Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is the ecosystem of financial applications being built with blockchain technology and without banks.  Money lives in cages:  Each financial system is locked within its own geographical borders and even then only some can access it. It’s also a system built on top of ancient technology; all the money transmitting protocols…

The latest ‘test in prod’ experiment from Yearn founder Andre Cronje has many degen traders questioning their YOLO nature following a flash loan attack of contracts which hadn’t been officially released to the public yesterday afternoon. Eminence Finance, an NFT gaming ecosystem which was still in development, was exploited by a hacker who stole $15M...

Stablecoins are one of the fastest-growing asset types in the crypto world. The purpose of these cryptocurrencies is to track a particular peg (usually the dollar) minimizing volatility and providing a convenient unit for transacting. They have become the lifeblood of the DeFi ecosystem and may look to take over other sectors like remittance and…

In this week’s interview, I spoke with Dan Elitzer and Clinton Bembry, who were part of the founding team of Yam. Yam Finance is an experiment in rebasing cryptocurrencies, plus token incentives, plus full on-chain governance, plus a DAO-like treasury managed by token holders. It’s also testing the power of the emoji and opened the...

MakerDAO traders who had their collateral wiped out during DeFi’s so-called Black Thursday, received bad news from the protocol’s decentralized court this week: they won’t be getting a penny (or gwei) back. Their only hope now lies in traditional/centralized courts. On March 12th, DeFi experienced its worst day on record as prices tanked by more…

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are back again. Well, sort of. This week, the crypto community shifted its attention from DeFi, forks, and $UNI to NFTs like $SOCKS, $MEME, $FAME, and $NEUE and NFT platforms like Rarible, Mintbase, OpenSea, Zora, and Foundation. NFTs have been around for more than two years, and just as DeFi is having…

A leaked Telegram chat has the DeFi community decrying that some of the space’s most well-known influencers were orchestrating a pump and dump scheme around a token called $FEW, an accusation the crypto personalities involved deny. The question is whether the group was created with the specific purpose of leveraging the members’ follower base to…

Yam Finance’s first successful monetary exercise yesterday marks a new start to DeFi’s original food-based token YAM is an experiment in rebasing cryptocurrencies, plus token incentives (aka yield farming) to drive liquidity, plus full on-chain governance, plus a DAO-like treasury managed by token holders. It’s also testing the power of the emoji. Its Aug. 11…

It was a sea of red in the market yesterday. But while Ether slid by almost 10% and all DeFi tokens plunged even deeper, one project astonished the crypto world accelerating the 10x increase it had seen in the last seven days: $MEME A ticker most would pass off as a pump and dump. But…