity in the Philippines, the local Department of Finance has made clear that it wants a cut of profits generated by playing Axie and other play-to-earn games.

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✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau and Juan Pellicer, and edited by Camila Russo, Bailey Reutzel and Edward Robinson. 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).