Ethereum gas prices spiked on Sunday as collectors, bots and apes raced to get their hands on newly launched NFT projects.  Gas fees, which briefly hit 600 gwei on Sunday due to demand, were reminiscent of a time when triple-digit gas fees were the norm. Gas fees for minting an NFT cost around $160. Yet,…

Just 40 days after Ethereum’s hashrate hit an all-time high, the key metric has plunged 17% in the last 10 days, according to data from Glassnode, a blockchain and intelligence provider. That’s the worst drop in a 10-day span in Ethereum’s history. The cause: China, probably. Ever since the Chinese government in May started warning…

The value of SafeDollar (SDO), an algorithmic stablecoin intended to be pegged to $1, has dropped to zero after a $248K exploit on Polygon. In a post-mortem analysis published on June 28, SafeDollar reported it had lost $202K of USDC and $46K of USDT as a result of an attack on one of its pools…

The decentralized Ethereum exchange DeversiFi plans to launch a governance token called DVF. DVF will be distributed via an open and fair launch mechanism called DeversiFi Launch Market (DLM). The proceeds will be placed in a community-governed treasury. Tokenomics and further details on the DLM mechanism will be made available closer to launch.  While DeversiFi’s…

Welcome to the first Global Digital Finance x The Defiant column, bringing you the stories and discussions that have caught our eye this month.  From market infrastructure to institutional investors to the digitalization of private markets, we’ll look at how decentralization is reshaping traditional finance. .  ETPs showing that Digital assets are ‘here to stay’ Bitcoin-indexed…

So, Friday, April 30, 2021 Hey dude, any thoughts on Bored Apes, the art looks cool. This was late April. My mind was very much not on NFTs, the overall market was just weeks away from what would turn out to be the top. I ignored it. And how I regret that now. Because BAYC…

In this week’s episode we speak with Jess Sloss, the instigator of Seed Club, a DAO that builds and invests in community tokens. We talk about the emergence of the social token economy, and how that’s different from the creator economy or the gig economy; the difference is that social tokens and DAOs allow individuals to create…

Refund is a word rarely heard in DeFi. So is redemption. Malt protocol is an algorithmic stablecoin that launched two weeks ago on the Polygon network. After an explosive launch, bugs in the smart contracts caused the MALT stablecoin to lose its peg and left many users unable to withdraw their funds. The protocol was…

What a wild moment.  When Grayscale Investments launched its Decentraland trust back in February it was hard to believe that a Wall Street firm with $40B in assets was firing up a vehicle to invest in one of the most exotic experiments in crypto. Created on the Ethereum blockchain six years ago, Decentraland is a…

SharedStake, a decentralized ETH2.0 Staking-as-a-Service protocol, is in disarray after a suspected inside job.  In a series of transactions on June 19 and June 23, a ‘rogue developer’ withdrew $500K worth of SGT, the project’s governance token, from the team’s allocation. These tokens were locked in a vesting contract and were meant to be unlocked…