The first ever DeFi mortgage may have just gone through.  An engineering lead at a top DeFi protocol, who asked to remain anonymous to keep his personal finances private, on Jan. 22 paid off his mortgage loan with Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and now is paying down his refinanced home loan through DeFi protocol Notional…

This week has seen a flurry of announcements around Layer 2 scaling solutions with Aave’s Matic bridge, Synthetix introducing Layer2 staking on Optimism and Loopring’s mobile app hitting the Google Play store bringing all the advantages of Layer 2 to mobile users. I’ve found myself using the Metamask and MyEtherWallet apps a lot recently so…

By Dan Kahan and Owen Fernau GameStop stock (GME) is going to the moon. So are AMC Theaters (AMC), Nokia (NOK), BlackBerry (BB), and maybe even Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY)—just ask the shitposters on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets (WSB). The WSB saga has been a fascinating black box for anyone interested in finance (or wealth redistribution,…

You know we’re heading into frothy markets when an otherwise unremarkable tweet sends a token flying.  Alpha Homora’s token ALPHA jumped by almost 50% to the highest since its launch in October after the DeFi project tweeted on Monday that 0.39% of ETH supply is locked in its smart contracts. That’s $600M, or 11th in…

Fixed rate lending has been slow to take off in DeFi. That’s what one of the latest MakerDAO proposals is seeking to change.  Maker Improvement Proposal 43 would enable MakerDAO to buy fixed-rate loans. The goal is that having DeFi’s largest protocol buying tokenized loans issued by other protocols, at more favorable terms, will boost…

Transactions on the Ethereum network continue to outpace Bitcoin’s as momentum for decentralised finance protocols snowballs. ETH is testing all-time highs, but has yet to double in price from its record, like BTC did. Highest Since 2017 Ethereum transactions are soaring near the high reached at the top of the 2017/2018 crypto rally, at around…

dYdX closed its Series B round with an investment of $10M led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital. Other investors include Wintermute, Hashed, GSR, SCP, Scalar Capital, Spartan Group, and RockTree Capital. The dYdX exchange, which focuses on derivatives trading, notes that since launching its  decentralized perpetual contracts for three markets in 2020, it’s…

Kyber Network just overhauled its protocol and token holders are loving it. Kyber’s KNC jumped 25% on Thursday after the announcement to the highest since 2018, compared with ETH’s 10% increase.  Over the weekend KNC retraced some of the gains and has been hovering between $1.3 and $1.45. The upgraded Kyber 3.0 will be transitioned…

“Wen Digg,” another day another meme in DeFi, though this one appears to be headed for the graveyard as Digg, the rebasing crypto asset pegged to Bitcoin, is now live on the Ethereum blockchain. Last Friday, BadgerDAO, the DeFi protocol which aims to build “products and infrastructure necessary to accelerate Bitcoin as collateral across blockchains,”…

Less than two weeks ago, CryptoPunk 8129, one of only 24 super-rare Ape Punks, made major waves when it sold for a whopping 140 ETH ($176k at time of purchase). But the non-fungible token market is on steroids right now, and the newest major Punk sale makes 140 ETH look like a drop in the…