The deposit contract for Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake chain was released today. If ~524k ETH is deposited this month, the new chain will go live on Dec.1. Potential rewards for contributing to that pile of ETH are enticing, but as is usually the case with high returns, there’s also high risk. So far, 5.7K ETH from…

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds begins with a story of British scientist Francis Galton, who on a brisk autumn day in 1906 went to a fair where attendees could guess the weight of an ox. At the time, Galton believed that the average guess would be quite far from the actual weight, and thought…

In the previous episode of The Defiant there was a QR code embedded in the video. Had you scanned that code it would have brought you into a week-long NFT-based social experiment designed to test a simple question: ‘Are you greedy or are you cultured.’ We normally report the news in DeFi and blockchain but…

Non-fungible tokens, or digital assets representing unique and scarce items, have taken off in the past few weeks. So much so, that video producer Robin Schmidt and artist Simon Wan thought to do an experiment to find what is actually valuable, art attached to these tokens or their crypto component?  And that gets to a…

As has become all too common in DeFi, Yearn founder Andre Cronje is tinkering with a new project and speculators are rushing to buy its token —aka aping in— before it’s even live. The project, called Keep3r Network, is a decentralized coordination ecosystem for projects to find developers that will work on their upkeep. “Projects…

Social tokens are becoming a breeding ground for adoption, with major names in music and sports all trying their hands at the web3-native fan engagement mechanism. Just this past week, social token platform Roll announced a partnership with Akon for the Grammy-nominated music producer to introduce personal tokens to his Akoin community, including in the…

Harvest Finance, one of the latest DeFi projects to ride on the waning yield farming wave, was exploited over the weekend, shortly after its total value locked crossed the $1B mark. The hacker was able to drain $33.8M worth of stablecoins. Users can deposit a variety of stablecoins and governance tokens in the Harvest platform…

Imagine a shadow universe of dark pools, anonymous mixers, and private marketplaces. Like DeFi, this shadow realm is highly liquid, ultra-usable, and built on cutting-edge cryptography. The difference is, it’s off-grid, off-chain, and untraceable.  Inside this shadow realm, anonymous communities proliferate. Capital flows into dark pools, undetected. Mixers and bridges cross-pollinate, merging liquidity across networks.…

Do you recognize art when it's right in front of you? As the yield farming craze cools off, non-fungible tokens are undoubtedly taking the blockchain world by storm, making us question our ideas about art and —as is often the case in crypto— greed.  Quick reminder: Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are cryptocurrencies meant to represent…

Filecoin had a record breaking $205M token sale in the 2017 boom days, promising to bring decentralized file sharing to the world, but all investors had to show for it in the three years since, was FIL token IOUs as the project repeatedly delayed its launch.  The day finally came yesterday, and for many, it…