🦍 Ape Diaries: A No-Frills Guide to Arbitrum and Optimism

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

News

• Billionaire Steven Cohen Goes Long in $50M Funding Deal for Sports NFT Player
• The Founder of LOOT Wants to Throw Away the Keys to the Contract
• Punks or Toadz? Referential Art Project No.1 in 24-Hour Trading Volume
• dYdX Drops Over $1B to Past Users in Airdrop

Primer

• Ape Diaries: The Early Bird Gets The Airdrop

Video

• Quick Take: Arbitrum TVL mooning with ArbiNYAN - over $2 billion

Links

• Walmart has not partnered with Litecoin, despite reports: The Block
• Institutional traders flock to Solana as demand for ETH and BTC flattens: CoinTelegraph
• Sushi and the Founding Murder: The Generalist
• Everything you need to know about crypto indices: DeFi Pulse
• Trending art NFTs on OpenSea: OpenSea

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• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at this link.
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No-Frills Guide

In this latest edition of Ape Diaries, yyctrader provides an invaluable primer on airdrops, a timely topic given all the action around Arbitrum and Optimism.

🦅 Ape Diaries: The Early Bird Gets The Airdrop

TLDR It has historically paid to be early in DeFi — literally. Traders (including yours truly) are betting that will also be the case on Arbitrum and Optimism.

CULTURE DeFi has long fostered a culture of rewarding early adopters, with a great example being last year’s massive Uniswap airdrop in which the decentralized exchange airdropped 400 UNI tokens to every user that had swapped tokens on the platform. Those who held onto the airdrop, worth $1,200 at the time, are now sitting pretty with tokens valued at close to $10K.

EXPLOSIVE And while DeFi may have started on Ethereum, its explosive growth and resulting network congestion and high transaction fees have led to the rapid expansion of numerous competing Layer-1 blockchains, sidechains, and Layer-2 scaling solutions.

AIRDROPS As these projects compete for users and liquidity, Defiers have a great opportunity to qualify for potential retroactive airdrops by interacting early with various protocols that have not issued tokens yet but may do so in the future. On September 10, users of the Ethereum – Avalanche bridge were airdropped $GB tokens worth $2K at the time.

👉READ THE FULL TUTORIAL IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

NFT Fundraising

🏟 Billionaire Steven Cohen Goes Long in $50M Funding Deal for Sports NFT Player

MOVE Steven Cohen, the billionaire hedge fund manager and onetime crypto skeptic, has jumped into the NFT market in a move that could shake up sports marketing, as well as the Metaverse.

ON-CHAIN DIGITAL, a Metaverse investment venture backed by Cohen, has led a $50M Series A fundraising round in RECUR, a tech startup that develops “on-chain branded experiences” and enables customers to buy, collect, and resell NFTs. The deal bestows RECUR with a valuation of $333M, the company said in a statement released Monday. Cohen is joining RECUR’s board.

SPORTS RECUR is focusing on the burgeoning market for NFTs that offer sports fans a way to own game digital highlights of their favorite teams and players. To that end, the venture formed partnerships with artificial intelligence developer Veritone and CLC, a company that specializes in trademark licensing at universities.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

NFT Games

🗝 The Founder of LOOT Wants to Throw Away the Keys to the Contract

NEWS The founder of Loot wants to throw out his most magical item: the smart contract keys that govern the nascent game.

PROJECT “I worry that the contract owner is and always will be the de facto authority (‘the church’) on Loot, and that this will ultimately harm the project,” its creator, Dom Hofmann, best known for making the social video app Vine, wrote on the Loot governance forum.

GAME A vote is underway to burn the contract keys that govern the NFTs known as LOOT. Loot is a hugely popular NFT project where each NFT minted generates a small list of item names, like those found in a swords-and-sorcery themed game. Loot launched on Aug. 27 and immediately captured the imagination of the NFT community. Loot NFTs (or “bags”) trade for a minimum of 6 ETH right now, according to OpenSea.

BELLWETHER More important than the value, however, may be the fact that the project is an interesting experiment around coordinating people to make something together. If it works, it could be a bellwether for many projects to come.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

NFT Projects

🐸 Punks or Toadz? Referential Art Project No.1 in 24-Hour Trading Volume

NEWS Another day, another NFT project, but with the strong network and idiosyncratic art behind this one, it might be in it for the long haul.

BOXER The new kid on the block is CrypToadz. At 4,873 ETH, over $15M, in weekly trading volume, the project has quickly vaulted to the tenth slot on OpenSea despite launching just two days ago. That’s ahead of major players like entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck’s VeeFriends, and Cool Cats, which boxer Mike Tyson sports on his Twitter.

SO WHAT In terms of 24-hour volume CrypToadz is at the number one slot in trading volume on OpenSea. CrypToadz is the brainchild of the artist Gremplin, who worked on the art for the daily generating Nouns NFT project. As people who previously used CryptoPunks as their Twitter avatar start switching to Toadz, it’s clear the project has struck a chord among NFT OGs because of the referential nature of the art.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Airdrops

🪂 dYdX Drops Over $1B to Past Users in Airdrop

AIRDROPPED Margin trading protocol dYdX launched its native token with one of the largest distributions in decentralized finance. dYdX dropped 7.5% of its initial billion-strong token supply on Sept 8. At the current price of $11.12, those 75M tokens are worth more than $800M. At one point the airdropped tokens’ value eclipsed $1B.

SO WHAT That’s up there with some of DeFi’s heaviest hitters — Uniswap’s massive airdrop last fall was initially worth about $750M though the UNI token’s appreciation pushes that figure over $3B today.

PROTOCOL The DYDX token will be used inside the protocol to vote on the project’s direction. dYdX recently introduced a foundation, which, similar to MakerDAO’s foundation, aims to manage decentralization of the protocol.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 Quick Take: Arbitrum TVL mooning with ArbiNYAN - over $2 billion

Links

🔗 Walmart has not partnered with Litecoin, despite reports: The Block

Walmart has not partnered with Litecoin, despite a press release that was published today and reported by multiple news organizations.

🔗 Institutional traders flock to Solana as demand for ETH and BTC flattens: CoinTelegraph

Institutional traders have flocked to Solana (SOL) as demand for Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) exposure has flattened, with SOL investment products representing a whopping 86.6% of total weekly inflows crypto investment products last week.

🔗 Sushi and the Founding Murder: The Generalist

Chef Nomi was in the wind. And he’d taken the money with him. Just ten days after founding Sushiswap (aka Sushi), the decentralized exchange’s pseudonymous founder pulled out $14 million worth of Ethereum and disappeared.

DeFi Pulse 🍇 @defipulse📖 Get ready for the DeFi Pulse Academy week 📖 Every day a new blog post on DeFi basics, educational threads and more! 👨‍🎓 Let's start with probably one of the best asset classes to start getting exposure to DeFi: crypto indices! defipulse.com/blog/crypto-in…

defipulse.comEverything You Need To Know About Crypto IndicesCrypto indices are a financial instrument that tracks the performance of a basket of cryptocurrencies. Learn how to invest in them!1:01 AM ∙ Sep 14, 202131Likes11Retweets

OpenSea @openseaTrending Art NFTs on OpenSea. opensea.io8:22 PM ∙ Sep 13, 2021223Likes33Retweets

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau and 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.