Wall Street and Washington may be in a panic about the advent of a crypto world. But not the venerable institutions in fine art — they love DeFi.   Case in point: Christie’s, the 254-year-old auction house, announced this week that it will handle the sale of Art Blocks NFTs on Oct. 1 in New York.…

Staking assets on a blockchain helps to secure the network, but losing that liquidity can be painful for traders and investors. So the team behind the derivatives protocol, Lido, created a staking derivative that allows investors to stay liquid while also supporting the security of the networks they rely on. So far, Lido has enabled…

 Less than a week after news broke that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Uniswap, Coinbase, the publicly traded crypto exchange that’s become a bellwether for the burgeoning industry, said it expected to be sued by the agency in connection with its forthcoming offering, Coinbase Lend. “Last Wednesday, after months of effort by…

OpenSea better watch its back.  Crypto investors have known for weeks that FTX, the offshore exchange that handles about $40B in daily trading volume, was spooling up an NFT minting operation. Then word came early this week that the Hong Kong-based platform was going to enable its customers to withdraw NFTs from FTX on either…

Two DeFi projects tasked with helping traders in the space hedge risk announced they are shutting down on Saturday.   Cover, an insurance protocol, and Ruler, a debt market without liquidations, lost their developer team and determined that they could not continue, according to a blog post authored by a cofounder of both projects who goes…

U.S. regulators are looking at more decentralized finance players than just Uniswap, according to a person familiar with the matter.  Officials are making a broad-based inquiry into a number of platforms in DeFi, other than just the one into Uniswap Labs, according to a source with knowledge of the matter who declined to be named…

Pixelated jpegs going for millions of dollars were already blowing people’s minds. The latest NFT project goes one step further –– traders are dropping what for some is a year’s salary or a property down payment, in exchange for white text on a black background. The project was launched with a tweet from Dom Hoffmann,…

Arbitrum, one of the most awaited Ethereum scaling solutions, has attracted $2.9M on its first day after launch, becoming the 11th largest so-called Layer 2 platform, according to L2BEAT. Offchain Labs, a blockchain software maker, launched Arbitrum on Aug. 31 with the promise to offer  lower fees and faster transactions. So far, it’s delivering: ETH…

Fantom’s liquidity mining program is once more showcasing the power incentives can have in markets as total value locked in the smart contract chain’s DeFi projects has nearly doubled in the three days since offering token rewards. TVL on Fantom soared by 80% to $990M from $547M on Aug. 29, the day before the liquidity…

In Facebook’s early days, it famously limited membership to students in colleges and universities, opening a few at a time. Hyype, a new social network for NFT collectors, plans a similar approach but Discord server by Discord server rather than school by school. To that end, Hyype today announced a $1.5M seed round from Electric…