📉 Alt Layer 1 Trade Unravels as Ethereum Killers Sink Below ETH

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

News

• Alt Layer 1 Trade Unravels as Ethereum Killers Sink Below ETH
• Shapeshifting Azuki Founder Outfoxes Himself with Strange Confession

Opinion

• Web3 DEVs Must Heed the Lessons of Past Tech Bustups

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with Diego Fernandez:

Video

• 📺 Hot Stuff: UPDATE: UST & LUNA crash harder, 8000 ETH moved by Azuki?

Elsewhere

• UST’s Do Kwon Was Behind Earlier Failed Stablecoin, Ex-Terra Colleagues Say: CoinDesk
• Cathie Wood's Ark Invest Grabs More Than Half a Million Coinbase Shares as Exchange's Stock Plummets: CoinDesk
• BlackRock And Citadel Deny Trading Cratering Stablecoin: Forbes
• In few minutes Tether will coordinate with a 3rd party to perform a chain swap: Tether

Trending in The Defiant

• 🌪 Do Kwon Humbled as LUNA Spirals and UST Suffers ‘Lehman Moment’
• 🐄 MakerDAO’s Real World Push Gains Moo-mentum with Aussie Beef Play
• 💰 Coinbase Will Keep Customer Balances in Event of Bankruptcy

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Layer 1s

😬 Alt Layer 1 Trade Unravels as Ethereum Killers Sink Below ETH

Solana, Fantom and Other Layer 1s Ride the Storm

By Samuel Haig

LAYER 1s The would-be Ethereum killers are getting killed. Fantom, Solana, Avalanche, Cardano… These Layer 1 networks are getting walloped by the gravitational pull of the crypto crash this week with Terra’s implosion. They are down between 40% and 60% in the past five days, while Ethereum’s ETH outperforms them all, falling by a still eye-popping 26% in that time.

IMAGINATION In 2021 they captured the imagination of investors. They were humorously dubbed Ethereum killers because they aimed to be faster, cheaper, and more efficient than the mother network.

BEARS Users and investors piled in, sending the likes of Solana, Fantom, and Avalanche soaring while capturing billions in total value locked (TVL). They played a huge role in taking decentralized finance to the next level. Now they’re falling prey to the bears just like everything else in crypto, while ETH and BTC hold up better.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT Collections

👺 Shapeshifting Azuki Founder Outfoxes Himself with Strange Confession

Azuki's Floor Price Plunged 68% After Vagabond Disclosed Marketing Tactics

By Jason Levin

FLOOR PLUNGE “I fucked up,” said Azuki founder @Zagabond. The market agreed. On Monday, Azuki, an Anime-themed NFT collection of avatars, was at 23 ETH, ($58,558). Now it sits at a floor of 8 ETH, a 68% fall.

IDENTITIES The cause? A strange confession from its founder that revealed how he used fake identities to promote past NFT collections, and rake in a cool $3M in profits on his way to the exit. Zagabond, laid out his boastful testimonial about his rug pulling ways in a blog post.

CASHING IN Over a span of two months, Zagabond created CryptoPhunks, Tendies, and Zunk — and quickly abandoned them after cashing in. He describes his tactics as “learnings” that helped him create Azuki.

FICTIONAL DEVELOPER For each project, Zagabond used separate identities ranging from a fictional intern known as @philiptheintern for CryptoPhunks, to a female developer named @0xMandy for CryptoZunks. He claims that these identities were crucial to building the product’s stories. The collections’ branding and art tested the border between homage and appropriation.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 Hot Stuff: UPDATE: UST & LUNA crash harder, 8000 ETH moved by Azuki?

Opinion

🧐 Web3 DEVs Must Heed the Lessons of Past Tech Bustups

The Dotcom Crash Looms Large Again

Guest writer Alex Shipp finds an opportune time to address key takeaways from the past.

ONLINE UNIVERSE Thirteen years out from its conception, cryptocurrency stands in a peculiar place — several iterations of creativity and sophistication beyond its original form, and many more removed from its most valuable promise: a decentralized, permissionless online universe owned and governed by its users.

COMMUNITIES Not unlike the dotcom boom in the late ’90s, crypto has a lot going for it. DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs continue to inspire the imaginations of leading developer teams and enthusiastic communities alike. And the tap of innovation shows no signs of drying up: powerful and disruptive decentralized applications are rarely more than a year of development away. On the human side, technical know-how and efficient fundraising methods are well-established.

OBSTACLES But there remains one major obstacle that separates development teams and their platforms from adoption: critical infrastructures like Ethereum and other Layer 1 blockchains to serve the computational demands of DeFi.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Elsewhere

🔗 UST’s Do Kwon Was Behind Earlier Failed Stablecoin, Ex-Terra Colleagues Say: CoinDesk

Do Kwon, the CEO of Terra creator Terraform Labs, was one of the pseudonymous co-founders behind the failed algorithmic stablecoin Basis Cash, CoinDesk has learned.

🔗 Cathie Wood's Ark Invest Grabs More Than Half a Million Coinbase Shares as Exchange's Stock Plummets: CoinDesk

Three funds of Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management bought a combined total of 546,579 shares of Coinbase Global (COIN), Ark said in an email on Thursday.

🔗 BlackRock And Citadel Deny Trading Cratering Stablecoin: Forbes

Asset manager BlackRock and hedge fund giant Citadel Securities have denied trading the troubled TerraUSD (UST), in separate emails sent exclusively to Forbes.

Tether @Tether_toIn few minutes Tether will coordinate with a 3rd party to perform a chain swap, converting from Tron TRC20 to Ethereum ERC20, for 1B USDt and from Tron TRC20 to Avalanche, for 20M USDt. The #tether total supply will not change during this process.7:27 AM ∙ May 12, 20224,000Likes813Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• 🌪 Do Kwon Humbled as LUNA Spirals and UST Suffers ‘Lehman Moment’“I understand the last 72 hours have been extremely tough on all of you,” Do Kwon tweeted Wednesday morning. “Extremely tough” will be an understatement for users who trusted their savings on a stablecoin – emphasis on the word “stable” – to now own only a small fraction of their initial holdings.
• 🐄 MakerDAO’s Real World Push Gains Moo-mentum with Aussie Beef Play It ain’t crypto, but MakeDAO is making strides in its push to finance off-chain business activities. On May 9, one of the project’s vaults was used to finance a shipment of Australian beef to Hong Kong.
• 💰 Coinbase Will Keep Customer Balances in Event of BankruptcyCoinbase will take your coins if it goes bankrupt. That was the rather jarring message in the first quarter earnings release for the leading U.S.based centralized exchange.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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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