On-Chain Markets Update by Lucas Outumuro, IntoTheBlock This Week: Ethereum’s Growth Catalysts Amidst an Overheated Market After underperforming Bitcoin in Q4, Ether’s price has managed to grow by over 60% in the first week of January. Having officially launched phase zero of ETH 2.0 in December, Ethereum has seen a wave of positive events unfold.…

ShapeShift will be fully embracing DeFi protocols and getting rid of KYC. The Colorado-based company will now route traders to decentralized exchanges, rather than holding cryptocurrency and being the counterparty in customers’ trades. This change allows it to stop collecting users’ information. Only ether and ERC20 tokens are supported for now. Fundamental Change  “Today, ShapeShift…

Uniswap liquidity is fast approaching an all-time high and this time the most used decentralized exchange (DEX) isn’t riding the wave of its liquidity mining program. The automated market maker (AMM) hit a previous high of $3.36B in liquidity during the end of its incentive program when the exchange was awarding liquidity providers (LPs) with…

In a landmark decision issued by the US Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC), national banks and federal savings associations have been granted permission to participate in independent node verification networks (INVN) and use stablecoins to conduct payment activities. This allowance for the integration of US centralized banking with emerging, decentralized technology speaks to…

Wall Street’s favorite ether investment vehicle is plunging just as the underlying cryptocurrency is near records. But there’s a good reason why. Grayscale’s Ethereum Investment Trust, ETHE, has dropped from a 6-month high of $23 on Dec. 22, to $14 at the time of writing. That ~40% drop contrasts with the near 70% rise of…

While bitcoin has proven cryptocurrency naysayers wrong again with its astounding gains in the past weeks, an adjusting market dynamic becomes more apparent as alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) stage a comeback. Bitcoin welcomed newcomers to the crypto space in an all-too-traditional baptism of fire on Sunday, so much so that upwards of $500 million in long…

YAM holders voted to remove the token’s rebase mechanisms, which expanded and contracted supply seeking to  establish a stable price, after taking DeFi by storm this summer. Rebases issued and burned new tokens based on the price of YAM, targeting a $1 peg. After migrating to YAM V2 following a smart contract exploit that caused…

The good news: Ethereum is booming. The bad news: gas fees are, too. ETH is surging past $1k—the highest it’s been since the crypto boom of January 2018. Investors have taken notice, with the co-founder of Three Arrows Capital hedge fund (which just made headlines for their SEC filing stating $1.3 billion in Grayscale Bitcoin…

As ETH crosses $1k, DeFi is hitting its own set of milestones. The last time the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency reached four digits was during the blockchain mania that was early January of 2018. Unlike the last bull run, however, Ethereum is buoyed not by ICOs but by DeFi.  With dapps built on Ethereum enabling permissionless…

TLDR: At the start of the year, I invested $1,100 in 10 DeFi applications, plus MakerDAO’s Dai Savings rate as a benchmark. The requirement was that they could give me passive income; I would just send 100 Dai into their smart contracts, never touch it again, and then hopefully have more than 100 Dai at…