When I joined MetaCartel Ventures’ weekly meeting online earlier this month I didn’t know what to expect.  The outfit’s bare-bones website looks like something university students would cook up on an all-nighter, with low-rez GIFs and, strangely, an embedded mp3 of Evanescence’s hit “Bring Me to Life.” Its whitepaper features images reminiscent of playing cards…

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…

Alien Worlds, one of the biggest blockchain games running on the Wax blockchain (EOS fork), is making some participants millions of dollars in weeks. The issue is, these players are gaming the game.   Players buy NFT tools and click a button to get Trilium (TLM), the in-game currency, as well as more NFTs. Even if…

MistX is the first time in Ethereum history that FlashBots is available to regular users for front-running protection and “no success, no fee” transactions.

Chiefess of the Defiant, Camila Russo assembles the chief voices of the biggest lending protocols in town from Compound, Aave, MakerDao and CREAM Finance for a spirited debate on the world of DeFi lending.

On-Chain Markets Update by Lucas Outumuro, IntoTheBlock The anticipated launch of Uniswap on layer 2 has finally arrived, at least to some extent. Uniswap’s alpha on Optimism has been released, supporting only six crypto-assets so far, but at a fraction of the cost incurred on Ethereum’s mainnet.  As Uniswap’s V3 is on track to fully…

ThorChain, a popular decentralized exchange that enables native token swaps across different blockchains, was exploited yesterday to the tune of $4.9M. According to the project, the exploit was made possible by a recent upgrade to the protocol’s “Bifrost” router that connects ThorChain to Ethereum. The change allowed the attacker to trick the router using a…

SushiSwap’s $60M strategic fundraising round has come under fire from community members who dislike the plan to offer investors deep discounts at a time when its tokens are slumping in the marketplace. Last week, the SushiSwap team introduced a proposal  to diversify the protocol’s treasury. The decentralized exchange holds the bulk of its treasury funds…

Damien Hirst, still the enfant terrible of the UK art scene and reportedly the nation’s richest living artist, is about to add to his fortune with a $20M NFT drop. His project, called The Currency, is a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which correspond to 10,000 unique paintings of spots created by the artist in 2016.…

It’s a good time for Layer 2 enthusiasts as Uniswap V3 has soft-launched on Optimism, a leading optimistic rollup solution for scaling Ethereum.  Users can now tap Optimism to deposit, trade and provide liquidity on the decentralized exchange (DEX), which captures roughly half of all DEX volume, according to a Dune Analytic’s query. Optimism “currently…