Dan Kahan

Journalist Dan Kahan loves manga. When he saw the famous Naruto series was being turned into NFTs he uncovered a new type of copyright fraud.

Mango Markets, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana, raised $70M from the sale of its governance token $MNGO.  Over a two-day sale period ending on August 11, buyers claimed 500M $MNGO tokens, in what the team called a “fair launch.”  Mango tokens give holders entry to the Mango DAO that governs the Mango Markets protocol.…

Rarible is lowering the barrier to entry for developers looking to launch NFTs projects. On August 12, the NFT platform launched Rarible Protocol, an open-source toolkit for developers to create custom NFT storefronts and marketplaces. The tech stack includes contracts, standards, and APIs for minting, exchanging and indexing NFTs.  Rarible is one of the most…

Sushi is drawing back from plans to deploy on Optimism after a dispute over the Ethereum L2 solution’s launch process. On August 11, SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong announced that Sushi would be taking a wait-and-see approach to deploying on Optimism due to what he described as “non-preferential treatment.” According to Delong, Sushi had already deployed…

Michelangelo drew inspiration from the Greco-Roman statues of Classical antiquity to sculpt his masterpiece David. Van Gogh paid homage to the vibrant colors in the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Great artworks of the past live beyond their creators to inspire great artworks of the future. Digital art and NFTs are no exception.  But…

Last month, one anonymous user spent more than $5M on CryptoPunks in a buy that kicked off a frenzy of NFT sales.  In an exclusive interview, The Defiant’s Camila Russo sat down to chat with the buyer 0x650d, who purchased 88 CryptoPunks for $5.5M in a single block. 0x650d gives us the scoop on how…

Artist pplpleasr, who has worked with big name DeFi protocols Uniswap, SushiSwap and Pickle Finance, has teamed up with Fortune Magazine for an NFT drop. The NFTs, which go live on Aug. 6 at 12 pm EST, will be based on pplpleasr’s cover art for Fortune Magazine’s August/September issue, which focused on cryptocurrency and DeFi.…

The Ethereum market is on fire, at least proverbially speaking. Over the first eight hours since EIP-1559 was implemented, thus changing the transaction fee mechanism of Ethereum, 2,458 ETH, or $6.9M at ETH’s current price of around $2.8K, had been burned.  The proposal, which went into effect with the London hard fork at 8:34 am…

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce is taking a “liberty-loving perspective” when it comes to cryptocurrency and DeFi, contrasting with statements by the agency’s chairman on Tuesday.  For Peirce, who joined a panel hosted by The Defiant and DeFi Watch on Aug. 4, if users are voluntarily deciding to trust the code over a company then they…

The price of Ethereum’s Ether has been rallying in the lead-up to the EIP-1559 upgrade. ETH crossed $2,500 for the first time since June 16 over the weekend — that’s a 47% increase from $1.7K on June 22, the lowest since hitting an all-time high above $4.3K on May 12. Analysts and traders speculate Ethereum’s…

CryptoPunk sales exploded over the past week, and the rest of the NFT market is coming along for the ride. The OG NFT avatar project has always been the biggest tour de force in the NFT marketplace, but recently the project has seen an unprecedented amount of sales, in both volume and value. From July…

If you’re looking to get into NFT Avatars, you might be suffering from decision paralysis.  After all, there are so many projects out there and new ones launching nearly weekly. It’s hard to keep track. NFT avatars are images of a character, usually from the shoulders up, frequently used as digital profile pictures. The vast…

The Ethereum staking-as-a-service company Lido is aiming to go fully decentralized. The project has implemented a skeleton upgradable smart contract for making new withdrawals and new deposits fully non-custodial. The project is still seeking an optimal solution to become a trustless node operator. Lido offers users the ability to stake ETH, which will be utilized…

Brace yourself Defiers: Government regulation in the U.S. is looking more and more like an inevitability. On July 27, the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs conducted a hearing to explore potential regulation needs for the cryptocurrency sector. The hearing, titled “Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?,” largely centered around whether or…

Goldman Sachs’s proposed DeFi ETF has sparked speculation that the fund has more to do with boomer tech than DeFi — but there’s still a chance the banking giant may redeem itself.  Goldman Sachs's DeFi and Blockchain Equity ETF will track the Solactive Decentralized Finance and Blockchain Index, according to the SEC filing. While the…

Retail investor-focused stock trading app Robinhood plans to bolster its crypto functionality. Ahead of its upcoming IPO on July 29, Robinhood livestreamed its “roadshow” to give investors insight into the company’s growth plans. Referring to Robinhood’s crypto offerings during the livestream, CFO Jason Warnick said the company would be “making a lot of investments in…

Uniswap is one of the few DeFi protocols that runs fully permissionlessly, without interruptions or possible human intervention. It’s considered to be the gold standard for the space, which is why it was so jarring when management behind the decentralized exchange decided to remove 100 tokens from its interface. Uniswap Labs is the software development…

A new NFT project, backed by some real star power, will have you burning green in more ways than one. “Stoner Cats” is an upcoming series of animated shorts about, well, house cats high on marijuana. And it will only be available to those who drop some greenbacks on its unique, algorithmically-generated NFTs.  The series…

Immutable X, an NFT-focused layer 2 solution on Ethereum from the team behind the NFT trading card game Gods Unchained, has unveiled its native token, $IMX. Since launching its Alpha version in April the Immutable X protocol has facilitated over 250K NFT trades. It offers gas-free NFT minting, trading, and collecting. The $IMX token will…

European Defiers better buckle up, because regulators in the EU are attempting to tighten the rules on crypto transfers.  On July 20, the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, announced a package of legislative proposals to strengthen the EU’s anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing (AML/CFT) rules. The legislative proposal moves to apply…

Bucking a bearish crypto market, FTX, the two-year-old cryptocurrency exchange, announced a $900M Series B funding round at a valuation of $18B, the company said in a statement released yesterday.  The deal is a clear sign that for all the angst in the markets, well-heeled investors are only too eager to play the long game…

Sushi has officially announced their next generation automated market maker (AMM) Trident.  While SushiSwap started out as a fork of Uniswap, the announcement explicitly states that Trident is a new AMM “and not a fork.” Trident will focus on capital efficiency (ie: the ratio between invested capital and return) and integrate Sushi’s many products. Trident…

The NFT marketplace OpenSea has reached a $1.5B valuation after a $100M Series B funding round led by a16z. This makes OpenSea the newest NFT-based unicorn, or a privately held startup company valued over $1B. A16z also led OpenSea’s $23M Series A round in March. This year, the venture giant also invested in Dapper Labs,…

Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO and Bitcoin enthusiast, wants to bring decentralized finance onto the OG cryptocurrency protocol. On July 15, Dorsey announced that his financial services and digital payments company, Square, is creating a new business focused on bringing non-custodial, permissionless DeFi services to Bitcoin. The new company, which is called “TBD” (just like…

Grayscale is now offering institutional investors index exposure to DeFi. The Grayscale DeFi Fund tracks Coindesk’s DeFi Index (DFX), a new market cap-weighted benchmark index following a representative basket of ten DeFi crypto tokens. These include Uniswap (UNI) weighted at 49.95%, Aave (AAVE) weighted at 10.25% and Compound (COMP) weighted at 8.38%.  Grayscale’s new index…