💥 Another Fork Bites the Dust: The Looming Fall of Fortress DAO and the Perils of Off-Chain Governance

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• Cosmos Ecosystem Quietly Surges to $17B in TVL in Challenge to Ethereum Layer 2s
• Winners in Second Round of Polkadot Parachains Poised to Add Mojo to Expanding DOT Ecosystem
• DEX Takes Aim at Protecting Blockchains from Manipulation and ‘Slippage’

Deep Dive

• Another Fork Bites the Dust: The Looming Fall of Fortress DAO and the Perils of Off-Chain Governance

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with Vitalik Buterin:

Video

• Real Vision vs. The Defiant: NOW’S THE TIME FOR MASS ADOPTION OF CRYPTO?

Links

• Sequoia Capital is launching a $500-600 million crypto fund to invest in tokens: The Block
• The Graph Backers Launch $205M Ecosystem Fund to Provide Grants to Dapp Builders: CoinDesk
• Circle valued at $9 billion under revamped SPAC deal terms: The Block
• Terra, CEO Do Kwon Ordered to Comply With SEC Subpoena Related to Mirror Protocol Investigation: CoinDesk
• You're not going to want to miss @saraareynolds' keynote at Opening Ceremonies tonight on how we can build Web3 to create sustainable, transformative impact: Uniswap
• Stop by the Infinity Stage tomorrow at 1:40pm to see Facu Ameal talk about "How to Become a Mighty Strategist" : Yearn Finance

Trending in the Defiant

• Cancel Culture Comes to Crypto as Offensive Tweets Trigger Flurry of Ousters
• SushiSwap Struggles to Overcome Lack of Management and Nixed Frog Nation Deal
• Upstart’s Vampire Attack on OpenSea Fizzles After Technical Issues and Criticism

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Market Surprise

⚛️ Cosmos Ecosystem Quietly Surges to $17B in TVL in Challenge to Ethereum Layer 2s

TVL This was supposed to be the Cosmos’ ecosystem banner year. And in a way, it already is. By itself Terra, a blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK (software development kit), is the No. 3 ranking chain in total value locked (TVL) terms at $17.32B as of Feb. 16, according to DeFi Llama.

PROXY TVL is a metric which represents the assets locked in a blockchain’s smart contracts and is an approximate proxy for a chain’s usefulness. Terra trails Avalanche by just $40M in TVL and Ethereum by a whopping $144.08B.

ECOSYSTEM But looking at other leading Cosmos chains like Osmosis, Cosmos, and Crypto.com’s Cronos chain, all of which were built using Cosmos’ SDK and are connected via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, it’s clear the entire ecosystem is actually the second ranked in TVL terms by over $3B as of Feb. 17.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Parachains

✨ Winners in Second Round of Polkadot Parachains Poised to Add Mojo to Expanding DOT Ecosystem

NEWS Bidding for Polkadot’s tenth parachain lease auction has begun, with teams competing for an early seat at the table in building out Polkadot’s burgeoning ecosystem.

VISION Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood founded Polkadot in 2016 to realize his vision for a sharded Proof-of-Stake blockchain ecosystem. While Polkadot’s relay chain completed its mainnet launch during May 2020, the chain wasn’t able to support DOT transfers and staking functionality until its first parachains went live at the end of December.

COMPUTATION Polkadot’s interconnected parachains will be tasked with handling specialized computation for the network, including smart contracts. Parachain slots are allocated to projects that compete to lock up large sums of crowdsourced DOT through auctions, with the DOT returned to holders at the end of the lease’s duration (typically two years).

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Blockchain Protection

🛡 DEX Takes Aim at Protecting Blockchains from Manipulation and ‘Slippage’

PROTECTION Hashflow, a decentralized exchange offering protection from MEV, has launched on Ethereum’s leading Layer 2, Arbitrum. The rise of decentralized finance brought with it the unsavory practice of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). MEV is when miners and other validators manipulate the order of transactions in a network’s blockchain to extract profits.

EXTRACTED As much as $25M worth of MEV has been extracted from the Ethereum network in the past 30 days, bringing the all-time total to $592.2M, according to the MEV-focused research team Flashbots.

