🚙 Elon's Bitcoin Dunk Drives Proof-of-Stake Coins Rally

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

• Crypto Recovers From Elon Dump Led by PoS Coins
• Vitalik Says UNI Should Become an Oracle Token
• AITO Platform Builds Yield-Generating NFT On Top of Aave
• xToken DeFi Project Hacked For Over $25M

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• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!
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• Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
• The DeFi Pulse Index, a capitalization-weighted index that tracks the performance of selected DeFi assets across the market.

🌿 Crypto Recovers From Elon Dump Led by PoS Coins

TLDR Energy-efficient blockchains are leading the crypto rebound after Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, shocked the crypto world yesterday saying the car manufacturer “has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin” because of the fossil fuels needed to run the network.

PROOF-OF-STAKE COINS Cryptocurrencies running on the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which is more energy-efficient than Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work mechanism, make up six of the top 10 24-hour gainers among the top 100 market cap coins. Investors may be piling into PoS blockchains after Musk said that Tesla is “looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”

TOP GAINERS Nano, Kusuma, and Cardano are the top gainers in the past 24-hours, up 72%, 18%, and 14% respectively. They all use versions of PoS consensus, as do Hedera Hashgraph, Polkadot, and Algorand, also among the top ten. Nano, Cardano, Hedera, and Algorand took the opportunity to promote their blockchain’s limited environmental impact on Twitter, following Musk’s tweet.

👉 READ THE FULL TUTORIAL HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

🔮 Vitalik Says UNI Should Become an Oracle Token

TLDR Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin made a proposal for Uniswap’s UNI token to become an oracle price token for ETH/USD so as to allow the DeFi eco-system to ‘mark to market’ its fair value, thus providing a more robust mechanism for smart contract execution. He says that the pricing oracle should be modeled along the lines of Augur.

AUGUR-LIKE MODEL UNI’s prodigious market cap of over $19B ensures that incentives are aligned when utilizing the Augur-like model. Poor price reporting is ultimately self-defeating to all actors involved as a potential fork leads to market cap destruction. Hence, all actors are incentivized to provide price transparency as it facilitates more volume on the Uniswap platform which enhances the value of the UNI token.

CHAINLINK ARGUMENT One of the most upvoted replies to the proposal made the counterargument that the Augur arbitration model would require a re-design of UNI’s economic system, at a time when the current governance system has “seen some difficulties.” The commenter argued that the full market cap of the LINK token can be dedicated to purchasing data and securing it when its staking mechanism is deployed, and added that Chainlink is already proposing an Augur-style resolution system.

👉 READ THE FULL TUTORIAL HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

👻 AITO Platform Builds Yield-Generating NFT On Top of Aave

TLDR Developed by NFT social media network AITO, the NFT is a first on Aave and also a first in that it’ll generate ongoing Aave yield for the artists. The artwork itself is a multimedia, audiovisual collaboration between the DJ Marshmello and Steven Messing, the concept art director for Avatar 2 and Avatar 3.

YIELD-GENERATING NFTS The concept of yield-generating NFTs is just now starting to gain some interest and traction. AITO has not yet revealed the mechanics of the yield generation on its NFT. But the idea has been put to work in NFT-based games like Axie Infinity, where players can use NFTs in-game to farm other digital goods like ERC-20 potions which can be sold for real world money, in what is essentially gamified yield-farming.

👉 READ THE FULL TUTORIAL HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

☠️ xToken DeFi Project Hacked For Over $25M

TLDR xToken, a project which automates staking and liquidity strategies and wraps them into ERC-20 tokens, has been hacked to the tune of ~$25M. The attack resulted in xToken’s TVL dropping by roughly 30% to $63M, according to DeFi Llama.

👉 READ THE FULL TUTORIAL HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

🔗 Binance Faces Probe by U.S. Money-Laundering and Tax Sleuths: Bloomberg

“Binance Holdings Ltd. is under investigation by the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange in U.S. efforts to root out illicit activity that’s thrived in the red-hot but mostly unregulated market.”

🔗 The bull market has caused DAO treasuries to balloon over the past year: @masonnystrom

Mason Nystrom @masonnystromThe bull market has caused DAO treasuries to balloon over the past year, with the top ten treasuries now possessing balance sheets worth hundreds of millions, or in some cases, billions of dollars. However, DAOs in their current form are set up for financial failure. 1/

1:29 PM ∙ May 13, 202189Likes30Retweets

✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Dan Kahan, Owen Fernau and Neil Singh, and edited by Camila Russo. 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).