⛓ BNB Chain Slips as No. 1 Ethereum-Compatible Chain

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News

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Blockchain Data Provider for Uniswap and Other DeFi Platforms Quietly Scales Up

Podcast

🎙 Starkware Founders: Ethereum Could Surpass Visa’s Transaction Speeds Within Months

Video

Quick Take: Unsecured Lending is becoming a crowded game

DeFi Explainers

What is UMA?

Elsewhere

Asset Management Giant Fidelity Adds to Crypto Offerings With Ethereum Index Fund: CoinDesk
The SEC’s Kardashian fine was a dumb publicity stunt: Fortune
This Wednesday, Sanja Kon of Utrust, John Wu of Ava Labs and former NBA player Baron Davis sit down to talk about Web3 and blockchain uses: Avalanche

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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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DeFi Blockchains

⛓ BNB Chain Slips as No. 1 Ethereum-Compatible Chain: Report

Nansen Reports Daily Transactions Still Top Ethereum

By Aleksandar Gilbert

TRANSACTIONS Binance’s BNB Chain is losing its edge as the world’s most-used Ethereum-compatible blockchain. Daily transactions on BNB Chain still dwarf those on Ethereum, the world’s preeminent smart contract platform, but the gap has steadily narrowed over the past several months.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT Marketplaces

🖼 OpenSea Streamlines NFT Launches for Artists

SeaDrop Refines NFT Minting and Drop Process

By Tarang Khaitan

SMART CONTRACTS OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, has launchedSeaDrop, an open-source smart contract that allows NFT project creators to skip the tedious task of deploying their own custom smart contracts.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

AMC’s The Walking Dead Signature 3D Avatars Minting on 10/5

The Walking Dead series may be coming to an end, but the Dead continue to live on in Web3. After two public sell outs of their NFT collections, Orange Comet will be releasing their Metaverse-ready, 3D hand-sculpted avatars of some of the favorite characters from the TV series. On October 5, two 5K piece mints (one public, one passholder only) will go on sale.

The Avatars feature fan-favorites Rick, Daryl, Michonne (with her pets), Carol, Mercer and more. These high-quality digital collectibles are one of the required NFTs needed to activate the gamification of the upcoming ‘The Walking Dead Lands’ metaverse; a post-apocalyptic open-world build-and-earn experience.

The cost for the public mint will be $80, priced in ETH immediately before the mint, and if you’re a Walker Access passholder, there will be an additional 0.02 ETH discount. So even if your favorite show may be ending, get your wallets ready so you can stay connected to the TWD community.

Defiant Video

📺 Quick Take: Unsecured Lending is becoming a crowded game

Podcast Video

🎙📺 Ethereum can surpass Visa’s transaction speed within months

Shoutout

Galxe is the leading Web3 credential data network in the world. This collaborative credential infrastructure enables brands and developers to engage communities and build robust products in Web3.

With Galxe, users can explore Web3 in learn-to-earn campaigns with over 700 partners. On the other hand, builders have the opportunity to create growth campaigns on a seamless, plug-in-play dashboard. Introducing Galxe Passport the one-click solution to verifying Web3 identities.

DeFi Explainers

🧐 What is UMA?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Tokenization of Off-Chain Assets

By Rahul Nambiampurath

TOKENIZATION Universal Market Access (UMA) is an Ethereum-powered protocol that tracks off-blockchain assets such as gold and tokenizes them into synthetic on-chain assets.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Elsewhere

🔗 Asset Management Giant Fidelity Adds to Crypto Offerings With Ethereum Index Fund: CoinDesk

Fidelity’s new Ethereum Index Fund will offer clients access to ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

🔗 The SEC’s Kardashian fine was a dumb publicity stunt: Fortune

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler got what he wanted on Monday.

