⚔️ Genie Accuses Rival Gem After DDoS Attack

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

News

• Genie Accuses Rival Gem After DDoS Attack
• Yearn Keeps Chugging With V3 of Vaults Aggregator
• SEC Signals Crypto Crackdown with Beefed Up Enforcement Arm
• Wall Street’s Jane Street Borrows $25M Via DeFi Lending Platform

Podcast

🎙Listen to our exclusive interview with BoredElonMusk here:

Video

• Tutorial: Airdrop opportunity? Bridgeless Cross-Chain Swaps with Hashflow

Elsewhere

• Buterin: L2 transaction fees need to be under 5c to be ‘truly acceptable’: CoinTelegraph
• RAC and David Greenstein on Why Music NFTs Are Better Than Spotify: Unchained
• Everyday Bitcoin usage in El Salvador remains low despite government push, US academic study finds: The Block
• Yearn is excited to be a sponsor of #HackMoney2022, taking place from May 6th through 27th: Yearn Finance

Trending in The Defiant

• Soaring Gas, Simmering Suspicion, and 50,000 NFTs: Inside Yuga’s Zany Metaverse Mint
• Bayc, Ape, the Otherside and Kodas – Everything You Need to Know
• Spate of Exploits Snares Rari Capital and Saddle Finance for $90M

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DeFi Clashes

⚔️ Genie Accuses Rival Gem After DDoS Attack

By Jason Levin

ATTACKED NFT aggregator Genie may be named after a magical wish-granting character, but Genie’s wishes were not granted this week. On May 1, Genie’s website was attacked – and founder Scott Gray accused competitor Gem of being behind it.

VICTIMS Gray said that Gem conducted a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which is used to disrupt a site’s connectivity by overloading its servers with requests. Cryptocurrency platforms like Solana have previously been victims of DDoS attacks.

CRASH Scott tweeted that the attack began when Yuga Labs’ Otherside mint began. He tweeted, “In the last 24 hours a header with the URL http://gem.xyz has sent us 1.7M requests in an attempt to crash our website and degrade our performance.”

PRICING Scott told the Defiant, ”their backend was calling our API then their API was passing it to their front end.” Gray claims that Gem was using Genie’s pricing data to display prices on their platform. He attached the below screenshot of Genie’s AWS EC2 instance.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Yield

⚙️ Yearn Keeps Chugging With V3 of Vaults Aggregator

Yield Aggregator Taps ERC-4626 Standard for Vaults

By Owen Fernau

CAPITAL Yield aggregators are a strange breed. They generate earnings by pushing capital strategically through DeFi protocols and they have largely fallen out of the limelight in a crypto world engulfed by Bored Apes and multi-chain ecosystems.

V3 But the leader in the category, Yearn Finance, is still making moves. On May 3, the yield aggregator unveiled a third iteration of their core product, Vaults. It’s the biggest collection of updates in Yearn’s history. Upcoming changes include issuing Yearn’s vault tokens, which essentially represent deposits in the protocol’s vaults, using the ERC-4626 standard.

TOKENS In January, The Defiant reported how ERC-4626 standardizes yield bearing tokens, making it easier for developers to build on top of tokens that accrue value instead of having to create custom solutions for each. Chris Eberle, a contributor at Yearn Finance, sees the inclusion of the standard, as well as the whole of the protocol’s forthcoming v3, as progress towards establishing Yearn as a piece of DeFi infrastructure for yield.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Regulation

🏛 SEC Signals Crypto Crackdown with Beefed Up Enforcement Arm

Gensler's Ramp Up Sets Tone for Global Regulators

By Samuel Haig

NEWS Gary Gensler means business. That’s the takeaway from the news yesterday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is increasing the headcount of its newly formed Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit to 50 positions from about 30. The unit is concentrating on enforcing securities laws in all aspects of crypto. from trading to lending to NFTs to custody.

PROTECTION “The U.S. has the greatest capital markets because investors have faith in them,” Gensler, the SEC’s chairman, said in a statement released by the commission on May 3. “As more investors access the crypto markets, it is increasingly important to dedicate more resources to protecting them.”

ENFORCEMENT Crypto supporters didn’t exactly applaud the news. “The SEC is a regulatory agency with an enforcement division, not an enforcement agency,” tweeted Hester Peirce, one of the SEC’s four commissioners. “Why are we leading with enforcement in crypto?”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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DeFi + TradFi

💰 Wall Street’s Jane Street Borrows $25M Via DeFi Lending Platform

Traditional Institutions Are Increasingly Tapping DeFi Loans

By Samuel Haig

TRADING TradFi leaders are increasingly cozying up to DeFi. Case in point: Jane Street, a Wall Street quantitative trading firm with more than $300B in assets, has taken out a 25M USDC loan from BlockTower Capital. The loan, worth $25M, was facilitated by the decentralized funding platform Clearpool, it said on May 3.

DEAL Clearpool enables institutions to borrow uncollateralized loans via a network of lenders, and is backed by venture capital firms, including Arrington Capital and Sequoia Capital. The deal marks the latest round of DeFi-TradFi hookups. Leading crypto money market Aave launched its institutional platform Arc earlier this year, deploying on L2s Arbitrum and Optimism to offer low fees. On January, 30 institutions joined Aave Arc.

PERMISSIONED Clearpool launched its permissionless pools product in March, allowing whitelisted institutional borrowers to compete for stablecoins loans from its network of lenders. The BlockTower and Jane Street pool is the first permissioned product offered by the platform.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Tutorial: Airdrop opportunity? Bridgeless Cross-Chain Swaps with Hashflow

Elsewhere

🔗 Buterin: L2 transaction fees need to be under 5c to be ‘truly acceptable’: CoinTelegraph

Despite layer-2s offering relatively cheap transactions, Vitalik Buterin said that all transactions need to be under $0.05 to be truly acceptable.

🔗 RAC and David Greenstein on Why Music NFTs Are Better Than Spotify: Unchained

André Allen Anjos, who is better known as the crypto-friendly artist RAC, and David Greenstein, co-founder of Sound.xyz, a web3 music platform, analyze the current state of the web3 music scene and discuss how artists can leverage web3 tools to get paid at fair market value for their art.

🔗 Everyday Bitcoin usage in El Salvador remains low despite government push, US academic study finds: The Block

A US academic research study concluded that bitcoin usage in El Salvador is low when it comes to everyday transactions.

yearn.finance @iearnfinance📣 Yearn is excited to be a sponsor of #HackMoney2022, taking place from May 6th through 27th. HackMoney is a DeFi hackathon with up to $300K+ in prizes💰 👉🏼Apply at defi.ethglobal.com Registration closes on May 4th! Stay tuned for more updates about hacking on Yearn💙

9:00 PM ∙ May 3, 202231Likes9Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• Soaring Gas, Simmering Suspicion, and 50,000 NFTs: Inside Yuga’s Zany Metaverse MintUngodly hype creates ungodly expectations. That’s what happened when Yuga Labs, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched the balleyhooed mint of their Otherside NFTs on May 1.
• Bayc, Ape, the Otherside and Kodas – Everything You Need to KnowLet’s talk Silos, powerful containers of value but limited by their size. The vast majority of crypto communities are silos.
• Spate of Exploits Snares Rari Capital and Saddle Finance for $90MWhile all eyes were on Yuga Labs’ Otherside mint over the weekend, the malicious actors that prowl DeFi didn’t take any time off.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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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