✊ RAI: Like DAI But More Cypherpunk

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

• RAI wants to become the permissionless Dai alternative
• Lukso raised $18M in first reversible ICO
• Cloudfare supports .crypto domains
• ArmorFi CTO puts up $320k bounty
• The Graph includes support for Polkadot, NEAR, Solana and Celo
• Private AMM SecretSwap is live in mainnet

and more :)

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✊ Cypherpunk Stablecoin RAI is Live on Ethereum

TLDR Rai, a stablecoin for decentralization purists, is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. It’s not pegged to fiat, it’s not backed by fiat, and it’s designed to run completely by computer programs. If it had a physical bill it would carry the inscription, “in code we trust.”

SO WHAT RAI tackles what may be a contradiction in the DeFi ecosystem, where despite the communities’ mistrust for fiat currencies and work towards permissionless network, fiat-backed stablecoins have become the backbone of the emerging financial system. DAI used to be the one exception when it was only backed by ETH, but that ended in November 2019 with the introduction of multi-collateral DAI. RAI wants to become the truly decentralized and uncensorable alternative

BIG AMBITIONS RAI’s initial goal is to become an alternative to pegged-coins for use in DeFi as collateral and as a stable reserve asset. With time, its builders hope RAI could also become “the Ethereum Standard — a native unit of account for the Ethereum ecosystem,” wrote Ameen Soleimani, a Reflexer Labs member, in a post titled “A Money God RAIses.” But long term ambitions for RAI are even larger.

If RAI fulfills its purpose within DeFi and starts to earn global adoption, it could “bring credible neutrality to the administration of a stable global reserve asset, a global public good,” Soleimani wrote.

RAI, a fork of Maker’s Multi-Collateral DAI , had over 28k of ETH locked, generating 7.4M of outstanding RAI at the time of writing, according to stats.reflexer.finance. With a current market price of $3.42 (and a redemption price of $3.14) the asset’s total market capitalization is $16M.

UNGOVERNANCE TOKEN Reflexer Labs plans to announce its liquidity mining program for the RAI/ETH Uniswap v2 pool, and the “Reflexer ungovernance token,” FLX.

“In the meantime, we’re not saying that there will be retroactive mining rewards for the initial cohort of RAI/ETH LPs, but we’re also not saying there won’t be,” the project’s blog post said.

WORKS LIKE A SPRING To achieve relative stability RAI starts out with an arbitrary initial target price, which is also its redemption price. When RAI’s market price deviates from its target price, its algorithmic controller automatically sets an interest rate to proportionally oppose the price move and incentivize people to return RAI to its target price.

“It works kind of like a spring: the further the market price of RAI moves from the target price, the more powerful the interest rate, and the greater the incentive to return RAI to equilibrium,” Soleimani wrote.

FUNDING Reflexer Labs last week announced its $4.1M funding round led by Pantera Capital and Lemniscap, while other investors including MetaCartel Ventures, The LAO and at least two former MakerDAO team members. The round follows a $1.68M raise in August, which was led by Paradigm, with participation from Standard Crypto, Compound Finance founder Robert Leshner and Variant Fund, from a16z alum Jesse Walden.

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

💰 Ethereum OG Raises $18M With First Reversible ICO

TLDR LUKSO’s Reversible ICO has ended with nearly $18M USD collected. The Reversible ICO (rICO)—the latest brainchild from Ethereum dapp developer and ERC 20 creator Fabian Vogelsteller—is a new model for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings used to fundraise for start-ups) where investors reserve tokens instead of buying them outright.

SO WHAT The result is an ICO system that balances responsibility, honesty, and trust between investors and the projects they invest in. After all, with a rICO, if investors lose faith in the project they can always return any as-of-yet unpurchased tokens and back out with their ETH intact.

HOW DOES IT WORK This new fundraising mechanism allows investors to reserve and buy tokens over time, and “return” reserved tokens that haven’t yet been purchased in exchange for the ETH they initially put in.

