🌊 OpenSea Vows to Probe ‘Incredibly Disappointing’ Insider NFT Buys

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

News

• OpenSea Vows to Probe ‘Incredibly Disappointing’ Insider NFT Buys
• Solana Outage Likely Caused by Bots Pursuing an Initial DEX Offering
• XRP Holders to Get Huge Airdrop of New Blockchain Songbird

Video

• First Look: Protect yourself from smart contract exploits with Sherlock

Podcast

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

Links

• Fidenza artist slams knock-off NFT project from ‘honest pirates’ on Solana: CoinTelegraph
• SkyBridge raises $100M for Algorand fund and files for crypto company ETF: CoinTelegraph
• How To Think About Token Generation Events Using DeFi: Deribit
• THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2021: Vitalik Buterin: Time magazine
• DeFi protocol @float_capital has integrated #Chainlink Price Feeds on @0xPolygon mainnet: Chainlink

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.

NFT Marketplaces

🌊 OpenSea Vows to Probe ‘Incredibly Disappointing’ Insider NFT Buys

LESSON OpenSea, the world’s biggest NFT marketplace with $100M in daily volume, just learned a painful lesson — inside information can lead to unscrupulous trading by employees.

PROFITS Devin Finzer, OpenSea’s co-founder and CEO, said in a blog post Wednesday that an employee purchased “items” ahead of their public listing on the auction site’s front page. With prices for CryptoPunks, Art Blocks Curated and other hot NFTs soaring, “frontrunning” public buying could generate substantial profits for an insider privy to non-public information.

BEHAVIOR “This is incredibly disappointing,” Finzer wrote. “We want to be clear that this behavior does not represent our values as a team. We are taking this very seriously and are conducting an immediate and thorough third party review of this incident so that we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take.”

CONFIDENTIAL OpenSea pledged to conduct an independent investigation of the matter. It also introduced policies barring employees from buying or selling NFTs that it’s featuring or promoting, and it prohibited team members from using “confidential information” to buy or sell NFTs on any marketplace.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Blockchain Outages

🤖 Solana Outage Likely Caused by Bots Pursuing an Initial DEX Offering

NEWS At 2:01 AM New York time Wednesday morning, the Solana blockchain went live once again, according to @SolanaStatus.

COMMUNITY “The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25,” the platform reported. “Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.”

DETAILS The Solana team has not released a technical post-mortem on the outage but some additional details have emerged. For example, founder Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted that a bot network chasing an initial DEX offering (IDO) was an issue in the outage. He did not identify the IDO, but he did say it was on Raydium, an automated market maker.

GRAPE The most likely offering seems to be that of GRAPE, a social networking protocol. Its IDO was set to start at 8:00 AM ET Tuesday. The outage was reported very shortly thereafter.

👉READ THE FULL TUTORIAL IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Airdrops

🪂 XRP Holders to Get Huge Airdrop of New Blockchain Songbird

TLDR Not only is DOGE a very good boy, its coin is about to be very smart, too — as in, smart contract-ready. Flare is a startup launching its canary network in the coming days, and it’s going to bring smart contract functionality to DOGE. It will also bring it to XRP, Stellar (XLM) and Litecoin (LTC), with more to come. To watch for exact timing, interested users should watch the Flare Network Twitter and website.

SO WHAT “[DOGE] really is the people’s coin,” Hugo Philion, a co-founder of the Flare Network, told The Defiant. “It has a huge community. Flare is Ethereum for all the layer1s that were left behind.”

MINING The deal is sweetest for XRP holders. Anyone who held XRP on Dec. 12, 2020, will be airdropped SGB, the coin of this new blockchain, Songbird. XRP holders are getting 30% of the total initial supply of 100B tokens. Another 22% will be distributed via liquidity mining over the next seven to eight years to those who move assets from compatible chains onto Songbird.

👉READ THE FULL TUTORIAL IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 First Look: Protect yourself from smart contract exploits with Sherlock

Links

🔗 Fidenza artist slams knock-off NFT project from ‘honest pirates’ on Solana: CoinTelegraph

Tyler Hobbs, the artist behind the popular generative NFT series Fidenza has slammed a Solana-based project for utilizing his code to produce knock-off artworks without his approval.

🔗 SkyBridge raises $100M for Algorand fund and files for crypto company ETF: CoinTelegraph

Alternative investment firm SkyBridge Capital hopes to expand its crypto offerings, filing for a crypto-focused exchange-traded fund (ETF) on Tuesday and revealing plans for an Algorand fund at this week’s SALT conference in New York.

🔗 How To Think About Token Generation Events Using DeFi: Deribit

Getting tokens into the right hands in a fair, efficient and targeted way should be a top priority for founders in crypto. Not only does this impact who governs your protocol, a token that begins as a potential security can also become credibly decentralized over time, potentially shielding founders from regulation in a space where precedents are still rare.

🔗 THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2021: Vitalik Buterin: Time magazine

Thanks to Reddit’s r/Ethereum community, I’ve had the privilege of following Vitalik Buterin’s career from early on, which is why I’ve taken a certain pride in watching his legacy grow.

Chainlink - Official Channel @chainlinkDeFi protocol @float_capital has integrated #Chainlink Price Feeds on @0xPolygon mainnet to launch a new tokenized market called "The Flipp3ning," which uses Chainlink oracles to track the relative market cap of Ethereum compared to that of Bitcoin.6:00 PM ∙ Sep 15, 2021622Likes132Retweets

This is a public version of the newsletter and both paid and free subscribers are receiving it.

Free subscribers get:

• Daily news briefings
• Weekly Recap

Paid subscribers get:

• Full transcript of the weekly podcast interview
• Early access to opinion columns and research pieces
• Exclusive access to Inbox Dump where we send all the press releases that didn’t make it to the newsletter (Saturday)
• Exclusive access to subscribers-only Discord chat
• Exclusive access to bi-weekly community calls

✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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.