🔥 Almost $1B Burned: A Month Into EIP-1559

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

News

• Two DeFi Projects Shut Down and Pledge to Return Users’ Funds
• $830M Burned: A Month Into EIP-1559

Special Research Report

• Beyond Crypto: Why Decentralized Exchanges May Eventually Trade Everything

Video

• Quick Take: What is LOOT? - new gen. NFTs and $BTC now Legal Tender in El Salvador

Podcast

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

Links

• El Salvador purchases first 200 BTC, President Bukele confirms: CoinTelegraph
• Caitlin Long takes aim at The New York Times over crypto 'alarm' article: CoinTelegraph
• Core Developer Apprenticeship Program: The Second Cohort: Ethereum Foundation
• DeXe is Integrating Chainlink Price Feeds and Chainlink Keepers to Power Charts and Limit Swaps: Dexe Network
• Urban Anomalies. 50 images shot primarily in NYC over the span of a decade. Weird AF: OpenSea
• The Vega Token Listing & LP Incentives: SushiSwap
• The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship: The Guardian

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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🙌 Together with:

• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at this link.
• 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, 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.

DeFi Wipeouts

😧 Two DeFi Projects Shut Down and Pledge to Return Users’ Funds

NEWS Two DeFi projects tasked with helping traders in the space hedge risk announced they are shutting down on Saturday.

TOKEN HOLDERS Cover, an insurance protocol, and Ruler, a debt market without liquidations, lost their developer team and determined that they could not continue, according to a blog post authored by a cofounder of both projects who goes by the online name of DeFi Ted. The projects pledged all treasury assets would return to token holders.

CORE “The decision to do this did not come easy and is a final decision the remaining team made after reviewing the path forward, after the core developers suddenly left the projects,” DeFi Ted wrote.

RULER As of Monday morning, DeFi Pulse shows a total value locked in the Cover Protocol of $836M dollars and $668,000in Ruler. The amount locked in Cover is relatively unchanged since Friday but Ruler is down considerably, from $2.7M. The Ruler token has fallen precipitously since Friday, from $11 to $0.75. The COVER token has fallen from $275 on Friday to $208 Monday morning.

Seven-day RULER price chart from CoinMarketCap.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

EIP-1559 Update

🔥 $830M Burned: A Month Into EIP-1559

TLDR It’s been a month, almost to the day, since Ethereum’s EIP-1559 upgrade went live, and the milestone was met with the first-ever deflationary day for ETH, where more of the cryptocurrency was burned than issued.

UPGRADE The upgrade promised more predictable gas fees, an improved user experience and the potential for a lower ETH inflation rate. Here, we take stock of the first 30 days of the “ultra-sound money” regime.

STELLAR ETH has enjoyed a stellar month, trading 35% higher at $3920 Monday afternoon New York time. Let’s dive into the numbers. Metamask, the most popular Ethereum browser wallet, was quick to add support for EIP-1559 transactions. However, hardware wallets such as those made by Ledger and Trezor are yet to enable EIP1559. Consequently, security-conscious DeFi users continue to utilize the old gas estimation system and only half of the transactions on the Ethereum network currently take advantage of EIP-1559, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Deep Dive

In this special research report, Momir Amidzic of IOSG Ventures analyzes how decentralized exchanges have defied their centralized rivals and demonstrated the value of using Ethereum-inspired blockchains to trade tokens. Now they are poised to bring the same efficiencies to other tradable assets. This primer is chock full of datapoints, definitions, and explanations of the forces at work in DEXes and will be a handy reference for all Defiers.

📈 Beyond Crypto: Why Decentralized Exchanges May Eventually Trade Everything

DOOMED Early on, many believed DEXes would stand no chance against CEX giants in terms of cryptocurrency trading. How in the world could simple constant product AMM replace the likes of Binance and Coinbase. Moreover, DEX is so expensive to use. Doomed to failure, right?

OUTPERFORM Wrong. Fast forward two years, DEXes are still inefficient relative to CEXes and trading is still expensive. Even so, few question the value of the AMM model and DEXs combined market cap is worth tens of billions of dollars with Uniswap alone being valued at $15B. The moral of the story: Many failed to see how DEXes can outperform CEXes.

DOUBT Still, even now we continue to see the same pattern of doubt. This time it’s all about derivative exchanges. Can DEXes compete with giants such as FTX? FTX, after all, has an amazing user experience, efficient and robust liquidation, and cross margin engines, it is available 24/7, provides fair and non-exclusive access to services (upon completing the KYC process) with extremely low cost for the users.

ADVANTAGES Indeed, centralized exchanges such as FTX will likely remain the most efficient derivatives venues in the medium term. But does that mean DEXes will have to become as efficient as FTX to get significant traction? This time we should avoid making the same wrong assumptions or underestimate the advantages of smart contract-based exchanges. What are those advantages?

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 Quick Take: What is LOOT? - new gen. NFTs and $BTC now Legal Tender in El Salvador

Links

🔗 El Salvador purchases first 200 BTC, President Bukele confirms: CoinTelegraph

El Salvador president Nayib Bukele confirmed Monday that his government has purchased its first 200 Bitcoin (BTC) ahead of the Sept. 7 rollout of a new law set to make the cryptocurrency legal tender.

🔗 Caitlin Long takes aim at The New York Times over crypto 'alarm' article: CoinTelegraph

Avanti Bank and Trust CEO Caitlin Long has posted a rebuttal to a recent New York Times article claiming that crypto and decentralized finance is “disrupting the banking industry” so fast regulators can’t keep up.

🔗 Core Developer Apprenticeship Program: The Second Cohort: Ethereum Foundation

Does development of the core protocols that power the Ethereum blockchain excite you? Are you interested in getting involved at the most fundemental and technical levels of the Ethereum protocol? I am excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for the second cohort of the Core Developer Apprenticeship Program (CDAP)!

🔗 DeXe is Integrating Chainlink Price Feeds and Chainlink Keepers to Power Charts and Limit Swaps: Dexe Network

In an important milestone for social trading in DeFi, theDexe Network is integrating industry-leading oracle network Chainlinkto help power multiple platform features.

Ben Zank @ben_zankUrban Anomalies. 50 images shot primarily in NYC over the span of a decade. Weird AF. My first major collection will officially launch this Monday at 12:00 PM EST. Floor is .33 ETH with varying prices and two currently open for bidding. opensea.io/collection/urb…

7:58 PM ∙ Sep 3, 2021341Likes96Retweets

Vega Protocol @vegaprotocol1/ Last Friday the VEGA token launched on Uniswap v3 and SushiSwap. We also announced $VEGA incentives for SushiSwap liquidity providers. Here is a quick recap of the initiative... 🍣📢 blog.vega.xyz/unlocking-vega…

blog.vega.xyzThe VEGA Token Listing & LP IncentivesThe first VEGA tokens unlock on 03 September 2021, at 00:00 UTC, and we are excited to announce the initial listings, along with new incentives for bootstrapping liquidity for VEGA tokens within…3:23 PM ∙ Sep 6, 202178Likes19Retweets

🔗 The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship: The Guardian

On the evening of 7 December 2010, in a hushed San Francisco auditorium, former Google engineer Patri Friedman sketched out the future of humanity. The event was hosted by the Thiel Foundation, established four years earlier by the arch-libertarian PayPal founder Peter Thiel to “defend and promote freedom in all its dimensions”.

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✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale, YYCtrader, and edited by Bailey Reutzel and Edward Robinson. 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