In this guide we’ll be helping you take your first steps into the boundless world of Decentralized Finance, better known as DeFi. DeFi is a growing movement which has the potential to democratize access to  financial services.  This emerging ecosystem is being built on global, public and distributed networks such as Ethereum, and uses smart…

This is The Defiant x Harmony, a weekly series brought to you by Harmony Protocol’s Creative Director, Robin Schmidt, and Camila Russo, the founder of The Defiant, to explore DeFi’s most important stories and demystify this exciting emerging financial space.

Gavin McDermott: Long time ago, I was in finance, and I was looking for a way to improve just the general system state, so when Bitcoin happened, that made a lot of sense. Ended up moving to San Francisco in 2012, it’s where I met Mike Belshe and I was the first engineer hire there...

CFTC charges against BitMEX are bound to push more cryptocurrency projects towards decentralization — but that means actual* decentralization. The Commission today filed charges against BitMEX and its owners and operators including CEO Arthur Hayes for operating a trading platform without CFTC approval, and for failing to implement know-your-customer procedures, a customer information program, and…

In the last month, almost every major DeFi project has been forked. Some of the forks have even been forked themselves. But do these near-copies of projects actually add any value? Or are they simply opportunistic money-grabs? Like many things in life, the truth isn’t always clear-cut. Each fork, from SushiSwap, to Swerve, to Cream,…

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...