🦹🏻‍♂️ Blockchains Wrestle with ‘Significant Threat’

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

News

• Blockchains Wrestle with ‘Significant Threat’
• SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ Narrowly Wins Vote

NFT Roundup

• Moonbirds’ Public Flight Sparks Debate About Intellectual Property Rights

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with Ox’s Will Warren in this week’s episode:

Video

DeFi Tutorials

• What Is a Bear Market?

Elsewhere

• Master of Anons: How a Crypto Developer Faked a DeFi Ecosystem: CoinDesk
• Voyager approved to return $270 million in cash deposits to customers: The Block
• Coinbase selected by BlackRock; provide Aladdin clients access to crypto trading and custody: Coinbase
• An explanation—and sincere apology—for the @tezos outage on @rarible that lasted nearly three weeks.

Trending in The Defiant

• Wallet Provider Slope Blamed For Solana Breach
• Plumbing Google Search Data for Clues on Crypto Market’s Direction
• What Is Cryptocurrency Market Cap?

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Exploits

🦹🏻‍♂️ Blockchains Wrestle with ‘Significant Threat’

Nomad Hack Exposes Weakness of Cross-Chain Bridges

By Aleksandar Gilbert

FRUSTRATED Earlier this year, a Cardano user going by the pseudonym Arctic Alpha was frustrated there were no dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies on his preferred blockchain. So he decided to use a bridge protocol called Nomad to bring “multiple six figures” of USDC he’d purchased on Ethereum to Cardano.

WRAPPED Arctic Alpha deposited the USDC on Nomad, and Cardano minted an equal number of “wrapped” USDC. He put the wrapped USDC into a liquidity pool on Cardano and, for a while, earned between 20% and 30% APR on his deposit.

TANKED When the crypto market tanked this year, the APR on his deposit tanked with it, and Arctic Alpha decided to withdraw the USDC, leaving a hair over $100,000 in Nomad, just in case.

BREAKDOWN Monday night, scrolling through Twitter, he saw something that made his heart sink. “Someone said, ‘Hey, [here’s] a little breakdown of what happened on Nomad,’” he told The Defiant in an interview this week, “and I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DAO Governance

🍣 SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ Narrowly Wins Vote

Contentious Debate Over Pay Continues as New Poll Approaches

By Samuel Haig

SLIM MAJORITY Governance has spoken, and the SushiSwap community remains divided on a proposed candidate for its leadership position of “head chef”. In a poll, members of the decentralized exchange’s governance forum voted to elect Jonathan Howard, a software engineer, as its chief executive by a slim majority of 53%.

DISCOURSE The result comes after more than a week of inflamed and divisive discourse within the SushiSwap community. Many governance forum members were miffed by what they considered Howard’s exorbitant pay package: the head chef may have pocketed more than $10M if certain SUSHI token price targets and other bonus criteria are met.

TOKENHOLDERS The poll was a “temperature check” to determine the sentiment of the membership. Now Howard’s appointment will move to a binding poll in which tokenholders will vote proportionately to the SUSHI they hold. No date has been set for the next vote.

DRAMA Even so, many community members and Sushi insiders believe there should be a separate vote on the prospective head chef’s compensation package. “It doesn’t feel like we negotiated the compensation package,” community member Nickjrishwait posted. “This probably should have been two proposals.” So the drama is far from over.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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NFT Roundup

🦉Moonbirds’ Public Flight Sparks Debate About Intellectual Property Rights

Tiffany’s NFT and OpenSea Transfer Weakness Round Out Week in NFTs

By yyctrader

LICENSE Moonbirds are now in the public domain. On Aug. 4, project founder Kevin Rose said that the popular owl-themed NFTs would be moving to a CC0 public license along with Oddities, their companion collection.

Moonbird #6830

TRADEMARKS “You’re now free to use any Moonbirds and Oddities art in any way you see fit – forever,” he tweeted. A Moonbirds DAO will be formed to oversee licensing of the Moonbirds and Oddities trademarks.

SURPRISE Prominent NFT collectors like DCinvestor, Bharat Krymo and Vincent Van Dough welcomed the surprise move. Still, many felt that Moonbird NFT holders should have been consulted before essentially giving away their IP rights.

OWNING “So what exactly is the point of owning an #NFT under a CC0 license compared to say, having it right click and saved on your PC?” tweeted NFT influencer Pranksy.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Explainers

🐻 What Is a Bear Market?

A Primer on Market Cycles and Their Effect on Crypto

By Rahul Nambiampurath

PUMMEL Bulls and bears are powerful animals. A bull tends to charge ahead, pitching its horns upwards. Bears tend to pummel downward and eviscerate their prey.

DOMINANCE In the financial landscape, the prey is your portfolio. Fortunately, bulls and bears trade off their dominance of the markets. Bull runs are relatively easy to ride. But bear markets? They can be tough to manage. Do you sell off everything and hide until it’s over? Or is that just panic that will backfire when the market turns?

DEFINITION One thing is certain: it’s helpful to understand the forces at work in a bear market. Here is the definition of a bear market: “A time when stock prices are declining and market sentiment is pessimistic. Generally, a bear market occurs when a broad market index falls by 20% or more over at least a two-month period.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

Elsewhere

🔗 Master of Anons: How a Crypto Developer Faked a DeFi Ecosystem: CoinDesk

The Macalinao brothers used a web of bogus identities to create the illusion of a dev community, juicing value on the Saber protocol and Solana blockchain. Now they're moving to Aptos.

🔗 Voyager approved to return $270 million in cash deposits to customers: The Block

Voyager is approved to return $270 million in cash deposits to customers, a bankruptcy court judge said on Thursday.

🔗 Coinbase selected by BlackRock; provide Aladdin clients access to crypto trading and custody: Coinbase

Over the past few years, Coinbase has played a central role in developing and strengthening crypto markets as the safest, most trusted bridge to the cryptoeconomy.

Rarible @raribleAn explanation—and sincere apology—for the @tezos outage on @rarible that lasted nearly three weeks.

rarible.comWhy Tezos was unavailable on Rarible for so longAn explanation—and sincere apology—regarding the Tezos outage on Rarible that lasted nearly three weeks.4:13 PM ∙ Aug 4, 202290Likes23Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• Wallet Provider Slope Blamed For Solana BreachSolana wallet provider Slope has been identified as the source of a hack in which attackers stole an estimated $8M in USDC, SOL and other crypto assets, according to a brief analysis released Wednesday by the Layer 1 blockchain.
• Plumbing Google Search Data for Clues on Crypto Market’s DirectionCalling the bottom of the market is one of the toughest tasks for investors. How do you know when the worst is over and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to get back in and do some buying?
• What Is Cryptocurrency Market Cap?Investors use market capitalization as the yardstick to measure both stocks and cryptocurrencies. A publicly-traded company’s market capitalization is synonymous with its value. That’s because it is calculated by multiplying the company’s total shares by the share price.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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.

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