LUKSO’S LYX SALE Vogelsteller tested the concept with his own Blockchain infrastructure project, LUKSO. LUKSO set aside 10M LYX for the rICO (10% of their intended 100M LYX ceiling). By the rICO’s close, nearly 5.5M LYX had been officially “bought,” valued at nearly 10k ETH or $18M USD.

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

🐛 DeFi Dev Offers $320k to Whoever Finds Critical Bug

TLDR ArmorFi’s CTO Robert Forster is partnering with bug bounty platform Immunefi to personally offer the equivalent of $320k to anyone who can find a critical smart contract bug in any Ethereum ecosystem project.

DETAILS The program, which is hosted on Immunefi and called the R Bounty, is designed to encourage responsible disclosure of critical vulnerabilities. The announcement comes days after Alpha Homora v2 was hacked for $37.5M, while Yearn Finance lost $11M in an exploit last month. Forster will be giving out the reward in Armor tokens, in a personal capacity.

MAKE DEFI SAFER The bounty is the latest in a series of efforts to improve security in DeFi. Earlier this week developer Emilio Bonassi launched ReviewsDAO, a forum for connecting projects with white hat hackers and security experts. Immunefi launched in December with the goal to have “sclaing bug bounties,” or payouts should priced as a percentage of the economic damage they would have caused.

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

💻 Billions of Users Can Now Access .Crypto Domains

TLDR Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure provider, now supports Unstoppable Domains’s .crypto domain name resolution. This will allow billions of users to access web content hosted on decentralized storage like IPFS and routed using blockchain-based domains.

SO WHAT Unlike centralized domains, which are held by a third party and subject to renewal fees, blockchain domains can act as a payment gateway, meaning users can attach all their cryptocurrency addresses to one domain and receive payments through that domain. This helps users avoid sharing their public keys in order to transact. Blockchain domains also are censorship resistant. They can only be taken down by the domain’s owner.

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

🔗The Graph Broadens Layer 1 Blockchain Support

The Graph, a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains, is including support for Polkadot, NEAR, Solana and Celo queries. The new Layer 1s will join the network’s current supported chains of Ethereum, IPFS and POA. Queries on The Graph’s hosted service grew to over 11 Billion last month, after growth of 100x last year of 2020.

🔗Someone Just Bought a CryptoPunk for $1.2M

CryptoPunks Bot @cryptopunksbotPunk 4156 bought for 650 ETH ($1,245,633.99 USD) by 0xf476cd from 0x9e199d. larvalabs.com/cryptopunks/de… #cryptopunks #ethereum

4:21 PM ∙ Feb 18, 2021686Likes161Retweets

🔗Private AMM SecretSwap is Live on Mainnet

SecretSwap, an automated market maker, is now live on the Secret Network. SecretSwap allows users to trade any secret token for any other. Smart contracts on Secret Network have encrypted inputs, outputs, and state, so miners are not able to front-run any orders submitted to the AMM. Tokens that users buy on SecretSwap can be transferred with privacy on Secret Network, used in other Secret Apps, or sent over bridges back to native chains, including Ethereum. Network fees for interacting with SecretSwap are paid in SCRT, like all other secret contracts.

🔗Blockchain.com Raises $120M in Funding Round: Cointelegraph

“Several notable macro investment funds joined the round, including Moore Strategic Ventures, Access Ventures, Rovida Advisors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Google’s investment spin-off GV, Lakestar, Eldridge, Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass and others,” Cointelegrpah reported. “The funding will be used to bolster Blockchain.com’s growing Institutional Markets business. The company recently expanded its suite and began offering crypto custody, trade execution and lending services tailored for institutional investors.”

🔗Pods Raised $800k in Seed Round

Pods Finance Inc. has closed a pre-seed round with Boost VC, Framework Ventures, P2P Capital, BitScale, Zeeprime, The LAO, and additional DeFi angel investors by August 2020. Pods enable the easiest way to hedge crypto assets in Ethereum. Pods Protocol is a decentralized non-custodial Options Protocolthat enables users to buy, sell and provide liquidity using an Options AMM.

✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Owen Fernau and Dan Kahan, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila and 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 ($10/mo, $100/yr).