Layer 1 blockchains are making extraordinary offers to attract DeFi protocols and juice liquidity.  It was Harmony earlier this week, and now it’s Avalanche. The Avalanche Foundation is offering $180M in liquidity mining incentives to bring more apps into its DeFi ecosystem.  The first recipients? Users of the Avalanche-deployed versions of lending platform Aave and…

SuperRare, the influential NFT art platform, is taking a big step forward in its plan to progressively decentralize with the launch of its RARE token on Aug. 17. As part of a slew of changes, SuperRare is poised to bestow more control to artists.   The new token rocketed more than 235% on Tuesday and Wednesday…

reNFT is a rental protocol, enabling lending and borrowing of NFTs.

If TikTok is a window into what teens are up to these days, then crypto has a place beside dance videos.  On Aug. 17, blockchain-based music streaming protocol Audius announced its partnership with TikTok to allow one-click sharing with the social network.   This is the first music integration TikTok has established. The upshot of the…

Automated portfolio manager Balancer introduced a new mechanism to improve capital efficiency for liquidity providers as it aims to take a larger bite of the interest-bearing token market. Balancer’s so-called metastable pools have a  “nesting” feature, facilitating cheap swaps between one pool’s tokens and those of a nested group of tokens, as though all tokens…

Five months after opening the door to SushiSwap, Harmony One is inviting more major DeFi apps to hop on its blockchain.   Harmony One, one of a handful of platforms that uses sharded proof-of-stake for consensus, wants Curve Finance, the automated market maker, and Aave, the lending platform, to join the party. It’s offering $2M in…

A copyright battle is being waged in the NFT space.  On August 16, Sad Frogs District, a collection of 7,000 Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs), was delisted from OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. According to the OpenSea team, the action was taken in response to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request by Matt Furie,…

Mercurial Finance is building the liquidity platform for stable assets on Solana. As the DeFi ecosystem on Solana grows, there will be many different variants of collateralized, wrapped, and synthetic assets in the space. Their most immediate objective is to provide the best liquidity for all the major stable and pegged assets on Solana, which…

In this week’s episode we speak with Ryan Selkis, CEO and founder of Messari, one of the most popular crypto data and research companies. Ryan has been very vocal about crypto regulation in the US. We talk about how he believes the infrastructure bill was a catalyzing event for the whole American crypto ecosystem. He believes while there are…

The Solana blockchain’s SOL token is soaring to an all-time high, climbing the ranks to become the tenth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization.  SOL rallied as much as 38.8 % to $68.24 today, the highest ever. The digital asset is up 3,441.9% this year, compared with 353.3% for ETH and 58% for BTC. …