🏛 Messari Founder Says He's Running for Senate as SEC Shadow Hangs Over Mainnet

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

News

• Messari Founder Announces Senate Run as SEC Shadow Hangs Over Mainnet Conference
• DeFi Market Stabilizes After White Knuckle Drops Monday
• DeFi Lending Venture Rides Solana’s High-Speed Chain to $100M in Deposits
• Derivatives Protocol Raises $3.75M in Sale of Governance Token

Podcast

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

Video

• Quick Take: Red Market, Jay Pegs and Maki says sayonara

Links

• Coinbase drops plans for crypto lending product after SEC tussle: The Block
• The Path Forward: Cryptocurrency with Gary Gensler: The Washington Post
• FTX Establishes Substantial Presence in the Bahamas and Appoints Ryan Salame as CEO: Yahoo Finance
• Yesterday MISO suffered a supply chain attack: SushiSwap
• ICYMI: A big upgrade is coming to #Avalanche: Avalanche

The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

Subscribe now

🙌 Together with:

• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at this link.
• Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
• Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
• The DeFi Pulse Index, by Index Coop - DPI is the easiest way to capture the upside of DeFi with the benefit of diversification. Buy DPI today on your favorite DEX.

Regulatory Crackdown

🏛 Messari Founder Announces Senate Run as SEC Shadow Hangs Over Mainnet Conference

NEWS Messari founder Ryan Selkis said he’s planning to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024. Selkis has become increasingly vocal against stringent cryptocurrency regulation but the final straw, he said, was when securities regulators allegedly showed up at the conference he organized and served one of the speakers with a subpoena.

TWEET He tweeted:

“If you’re wondering when I actually decided to run for Senate, it was when these fuckers came to my event, didn’t buy a ticket, and served one of the speakers a subpoena.

“Enough talk. More war on our out of control regulatory state. Selkis 2024. Time to activate the crypto political machine.”

Selkis declined to comment further on his candidacy or the subpoena to The Defiant.

TWEET The reference to a subpoena appears related to a tweet posted by Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin on Twitter early today about a subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Enforcement Commission (SEC).

“lol I just witnessed a guy get served by the SEC at the top of the escalator at #mainnet2021 right before going on stage for his panel”

BEING SERVED Slava did not answer a question from The Defiant about who it was that was served, but he did answer a question about how he knew it was the SEC via direct message, writing, “It was not clear if he was personally part of the SEC, but he said you are being served by the SEC.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Markets

😮‍💨 DeFi Market Stabilizes After White Knuckle Drops Monday

NEWS Crypto markets Tuesday morning appeared to be shaking off gut-wrenching falls in the last 24 hours. At one point Monday, ETH nosedived 2.8% in an hour.

FLAT Ethereum was up 0.5% in trading at 7:15 AM, according to CoinGecko data. Cardano increased 0.4% and Solana, Avalanche and Chainlink were flat. So, too, was Bitcoin.

RESPITE The respite was most welcome after investors sought cover on news Monday that China Evergrande Group, one of the nation’s biggest property developers, was going sideways on more than $300 billion in loans. Global equity indexes plunged throughout the day but rallied to finish with modest declines — the Standard & Poor’s 500 ended Monday down 1.5%.

BARGAINS On Tuesday, U.S. equity index futures were up ahead of the opening bell, according to Bloomberg News. And the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong, the best bellwether for possible contagion from the China Evergrande situation, eked out a 0.5% uptick as bargain hunters scooped up beaten down stocks.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

SPONSORED POST

PAC DAO - CRYPTO ACTIVISM

The lever is one of the oldest tools used by humans. It enables a small hand to move even the largest boulder. In the end, you trade distance for power. What is true of large objects is also true of large organizations.

For legislation, the journey from idea to law is long, with many opportunities to influence the outcome. It may take time to blossom, but a small force applied at the right moment makes a big difference.

For crypto, people rally around a clear cause. As the infrastructure bill evolved in the Senate, people saw the competing amendments. They knew what they wanted, and they contacted their Senators to express their will.

Given this, it’s clear that PACDAO moves among giants. Instead of relying on power, we must rely on cunning. Our opportunity is clear: try to bring an amendment to a floor vote. If that happens, we’ll be joined by an army.

