The Layer 1 blockchain Harmony unveiled a $300M ecosystem fund today to back startups working on applications and protocols. There are many large blockchains now, but to a certain degree each one is a bit of a walled garden, Stephen Tse, Harmony’s founder told The Defiant, via a spokesperson. “Harmony was purpose-built so that developers…

Blockchains really only know themselves. That’s what blockchains are good at: knowing the current state of assets held by all the blockhain’s users with confidence grounded in cryptographic verifiability. “[Blockchains] don’t have the ability to speak to the outside world, so they aren’t able to incorporate that into their logic and their contracts,” Kanav Kariya,…

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…

This is a weekly tutorial on the most compelling opportunities in yield farming, written by our friend DeFi Dad, an advisor to The Defiant and Head of Portfolio Support at Fourth Revolution Capital (4RC).  Background on Protocol: Crypto markets have always struggled to manage overinflated token prices thanks to an abundance of ways to go…

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,…