“It’s no secret that the Ethereum blockchain is a highly adversarial environment. If a smart contract can be exploited for profit, it eventually will be. Some very smart people spend a lot of time examining contracts for vulnerabilities. But this unforgiving environment pales in comparison to the mempool. If the chain itself is a battleground,…

An all-time high of 11.2M Ether is locked in DeFi protocols, despite a weekend sell-off. Liquidations spiked, while tokens continue sliding. Locked Ether’s resilience may show that DeFi participants do not consider the recent drop in price to signal a long-term trend and thus are not unlocking their ETH in order to sell. Borrowers may also…

As ETH reaches new highs and the larger DeFi market booms, average gas prices have remained surprisingly stable throughout April––and that may be all thanks to one project working at the very core of the chain.  Flashbots Alpha is a proof-of-concept communication channel between traders and miners that allows formerly inefficient on-chain bidding wars to…

ShapeShift’s mobile platform has integrated with multi-chain liquidity protocol THORChain to offer native Bitcoin trading without KYC. THORChain’s recently launched multichain “chaosnet” enables cross-chain swaps amongst the Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Binance Chain networks. THORChain’s native token, RUNE, exploded 111% over the past two weeks building up to the launch.Through THORChain, Shapeshift users…

A MakerDAO proposal to accept an ERC-20 token which represents shares in a pool of real estate assets as collateral in the Maker protocol passed yesterday. The use of real-world assets in DeFi is a first and is a major step in bringing the trillions of dollars worth of physical assets into the open finance…

Ether and the most popular DeFi metrics are all smashing through new records. Ether continues to push higher, hitting a record of $2487 earlier today, according to CoinGecko. Rising ETH prices is pushing total value locked in DeFi to a new high in dollar terms of $55.9B. ETH locked in DeFi hit an all-time high…

zkSync introduced an Ethereum Layer 2 solution called zkPorter yesterday promising to push the blockchain’s transactions per second (TPS) capabilities to over 20,000. This would put Ethereum within striking distance of Visa, which says its network can handle 24,000 TPS.  “To bring true scalability, we need an exponential gain in throughput,” the team wrote in…

Coinbase listed its stock today on the Nasdaq exchange at $381 per share and an initial market cap of $99.6B, marking the historic first entry of a crypto exchange onto the US stock market. The Coinbase listing is expected to draw a major new wave of investor interest towards crypto markets. Coinbase stock, ticker COIN,…

We will be hosting a weekly tutorial on the most compelling opportunities to consider yield farming, written by our friend DeFi Dad, an advisor to the Defiant and the Chief DeFi Officer of Zapper. The goal is to expose more Defiant readers to new DeFi applications and their associated liquidity mining programs. Background on Protocol:…