That’s why the goal of our first action is: encourage representatives to sponsor and bring to a vote an amendment that strips all crypto language from the infrastructure bill. An amendment that does this will bring the attention of the entire crypto community. This is our lever.

We are proud to announce our upcoming release 'The War on Crypto' featuring award-winning American artist Rebecca Hendin. A limited series significant to the current state of US politics and their overarching stranglehold on crypto innovation.

Details at https://pac.xyz/

Solana Chain

DeFi Lending Venture Rides Solana’s High-Speed Chain to $100M in Deposits

THE LEAD Solend, a lending platform built on the proof-of-stake blockchain, Solana, has hit $100M in deposits, according to its team.

LIQUIDATED Solend has done so without liquidity mining opportunities, but those are coming. Solend works basically the same way Compound and Aave do. Users can post assets that will earn interest, and they can borrow a certain amount against those assets. If the value of their collateral drops, they get liquidated.

FASTER “Our users have been describing Solend as ‘Aave but faster and cheaper,’ and I think when the market wises up to this, the numbers will reflect it,” Solend’s founder, Rooter, told The Defiant.

UNLOCK Collateralized lending has been crucial to the decentralized finance (DeFi) market on Ethereum. It lets people hold assets they believe in and still unlock underlying value.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

DeFi Auctions

💰 Derivatives Protocol Raises $3.75M in Sale of Governance Token

TLDR The Tracer Protocol has completed a sale of 50M TCR tokens for 3.75M DAI, giving its total supply a valuation of $75M at the sales end. It has since nearly doubled to $137M, according to CoinGecko.

AUCTION The auction ran for five days, ending on September 15, and it used the Gnosis batch auction system, so that all participants who purchased any TCR tokens paid the same price, 0.075 DAI.

SO WHATTracer Protocol is a project that will enable leveraged perpetual pools of long and short positions against different assets. The price of a long or short position is determined by the ratio of the longs and shorts in the respective pool, much in the same way that Uniswap version 1 determined the price of the two tokens in each of its pools.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

Quick Take: Red Market, Jay Pegs and Maki says sayonara

Links

🔗 Coinbase drops plans for crypto lending product after SEC tussle: The Block

Crypto exchange Coinbase has dropped plans to launch its crypto lending product, dubbed Lend, in light of the SEC's view that it would constitute a security, per an update to its original announcement blog post.

🔗 The Path Forward: Cryptocurrency with Gary Gensler: The Washington Post

On Tuesday, Sept. 21 at 12:00pm ET, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius speaks with Gensler about the cryptocurrency landscape, the growth in digital trading platforms and his call for more stringent financial disclosures around sustainability.

🔗 FTX Establishes Substantial Presence in the Bahamas and Appoints Ryan Salame as CEO: Yahoo Finance

FTX Trading Limited ("FTX'' or "the Company"), owner and operator of leading global cryptocurrency exchange FTX.COM, today announced that its Bahamian subsidiary, FTX Digital Markets, has been registered by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas as a digital assets business under the Digital Asset Registered Exchanges Bill or the "DARE Act."

SushiChef @SushiSwapYesterday MISO suffered a supply chain attack. All funds have been recovered, the interface code updated, and we have taken concrete steps to fully secure access controls. A full postmortem can be found here:

hackmd.ioHackMD - Collaborative Markdown Knowledge Base**Postmortem, September 18th, 2021** Yesterday MISO suffered a supply chain attack. All funds have7:00 PM ∙ Sep 18, 2021159Likes37Retweets

Avalanche 🔺 @avalancheavaxICYMI: A big upgrade is coming to #Avalanche! 🔥 Optimization 1: Snowman++ (Reducing MEV & Contention) 🔥 Optimization 2: C-Chain Fee Reductions 🔥 Optimization 3: Block-Based Fees If you're a validator, please upgrade your nodes ASAP. medium.com/avalancheavax/…

medium.comApricot Phase Four: Snowman++ and Reduced C-Chain Transaction FeesApricot Phase Four will activate on the Avalanche Mainnet at 5 p.m. EDT (9 p.m. UTC) on Wednesday, September 22nd. Update (9/18): Following a successful AP4 activation on the Fuji Testnet, Avalanche…3:00 AM ∙ Sep 21, 2021594Likes167Retweets

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

Subscribe now

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.