🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of May 17

Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend and holding up amid the sell-off. Summing up: It's been a bad week for crypto — ETH is down moe than 40% in the past seven days and so are the top DeFi tokens, while BTC is down more than 20%. Analysts loo...

Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend and holding up amid the sell-off.

Summing up: It's been a bad week for crypto — ETH is down moe than 40% in the past seven days and so are the top DeFi tokens, while BTC is down more than 20%. Analysts looking for explanations for the downturn point to China regulation concerns and Elon Musk turning on BTC. Most likely, crypto had simply gone up too far, too fast. An over-leveraged market led to cascading liquidations, worsening the fall. Our Defiant Weekly video goes into all the drivers of the fall. But if you want to keep things light, head over to our “Wait for It” video, a hilarious production created for CoinDesk’s Consensus, which pokes fun at high Ethereum gas prices and features a deep fake of Vitalik and Terry Crews .

We covered how DeFi protocols held up better than centralized exchanges, never losing uptime amid record volume and liquidations. We wrote about how DeFi on-chain metrics remain strong, with Yearn taking advantage of the dip, buying back is own token, while BSC’s Venus didn’t handle the downturn as well and was left with a pile of bad debt.

Speaking of Yearn, we have a breakdown of the protocol’s complex ecosystem, diving into how each of its merger partners fit and work with each other. We also dug into BSC’s main applications and how its users are proving to be more fickle in the market rout. We also have an explainer on Ethereum’s MEV bots and the projects trying to solve this problem.

In this week’s launches and upgrades, Coinbase announced a new wallet browser plugin that will more directly compete with MetaMask, Sushi released its Miso token launchpad, and Aave hinted at a product for institutions. In our tutorials, we go through how to yield farm using Convex Finance, and how to become a liquidity provider for free by playing APY Vision’s LP Royale game. If you’re looking to keep your eye on the long term vision for web3 amid the market blood-bath, head to our podcast where Kayvon Tehranian talks about how blockchains are adding a value layer to the internet.

And there was more! There’s a lot going on, but we’ve got you covered :)

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).

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🙌 Together with:

  • Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!
  • 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, a capitalization-weighted index that tracks the performance of selected DeFi assets across the market.
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Video

📺 Defiant Weekly: Bear Market Blues

📺 V'ktalik Buterin - Wait for It feat. Terry Crews

📺 Quick Take: NBA Top Shots Sued

📺 Tuesday Tutorials: No Risk Liquidity Providing with LP Royale

📺 First Look: Trading Secretly with SecretSwap

Interview

"Blockchains are Adding Property Rights to the Internet:" Kayvon Tehranian

In this week’s episode I interview Kayvon Tehranian, founder & CEO of Foundation, a platform for minting, buying and selling non-fungible tokens. We talked about the future of the internet —Kayvon believes blockchains are adding property rights to the internet. He also thinks that instead of having to wait for old institutions to come online, new ones in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOS, will be built. He foresees a future when a lot of people will start saying, ‘why aren't you asking me to connect my wallet? Why do I have to log in this other way, that I don't have control over what I'm doing?’ I also believe that future is not so far away.

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

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📺Watch the Interview Here:

Thursday

Markets

Dives

Links

Wednesday

Markets

  • Crypto Makes First Attempt to Recover After Worst Bloodbath in Over a Year: It’s bad out there — in the past 24 hours Bitcoin plunged more than 30%, while Ether fell more than 40%, crypto exchanges were down, price tracking websites collapsed, China crackdown news flashed, crypto Twitter panic ensued. All in all, a classic crypto sell-off. But there are signs the market is starting to recover.
  • Yearn Seizes Dip and Buys Back $1.47M of YFI Token: Yearn Finance is buying its own YFI token dip. The protocol recently announced it would buy 8.15 YFI, when the average price was $50,121. Because of today’s market crash, the organization is down $12K at the time of writing. Yearn doesn’t seem concerned by the drop, doubling down today and announcing another purchase of 21.35 YFI for $1.2M.

Bytes

Tuesday

Tutorials

Markets

  • Crypto Market Downturn Mostly Shakes Out Short-Term Bitcoin Traders: It’s been a rough week for the crypto market̶ and it appears to be at the hands of n00bs. Bitcoin (BTC) has been hit especially hard with a 25% loss over the past seven days, and the majority of people selling BTC since the end of April have been traders that have been holding onto the cryptocurrency for less than one month, according to data from IntoTheBlock.com.

Dives

Links

Monday

DeFi 101

Ethereum’s MEV Bots: Explainer and Project Map: Blockchain miners can extract value by excluding, including or re-ordering the transactions on the block they produce. This is known as MEV (miner extractable value) and it’s only bound to increase in the future as DeFi volume and complexity increases.

Eco-Friendly Chia Network Gets Elon Musk Boost: The Chia network and its XCH cryptocurrency got a boost from Elon Musk’s recent lambasting of Bitcoin’s energy consumption.

Links

💜Community Love💜

Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!

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Lai Yuen | HFSP, NGMI | @0xlaiyuen7/ Privacy 2: People are already exploiting the public state of blockchains by front running traders in sandwich attacks. This is known as MEV, and here is a great thread from @DefiantNews .

