Corporate debt is no longer good enough for Circle, the blockchain powerhouse. That’s the upshot of a move Circle announced on Sunday as it unveiled a rebalancing of the reserves that support USDC, it’s widely used stablecoin. Circle, a peer-to-peer payment platform powered by blockchain technology, will now solely use cash and short-duration U.S. Treasury…

Avalanche, a smart contracts platform, now has its first DeFi protocol with $1B in total value locked. The protocol, Benqi Finance, launched just four days ago on Aug. 19 and has been distributing $3M in AVAX tokens to users. AVAX tokens are from Ava Labs, the company that created Avalanche, and the distribution is part…

NFTs are a simple idea, but not for long. We’ve already seen how they’re being tapped as collateral for loans. Now more complex instruments are coming, thanks in part to projects breaking NFTs into pieces in a process called fractionalization.  That’s not all — some financial engineers are reportedly fashioning futures contracts derived from NFTs. …

The idea behind the new Metamask is to make gas fees more transparent for the user. Wallets are able to have better estimates and make transaction fees more predictable. There is also additional user experience benefits like automating the fee bidding mechanism, thus reducing delays in transaction confirmation.

In this week’s episode, we speak with Dan Morehead, the founder of one of the longest-standing and largest crypto funds. Dan founded Pantera Capital in 2003 as a global macro hedge fund. In 2013, Pantera began investing in Bitcoin and quickly shifted its entire focus into crypto. Today, Pantera manages $3.8 billion in digital assets and equity in…

Investor appetite for NFT art and collectibles shows no signs of abating.

Have you watched Howl’s Moving Castle from Hayao Miyazaki? If you haven’t, please go check it out, it’s an amazing movie. As the name suggests, a magical castle roams across the landscape on a pair of spindly legs.  I find quite a parallel between this wonderful contraption and DeFi. The castle, devoid of symmetry and striking with…

DeFi can be part of the conversation at South by Southwest — if you demand it. Organizers allow the public to weigh in on the agenda of South by Southwest (SXSW), one of the biggest festivals in the country, and that’s underway now. Dozens of sessions have been proposed that touch on crypto topics and…

A Uniswap governance proposal riled up the DeFi community this week.  The proposal, which has since been canceled, would have used yield generated from $25M in Uniswap treasury assets to pay employees at blockchain analytics platform Flipside Crypto. The payment would have been for Flipside to oversee a bounty program for pulling more users into…

Last week, we conducted our BAYC evaluation 3 months after our crew was gifted them by Robin. But, here's the thing, in this ever expanding space of crypto capital and hoddling there is a growing consensus that a "gifting culture" is fundamental to this moral tightrope of the Nakamoto consensus. So we dived into this…