LAYER 2 Hashflow launched to Arbitrum on Feb. 17. The protocol previously completed its private alpha launch on Ethereum in late April 2021, before opening up to the public in August. Hashflow also launched on rival Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon last month.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Weekend Read: DAOs Governance

💥 Another Fork Bites the Dust: The Looming Fall of Fortress DAO and the Perils of Off-Chain Governance

Brady Dale goes deep into the travails of Fortress DAO, a small project with outsized implications for DAO governance and the Olympus DAO ecosystem.

DOOM Fortress DAO is doomed. The question is how it dies. The crux of the matter is that this particular decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) isn’t really decentralized at all, and its investors are paying the price for getting in on a governance token, FORT, that has power in rhetoric only.

SHADOW Fortress is an also-ran fork of Olympus DAO running on the Avalanche blockchain with a mere $14M in its treasury (a shadow of the more than $500M+ still backing Olympus’s OHM), but feelings are running very high right now over what should happen with that money.

CONTROL The problem is that the $14M isn’t really in its treasury anyway. It’s in a separate project, one that was funded by the Fortress DAO treasury, but is now completely in control of its chief technical officer, Avraham Eisenberg, who has shown no interest in giving it back.

CODE Community members that spoke to The Defiant predicted the matter could very well find its way to court. But for now, code is very much law and that particular law is not on the Fortress DAO community’s side.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 Real Vision vs. The Defiant: IS NOW THE TIME FOR MASS ADOPTION OF CRYPTO?

Links

🔗 Sequoia Capital is launching a $500-600 million crypto fund to invest in tokens: The Block

Sequoia Capital, one of the world's oldest and most successful venture capital firms, is launching a new crypto-focused fund — its first-ever sector-specific fund since its founding in 1972.

🔗 The Graph Backers Launch $205M Ecosystem Fund to Provide Grants to Dapp Builders: CoinDesk

The backers of The Graph, a protocol that aims to make on-chain data more accessible to decentralized application (dapp) projects, have launched the first fund to support developers building for the system.

🔗 Circle valued at $9 billion under revamped SPAC deal terms: The Block

Circle — the firm behind stablecoin USDC — announced on Thursday that it has scrapped its previous deal with special purpose acquisition company Concord Acquisition Corp in favor for a new deal with the firm as it charges forward with its plan to go public.

🔗 Terra, CEO Do Kwon Ordered to Comply With SEC Subpoena Related to Mirror Protocol Investigation: CoinDesk

A New York judge ordered Terraform Labs and its CEO Do Kwon to comply with subpoenas the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued in its investigation of Terra’s Mirror Protocol, according to a filing dated Feb. 17.

Uniswap Labs 🦄 @Uniswap🚨#ETHDenver2022 peeps -- You're not going to want to miss @saraareynolds' keynote at Opening Ceremonies tonight on how we can build Web3 to create sustainable, transformative impact. ethdenver.sched.com/event/80dbb302…11:23 PM ∙ Feb 17, 202265Likes11Retweets

ETHDenver @EthereumDenverStop by the Infinity Stage tomorrow at 1:40pm to see Facu Ameal talk about "How to Become a Mighty Strategist" @iearnfinance

1:04 AM ∙ Feb 18, 202276Likes14Retweets

Trending in the Defiant

• Cancel Culture Comes to Crypto as Offensive Tweets Trigger Flurry of OustersFor years, crypto has floated along in its own bubble, replete with risque anime characters, profane observations, and lots of provocative opinions about politics and society.
• SushiSwap Struggles to Overcome Lack of Management and Nixed Frog Nation DealSushiSwap doesn’t just need leadership, it also needs to sort out where all its keys are.
• Upstart’s Vampire Attack on OpenSea Fizzles After Technical Issues and Criticism OpenSea, the Leading NFT marketplace, is again under vampire attack, this time from new rival, x2y2. But the assault quickly stalled after a number of technical glitches halted an airdrop and triggered accusations that the project was manipulating the price of its token.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, DeFiDad, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader, and Camila Russo. Videos are produced by Robin Schmidt, Alp Gasimov and Daniel Flynn. Podcast is led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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