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...

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…