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The Defiant @DefiantNews🤖Cumulative Miner Extractable Value (MEV) has reached $559M as per https://t.co/p1Prumoufz Here's a look at the current state of #DeFi projects working on #MEV ⚡️Flashbots ♟️ @Keeper_DAO 🤫 @SecretNetwork 🏹 @Archer_DAO Read more👇 https://t.co/MIMGbprmwB https://t.co/69ZHFfbxqi8:05 AM ∙ May 22, 2021

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Notional @NotionalFinanceDeFi comes out on top during Wednesday's sharp drawdown "stress test." via @DefiantNews 🧐🧐🧐

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12:33 PM ∙ May 21, 202122Likes7Retweets

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Fulvia 🍵 @fulviamoralesNo small feat. Source: @DefiantNews

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12:40 PM ∙ May 21, 2021139Likes25Retweets

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Pedro Costa @saagaz@DeFi_Dad @CamiRusso This is a true gem. That and other contributions to society from @DefiantNews and @CamiRusso towards leveling the financial game really inspired me to start writing something about it in Portuguese, as an attempt to spread the word in Brazil.2:45 AM ∙ May 21, 2021

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DeFiFry🔥 @DeFiFryCould we be 6 months away from Proof of Stake (PoS) on $ETH? @CamiRusso interviews @preston_vanloon of @prylabs on @DefiantNews and they talk #Ethereum. Full Interview: youtu.be/FZ0TQAvVpac

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2:31 AM ∙ May 21, 202141Likes10Retweets

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Kevin Feng @kfeng027Starting to really like the contents from @DefiantNews, the depth and presentation of Defi is hard to get from other media.

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thedefiant.ioYearn Finance Ecosystem Breakdown –– Pushing the Boundaries of Human Coordination - The Defiant - DeFi NewsWhile Yearn’s mergers were well publicized, the nature of the integrations were less so, so we dug into how the teams work together, on both a technical and social level.1:07 AM ∙ May 21, 202137Likes6Retweets

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Satoshi Nakameowdough @NakameowdoughI loved Hamilton, and this made me laugh out loud several times. Top work @DefiantNews

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The Defiant @DefiantNews🎁 A little special something from us to you. 📽️Tune in for the premiere of our "Wait for It" tribute featuring @terrycrews in just under an hour at 3pm UTC🔥 Don't miss @DirSchmidt's #DeFi Unlocked session at @CoinDesk #Consensus2021⚡️ Watch here👇 https://t.co/eJNQNKzGRv3:26 PM ∙ May 20, 20217Likes1Retweet

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Bianca Trovò @bianca_troveaux«Participants were not primarily interested in making money quickly through trades – 36% were most interested in the underlying technology, while 14% saw cryptocurrency as a long-term investment vehicle.» via @MarinaSpindler @paordgz7 @DefiantNews #womenincrypto

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The Defiant @DefiantNews🌐Global Report on Women, Cryptocurrency & Financial Independence by @MarinaSpindler and @paordgz7🔥 Women worldwide are embracing crypto and the report shows that they: ⚡️Are in it for the tech ⚡️Want to be paid in crypto ⚡️Hold digital assets 👇 https://t.co/bc3ibmz4iN https://t.co/dpIJN1sbJo2:03 PM ∙ May 20, 20218Likes2Retweets

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Internationalist Capitalist ™ @IntlCapitalist“When #ethereum reaches its potential to be a truly global platform for decentralized applications, that’s when we’ve achieved the final stages and we know we’ve made it.” -@preston_vanloon Great show with @CamiRusso and @DefiantNews #eth

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podcasts.apple.com‎The Defiant: “Ethereum is About Six Months Away from Proof-of-Stake:” Preston Van Loon on Apple PodcastsIn today’s episode, we interview Preston Van Loon. Preston co-founded Prysmatic Labs, one of the main teams building Ethereum 2.0, and has been leading that team for the past three years. On top of that, he recently founded a DeFi project which bundles the entire crypto market cap in one token to al…12:12 AM ∙ May 19, 202143Likes11Retweets

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3NV364N @ENVegaN.@DefiantNews Awesome Job!!! Bravo!! Great content!! https://t.co/vxFwRCTI5R

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The Defiant @DefiantNews📉 TVL on @BinanceChain has dropped by 35% to $20B as the crypto market continues to tread water With alternative low-fee options like @0xPolygon and @FantomFDN gaining traction, will users return? Read more👇 https://t.co/K5YD6vtcxS https://t.co/UWHuZ5iWkd11:10 PM ∙ May 18, 20219Likes2Retweets

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Aleks Larsen @_alekslarsenIt’s telling that the media prefers covering dog coins over real innovation in crypto If you want to learn about what’s actually going on and how it’s going to change the world, read the specialists A few favorites: @MessariCrypto @TheBlock__ @BanklessHQ @DefiantNews

the-defiant

Ryan Watkins @RyanWatkins_Just wait until DeFi starts receiving meaningful media coverage. Almost a year into this bull market and the media still hasn’t covered what is indisputably the single most exciting sector in crypto.6:00 PM ∙ May 18, 202154Likes7Retweets

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spinbackwards @spinbackwards@CamiRusso Stay calm. Buy a subscription to The Defiant.3:39 PM ∙ May 17, 2021

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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 below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

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