Avalanche, a smart contracts platform, now has its first DeFi protocol with $1B in total value locked. The protocol, Benqi Finance, launched just four days ago on Aug. 19 and has been distributing $3M in AVAX tokens to users. AVAX tokens are from Ava Labs, the company that created Avalanche, and the distribution is part…

NFTs are a simple idea, but not for long. We’ve already seen how they’re being tapped as collateral for loans. Now more complex instruments are coming, thanks in part to projects breaking NFTs into pieces in a process called fractionalization.  That’s not all — some financial engineers are reportedly fashioning futures contracts derived from NFTs. …

Investor appetite for NFT art and collectibles shows no signs of abating.

A Uniswap governance proposal riled up the DeFi community this week.  The proposal, which has since been canceled, would have used yield generated from $25M in Uniswap treasury assets to pay employees at blockchain analytics platform Flipside Crypto. The payment would have been for Flipside to oversee a bounty program for pulling more users into…

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 Marketing and Portfolio Support at Fourth Revolution Capital.  Disclaimer: All opinions expressed by DeFi Dad are solely his own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of 4RC…

The whole world is struggling to wrap its head around non-fungible tokens (NFTs), including DeFi. But DeFi is trying. “Over the last two weeks NFT sales have exploded to levels well beyond the NFT boom seen in March,” says a new report by CoinMetrics. Obviously, that’s driven in part by genuine interest but also by…

Automated portfolio manager Balancer introduced a new mechanism to improve capital efficiency for liquidity providers as it aims to take a larger bite of the interest-bearing token market. Balancer’s so-called metastable pools have a  “nesting” feature, facilitating cheap swaps between one pool’s tokens and those of a nested group of tokens, as though all tokens…

Five months after opening the door to SushiSwap, Harmony One is inviting more major DeFi apps to hop on its blockchain.   Harmony One, one of a handful of platforms that uses sharded proof-of-stake for consensus, wants Curve Finance, the automated market maker, and Aave, the lending platform, to join the party. It’s offering $2M in…

Mercurial Finance is building the liquidity platform for stable assets on Solana. As the DeFi ecosystem on Solana grows, there will be many different variants of collateralized, wrapped, and synthetic assets in the space. Their most immediate objective is to provide the best liquidity for all the major stable and pegged assets on Solana, which…

Vitalik Buterin, criticized the state of on-chain governance today on his blog, arguing blockchain projects have become overly reliant on token-based voting as they try to become more decentralized.   Buterin wrote: “The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of…