This Wednesday, Sanja Kon of Utrust, John Wu of Ava Labs and former NBA player Baron Davis sit down to talk about Web3 and blockchain uses. Register here: https://t.co/1Md2rYyoQ3 pic.twitter.com/sxcfrYBptX

— Forbes Crypto (@ForbesCrypto) October 3, 2022

Trending in The Defiant

SushiSwap Elects Grey New ‘Head Chef’ After Months of DramaAfter months of debate and controversy, the community of SushiSwap has finally elected a new “head chef” to lead the decentralized crypto exchange.
DeFi Lender Euler Finance Accepts USDT as CollateralSkepticism about whether USDT is fully backed by reserve assets has been around since 2017. Despite this, crypto’s largest dollar-pegged stablecoin, with a $68B market capitalization, has continued to make inroads into DeFi.
What are Gas Fees?For a system to be decentralized, it must be self-funded. In other words, there is no need for outside money to make it work. Self-funding must be incentivized to be effective.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Samuel Haig, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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⚙️ Blockchain Data Provider for Uniswap and Other DeFi Platforms Quietly Scales Up

The Graph Notches 500 Subgraphs But Some Users Knock Performance

By Owen Fernau

INFRASTRUCTURE Data may not be the sexiest element in crypto, but it is a key piece of infrastructure. And on Oct. 3, The Graph, a leading provider of decentralized crypto data, recorded 500 subgraphs on its Graph Network.

DATA Subgraphs are application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable software programs to interact with other programs. In the case of the Graph, subgraphs pull, process, and store data from the blockchain so the information can be easily accessed.

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That function is pretty important and major players such as Uniswap depend on it. Yet some users grumble that The Graph needs to improve the technology’s composability — the ability for blockchain apps to work together.

The Graph Network is a decentralized protocol which allows developers to access on-chain data. The first 10 subgraphs migrated to The Graph Network in April 2021.

Solid Growth

Reaching the milestone of 500 migrated subgraphs is solid growth, but Kyle Rojas, who works on business development and partnerships for Edge and Node, the team that built The Graph, said it’s just the beginning.

“This scaling pace is almost exactly what happened with the hosted service,” Rojas told The Defiant.

The Graph has a centralized service on which it still hosts subgraphs as they migrate to the decentralized network. “Small, fast, then all at once,” Rojas said.

39 Blockchains

Major data sources like Uniswap’s well-used charts page use subgraphs for data. Developers are building subgraphs across 39 different blockchains, according to Rojas.

“Subgraphs power the majority of the web3 space,” he said, listing major decentralized exchanges like Avalanche’s Trader Joe, as well as NFT marketplaces like Foundation.

“Subgraphs are powerful because you deploy them once and they live forever on The Graph Network,” Rojas said. “There is no one that can shut down the API or deplatform the application.”

A Billion Queries

The business developer said this differs from Google, a centralized company which indexes the web’s data.

Subgraphs are queried over a billion times a day, according to Rojas. Looking forward, he added that The Graph is testing out the Layer 2 Arbitrum as protocol-wide solution, to bring down costs of interacting with the network.

In terms of momentum, The Graph has also formed a significant partnership with Messari, a crypto data and intelligence platform, to push forward standardization for subgraphs.

Despite the milestones, The Graph’s GRT token has dropped 84% this year compared to a 63% slide in Ether.

GRT has tumbled this year during the crypto bear market. Source: The Defiant Terminal

Token prices don’t necessarily mean demand is depressed. Rojas said the number of developers, queries of data, and subgraphs have all increased at a faster rate during the crypto bear market.

That isn’t to say developers enjoy working with subgraphs. Pat Croke, a founding data engineer at Transpose, a company which translates blockchain data into APIs, told The Defiant that he found the composability — the ability of blockchain apps to talk to one another — of subgraphs lacking.

“You can’t have subgraphs call other subgraphs,” Croke said. “That composability part is the biggest part of DeFi and when you’re doing data you want to map data to DeFi.”

Useful Data

Transpose operates more like a traditional company in that it doesn’t rely on token incentives in order to have a decentralized group of contributors to do the work necessary to provide useful data.

“The Graph is the biggest and pretty much only decentralized indexing service, but that’s not to say that The Graph technologically isn’t the best solution,” Croke added.

Rojas told The Defiant that a feature called Substreams will make subgraphs more composable.

Even so, it’s clear there is a hunger to translate data into more usable formats.