The week-long Shanghai International Blockchain Week attracted top projects and investors to Shanghai to seek crypto money and fame in its 6th year.  The two main events in the week were the Blockchain Summit organized Wanxiang, one of the earliest backers of Ethereum,  and the Web3 Forum organized by the Web3 foundation. Ethereum founder Vitalik…

Hegic is back with a bang. Demand for the protocol, which temporarily suspended activity after a bug earlier this year, is soaring as its partnership with Yearn Finance’s rockstar founder compounds with increasing demand for trading protection. The HEGIC governance token has more than doubled over the past 30 days, after founder Molly Wintermut and…

There’s a blue wave and we’re not talking about US politics; it’s the latest meme making the rounds in DeFi as tokens with blue logos are rallying ahead of the rest this month: That’s AAVE, YFI and SNX up at least 50% just in the past 10 days. Image Source: CoinGecko Top Gainers DeFi tokens…

Many decentralized finance applications broke down earlier today after a series of unfortunate events resulted in an outage on a key piece of Ethereum infrastructure.  The main lesson of the day is that a *decentralized* financial system shouldn’t be so reliant on a single provider.  Here’s what happened: Developers of Ethereum client Geth —one of…

DeFi tokens are rebounding after a slump in October amid increased coronavirus cases and election uncertainty, dragging down most financial assets. All of the major DeFi tokens are up today, enough to erase each of their losses in the past week. 0x’s ZRX and Uniswap’s UNI are the biggest gainers, both up more than 10%…

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is exploding in popularity. Concentrated in the Ethereum ecosystem, it offers the types of services hitherto dominated by the legacy financial system such as lending, borrowing, and savings. But like the ICO craze of a few years ago, the growing mania around it has raised eyebrows from those with a deep…

The deposit contract for Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake chain was released today. If ~524k ETH is deposited this month, the new chain will go live on Dec.1. Potential rewards for contributing to that pile of ETH are enticing, but as is usually the case with high returns, there’s also high risk. So far, 5.7K ETH from…

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds begins with a story of British scientist Francis Galton, who on a brisk autumn day in 1906 went to a fair where attendees could guess the weight of an ox. At the time, Galton believed that the average guess would be quite far from the actual weight, and thought…

In the previous episode of The Defiant there was a QR code embedded in the video. Had you scanned that code it would have brought you into a week-long NFT-based social experiment designed to test a simple question: ‘Are you greedy or are you cultured.’ We normally report the news in DeFi and blockchain but…

Non-fungible tokens, or digital assets representing unique and scarce items, have taken off in the past few weeks. So much so, that video producer Robin Schmidt and artist Simon Wan thought to do an experiment to find what is actually valuable, art attached to these tokens or their crypto component?  And that gets to a…