Cooper Turley

Before, going viral offered didn’t much more than internet fame. Now, it’s providing the humans behind the memes with hefty paydays, thanks to NFTs. The recent upswing in NFTs has given memes a new monetization avenue to the tune of 100+ ETH sales. Most of these memes are selling on Foundation – the new kid…

A new web3 media platform called Mirror offers a new way for journalists to monetize their work. This past month, I set out to explore the NFT value stack – leveraging Mirror to make the essay into an NFT. The post, titled “NFT Value Capture Equation” was broken down using a fractional token called $VALUE.…

Social money issuer Roll was hacked for nearly $5.7M of creator tokens held in hot wallets on the platform over the weekend. Using Roll’s private keys, the hacker made off with tokens from 400+ creators on the platform. They immediately sold into Uniswap pools created around the vulnerable social tokens and transferred the ETH via…

3LAU smashed the single NFT auction record on Saturday night after selling $11.6M of NFTs by tokenizing his debut album Ultraviolet in partnership with Origin Protocol. The bespoke auction portal – nft.3lau.com – allowed the top 33 bidders to earn exclusive Ultraviolet album NFTs of varying rarities. These tiers ranged from “Platinum” for the top…

In the midst of a growing NFT boom, marketplaces like OpenSea, SuperRare and Nifty Gateway are experiencing record-breaking volumes. There was over $100M in NFT sales over the last 30 days, according to Crypto Slam, which tracks the data, and a large part of the trading action is taking place on secondary markets. This means…

DeFi experienced one of its more complex exploits over the weekend. An attack which resulted in ~$37.5M drained from CREAM Finance’s Iron Bank using Alpha Homora’s leveraged debt. An attacker was able to use Alpha’s sUSD contracts which had not yet been released to the public or made available in the UI to act as…

The Tamagotchi x Pokemon web3 crossover Axie Infinity has broken the record for the largest NFT sale yesterday afternoon as a community member purchased a digital plot of land for 888.25 ETH, worth over $1.5M at the time of writing. The sale comes alongside the launch of Axie Infinity’s custom sidechain, Ronin, which launched last…

Tornado Cash passed its first governance proposal to make its native token – TORN – transferable yesterday afternoon. Tornado Cash offers a way for users to privately send funds between any two addresses using an anonymity pool, meaning tokens sent through the mixer can not be tracked between the sending and receiving address. It also…

DeFi is getting an unexpected and huge new backer: The Federal Reserve of St. Louis. “DeFi offers exciting opportunities and has the potential to create a truly open, transparent, and immutable financial infrastructure,” reads the latest report from one of the 12 regional Reserve Banks. The report cites  learnings from projects like Maker, Uniswap, Balancer,…

Foundation added 100 new NFTs to auction as its V2 upgrade went live yesterday afternoon. The launch featured 1/1 drops running as 24 hours auctions, most starting at 1 ETH reserves with first edition items like Robbie Tilton’s Fire Sword leading the way at 5 ETH at the time of writing. “Foundation is bringing digital…

Balancer unveiled its V2 protocol upgrade, offering a generalized AMM solution for DeFi liquidity. Balancer allows users to create token pools with flexible constituents, weights and trading fees. With V2, Balancer will aggregate all its liquidity in one vault, while users will maintain an internal balance of the tokens they hold. The change is meant…

NFT collectors are flocking to get their hands on Hashmasks – a collection of 16,384 unique digital portraits. Each portrait features a combination of five traits with different levels of scarcity. The sale window opened with seven price tranches, quickly breaching the 100 ETH threshold and selling out yesterday morning for a total of $14M…

Zora Protocol has unveiled documentation around its universal media protocol, offering developer tools to create perpetual markets for NFTs by baking an order book directly into the token. Zora’s protocol creates assets that contain a market and media component, allowing NFTs to become independent of the platforms they are issued on, a concept they have…

Reddit announced a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation, a sign it’s betting on a more decentralized internet and doubling down on the leading smart contract platform.  The social media company and the foundation started collaborating last year with the  Scaling Bake-off, a scaling technology competition. Reddit is also exploring  Community Points – or non-transferable ERC20…

Notional Finance has come out of stealth with $3M in liquidity following a closed beta over the past quarter. Notional users can lend and borrow the stablecoins DAI and USDC at fixed rates using ETH or WBTC as collateral. A 10k USDC loan has a fixed APR of 4.27%, while a 10k USDC deposit has…

Fei released details of its planned decentralized stablecoin protocol yesterday afternoon. Fei seeks to offer a novel design to combat some of the whale games that favored the earliest participants of decentralized stablecoins. Fei’s stablecoin, FEI, is a “decentralized, fair, liquid, and scalable stablecoin that exhibits a high fidelity peg” said the announcement post. It…

For all the optimism about the potential for NFTs – or non-fungible tokens – to revolutionize digital collectibles, one important drawback has been hanging over the sector; lack of liquidity.  NFTX is seeking to address the issue by debuting an NFT liquidity pool. “NFTX is a platform for making ERC20 tokens that are backed by…

YAM holders voted to remove the token’s rebase mechanisms, which expanded and contracted supply seeking to  establish a stable price, after taking DeFi by storm this summer. Rebases issued and burned new tokens based on the price of YAM, targeting a $1 peg. After migrating to YAM V2 following a smart contract exploit that caused…

DEX aggregator 1inch surprised DeFi users with a holiday treat with the release of the 1INCH governance token on Christmas Eve. 1INCH features a total supply of 1.5B tokens, which unlocks every 6 months over the course of the next 4 years. Tokens were airdropped to all wallets that made at least one trade before…

DeFi’s rising insurance protocol Cover Finance was exploited for $9.4M worth of user funds after a group of hackers used a faulty smart contract to mint quadrillions of COVER tokens. Cover Finance allows users to buy smart contract protection on supported DeFi protocols by buying CLAIM tokens that can be redeemed in the event of…

Crypto hardware wallet provider Ledger had thousands of its users’ sensitive information leaked to the public this weekend. The data breach that occurred in June was brought to light after a public hacker shared the stolen data on leaking site Raidforum, after months of it supposedly ‘selling for six figures’ on dark marketplaces. The proprietary…

Ethereum-based social network Cent has caught Twitter by storm through its new Valuables feature, allowing users to buy Tweets, minted as scarce, digital assets. “The creator of this tweet decides whether to turn their work into a limited edition, one-of-one NFT,” states the website. “Prior to them deciding, anyone can make an offer for them…

Tornado Cash presented a governance proposal to incentivize use of the Ethereum-based privacy tool via a new token called TORN. Tornado Cash allows users to deposit a fixed amount of supported assets (ETH, USDC, DAI) and “wash it” through an anonymity pool. That deposited value can be redeemed by the receiving address using a note…

Compound Finance is entering uncharted DeFi territory with an independent blockchain called Compound Chain. Underpinned by a native unit of account called CASH, Compound Chain is a “reimagination of the Compound Protocol” that is “proactively preparing for the rapid adoption of digital assets, both on Eth2 and central bank digital currency ledgers,” according to compound.cash.…

Prolific 3D artist Beeple sold $3.5M worth of crypto art on fiat-to-crypto marketplace Nifty Gateway, a record for NFT sales over a 72-day period. The sale is a sign digital art is becoming increasingly valuable, The Beeple Everyday: 2020 Collection featured 21 single edition auctions, three open editions which were auctioned for 5 minutes and…