💥 Cronje’s Exit Hits Yearn and Fantom as Defenders Scramble to Shore up Confidence

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

Markets

• Cronje’s Exit Hits Yearn and Fantom as Defenders Scramble to Shore up Confidence

News

• BitDAO’s War Chest Quietly Grows $2M Per Day After Token Sales to Thiel and Pantera
• Evmos Chain Paused After Going Live With Highly Anticipated ‘RektDrop’
• Axie Infinity Hikes Marketplace Fees to Reward Game Players with ‘Creator Codes’

Research

• IntoTheBlock: How Swapping and Staking on Curve Drives High User Engagement

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with author Laura Shin in this week’s podcast episode:

Video

• Quick Take: Andre has left the building

Links

• EXCLUSIVE NFT startup Immutable valued at $2.5 billion in Temasek-led financing: Reuters
• Ukraine Is Buying Bulletproof Vests and Night-Vision Goggles Using Crypto: CoinDesk
• Using Crypto Tech to Promote Sanctions Compliance: Coinbase
• Calling Artists to Feature Their NFTs at Avalanche Summit: Avalanche
• DiCaprio has Ukrainian roots - his grandmother was born in Odesa in southern Ukraine: Alona, UkraineDAO

Handpicked by The Defiant Team

• Polkadot’s Gavin Wood on Building a Layer 0 to Underpin the Entire Blockchain-Based Economy
• DeFi Blue Chips Slide 80% Since 2021 as New Generation Rises
• NFT Collectors Love Space Doodles Imagery But Not Its Confusing Valuation Model

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Market Action

💥 Cronje’s Exit Hits Yearn and Fantom as Defenders Scramble to Shore up Confidence

By Samuel Haig

NEWS The crypto markets have been punished recently, but tokens associated with Andre Cronje have taken an extra beating in the wake of news he is quitting DeFi.

STAR While the star DeFi developer has previously published knee-jerk pronouncements of retirement, a March 6 Twitter thread from Anton Nell of the Fantom Foundation suggests the pair are now resolute in their desire to walk away.

DECISION Nell announced that he and Cronje will “close” their respective “chapter[s] of contributing to the DeFi/crypto space,” noting they will hand over all existing responsibilities with roughly 25 projects by April 3. He added that their decision “has been coming for a while now.”

Fantom TVL. Source: DeFi Llama

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

🎮 Axie Infinity Hikes Marketplace Fees to Reward Game Players with ‘Creator Codes’

By Samuel Haig

CONTENT CREATORS In a move to crank up tokenomics, Axie Infinity launched a new program today to share the wealth with game players. The leading play-to-earn game, plans to increase its marketplace fees to 5.25% and distribute the extra revenue to Axie’s community of content creators, the project said last week.

TRANSACTIONS The fee hike will go live on March 7 in tandem with the launch of “creator codes”. When users transacting on the Axie marketplace supply a creator code, they will collect 1% of the transaction’s value. If a creator code is not supplied, the Axie Community Treasury will claim the full 5.25% fee on transactions in the marketplace.

GOOD MOVE Axie says the increased marketplace fee is intended to “provide a sustainable source of funding for marketing and growth initiatives going forward.” Kookoo Crypto TV, a community manager at play-to-earn collective Yield Guild Games and a social media influencer with more than 100,000 followers, said introducing incentives “a good move for any game.” But he warned that the team must be selective about which creators they onboard.

DAO Funds

💰 BitDAO’s War Chest Quietly Grows $2M Per Day After Token Sales to Thiel and Pantera

By Brady Dale

FUNDS The BitDAO treasury is the largest for a DAO you’ve never heard of. According to Open-Orgs, BitDAO currently has $1.8B in it, making it the second largest treasury of any publicly viewable treasury on Ethereum, following that of Uniswap and just ahead of those of Ethereum Name Service, Lido, and Gitcoin.

TREASURY BitDAO holds the number 2 spot largely thanks to its governance token, BIT, which accounts for about $1B of that treasury. Its governance token currently trades for around $1.06. That treasury also grows at a pace of roughly $2M per day without diluting BIT holders.

CONCEPT “I think people in crypto have been excited about coordinating capital better than you can as an individual,” Jonathan Allen, of Mirana Ventures, a sister fund of ByBit, the exchange that managed spinning up the BitDAO concept, told The Defiant.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

EVM Chains

😲 Evmos Chain Paused After Going Live With Highly Anticipated ‘RektDrop’

By Owen Fernau

NINE-FIGURES Last year, it seemed like every blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the rules which dictate how transactions get processed, had its time in the sun. Layer 1s like Avalanche, Fantom, and Binance Smart Chain launched nine-figure growth funds to bootstrap their DeFi ecosystems.

AIRDROP Now, there’s a new EVM chain in town that was producing blocks as of Mar. 1 as part of the Cosmos ecosystem before stalling as of Mar. 6. Called Evmos, it’s airdropping tokens to assorted stakeholders in the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems.

REKT n solidarity with those who have suffered major losses in the dark forest of web3, also known as those who have been “rekt,” Evmos is calling its airdrop the “Rektdrop.” “The end goal of Evmos is to bring together the Cosmos and Ethereum community and thus the Rektdrop has been designed to reward past participation in both networks under this theme of ‘getting rekt,’” reads the post by Tharis about the drop.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

IntoTheBlock Report

🧐 How Swapping and Staking on Curve Drives High User Engagement

On-Chain Markets Update by Pedro Negron IntoTheBlock

GROWTH Curve Finance was launched in 2020 with the initial purpose of creating an automated market maker (AMM) exchange for assets pegged to one another. By using efficient algorithms they soon experienced incredible growth, offering some of the lowest fees, slippage, and impermanent loss in the DeFi space.

FOCUS Since their focus was on stable assets, fees for liquidity providers (LPs) tended to be smaller. This created the need for the protocol to offer incentives to its liquidity providers. These incentives were given in the form of CRV which also works as a governance token for the Curve DAO. This article analyzes Curve’s high user engagement on the swapping and staking side of the protocol.

INDICATOR Volume traded is an important indicator to understand DEXes. They show the platform’s usage. IntoTheBlock gathers all daily volume traded on Curve’s pools on Ethereum and aggregates it into a single indicator.

Source: IntoTheBlock DeFi Insights

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

Coming of Age: Indices and the Phuture of DeFi

"Aiming for average" may not seem particularly exciting, but the rise of crypto indices that leverage the power of DeFi indicates at least three developing trends in crypto investing.

Index Funds Indicate Market Maturity

Index funds generated controversy when first proposed. Today, they don't seem particularly new or radical; funds like the Dow Jones Industrial Average are everyday names even to non-investors.

In this vein, the rise of crypto index funds demonstrates a maturing industry. DeFi is still only a small part of crypto - but it’s currently worth over $103 billion with room for growth.

Index Funds Encourage Stability

Aiming for average with an index fund brings much-needed stability to the world of crypto investing. Individual tokens may still be subject to wild swings in value, but larger swathes of the market remain stable. Projects like Phuture encourage stability by automatically rebalancing on the go and by boosting liquidity through token-incentivized programs.

The Phuture of Index Funds

Index funds mark a shift towards passive crypto investment vehicles, tools that open the DeFi and crypto worlds to a broader audience. The Phuture model leverages both approaches, with the goal of launching macro index products that will be relevant for years. The result is a sophisticated, hands-off approach to crypto investing in line with similar approaches to the stock market.

The Tube

📺 Quick Take: Andre has left the building

Links

🔗 EXCLUSIVE NFT startup Immutable valued at $2.5 billion in Temasek-led financing: Reuters

Australian NFT startup Immutable has raised fresh funding from investors led by Singapore's Temasek in a round that values it at $2.5 billion, the company said on Monday, as it taps a surge in interest in cryptocurrency and NFT ventures.

🔗 Ukraine Is Buying Bulletproof Vests and Night-Vision Goggles Using Crypto: CoinDesk

Some of Ukraine’s weapons suppliers are accepting payments directly in crypto, a senior official told CoinDesk Monday.

🔗 Using Crypto Tech to Promote Sanctions Compliance: Coinbase

Coinbase is committed to building a safe and responsible financial system that promotes economic freedom around the world.

🔗 Calling Artists to Feature Their NFTs at Avalanche Summit: Avalanche

Avalanche is looking for up-and-coming or established artists to be featured Art & NFT partners at Avalanche Summit!

Alona | Ukraine DAO (🇺🇦,🇺🇦) @cryptodrftngDiCaprio has Ukrainian roots - his grandmother was born in Odesa in southern Ukraine. #StandWithUkraine https://t.co/bLF7A7llDl

Hromadske Int. @Hromadske💸 Leonardo DiCaprio sent $ 10 million to the Armed Forces of Ukraine — this is currently the largest donation from one person, according to GSA News11:07 AM ∙ Mar 8, 2022

Handpicked by The Defiant Team

• Polkadot’s Gavin Wood on Building a Layer 0 to Underpin the Entire Blockchain-Based EconomyGavin Wood’s crypto journey started with Ethereum – he was one of the eight original founders and the project’s CTO in the early days.
• DeFi Blue Chips Slide 80% Since 2021 as New Generation RisesA new generation of DeFi projects — Terra, Fantom — have had a blistering run in the last 30 days. The old guard, let’s call them DeFi 1.0 blue chips, not so much.
• NFT Collectors Love Space Doodles Imagery But Not Its Confusing Valuation Model For all the mojo in NFTs, there’s still a lot of experimentation under way. And sometimes buyers aren’t sure what to make of a new crop of imagery, or new minting systems.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, 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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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)