🍱 Answer to SushiSwap’s Troubles May Be Transforming into On-Chain DAO

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

News

• Answer to SushiSwap’s Troubles May Be Transforming into On-Chain DAO
• Anchor Asks Terra Foundation Guard for $450M to Shore Up Dwindling Reserves
• Scramble for Spots on Lucrative NFT Whitelists Sparks Grind-to-Earn Trend
• Aave Team Launches ‘Decentralized Social Graph’ With Lens Protocol Venture

Markets

• Market Action: Terra Jumps 7% to Lead Rebound in DeFi Names
• From Airdrop to $307M in Revenue in 30 Days — LooksRare Surges Past OpenSea in Torrid Month

Opinion

• What the History of Democracy Can Teach Us About Blockchain Governance

Podcast

🎙Listen to the interview with Giveth’s Griff Green here:

Video

• The Defiant Weekly: Are we unfairly ignoring Harmony (ONE)?
• Quick Take: Doxxes, Hacks, Bailouts & Cancellations

Links

• Polygon raises $450 million from SoftBank, Tiger, and others in a token sale : The Block
• Nasdaq will list Valkyrie’s ETF linked to Bitcoin mining firms on Feb. 8: CoinTelegraph
• Finding Common Ground | Solana, Avalanche, Terra: Bankless
• Web 3 & The Curse of Solutionism: Substack
• We’re excited to announce that FTM is now tradable on @Poloniex!: Fantom Foundation
• The results of the 2021 Solidity Developer Survey are out!: Ethereum Foundation

Trending in The Defiant

• Crypto Stakers’ IRS Tax Refund Marks Milestone for PoS Validators
• SushiSwap Struggles to Overcome Lack of Management and Nixed Frog Nation Deal
• OlympusDAO Created a Breakthrough DeFi Model – Now It’s Down 93% and Called a ‘Ponzi’

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DeFi Drama

🍱 Answer to SushiSwap’s Troubles May Be Transforming into On-Chain DAO

BUSTED SushiSwap has been whipsawed by busted deals and the departures of key leaders. And yet the decentralized exchange remains one of DeFi’s second-largest DEX by trading volume and now, a coalition of of other projects is rallying to get behind it.

PROPOSAL A Snapshot proposal, based on a post from Sushi’s forums, is imminent, according to its author, Justin Bram of Ondo Finance, a protocol that bills itself as a decentralized investment bank. Ondo’s co-founder Nathan Allman authored the proposed changes. The proposal calls for another group of projects putting their collective weight behind Sushi to turn the project into a multi-chain DeFi force.

TRIGGER The proposal, called Poke Bowl, would formalize Sushi as an on-chain DAO, which means voting will trigger smart contracts to execute and establish a legal entity for the project. The move would take assets like the protocol’s Twitter and Discord accounts off-chain. Both entities would be governed by SUSHI holders, according to the forum post, which preceded the Snapshot proposal.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Bailouts

⚓️ Anchor Asks Terra Foundation Guard for $450M to Shore Up Dwindling Reserves

REVENUES The community for Anchor, a Terra-based stablecoin money market protocol, is discussing the project’s future as revenues continue to fall short of the roughly 20% yields it promises depositors.

ITERATION The fix? Calling on the freshly-launched Terra Foundation Guard to top-up Anchor’s Yield Reserve with $450M while developers scramble to cook up Anchor’s new and improved v2 iteration. That’s according to ‘N3m0’, an Anchor community member and researcher at crypto VC firm Hashed.

MOBILIZED Anchor offers depositors a fixed annual return of roughly 20% by redistributing fees from borrowers and rewards from other assets staked in the protocol. However, when the protocol revenues are lower than 20%, funds are mobilized from its Anchor Yield Reserve to pay out investors.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Social Media

🧐 Aave Team Launches ‘Decentralized Social Graph’ With Lens Protocol Venture

SOCIAL MEDIA Today’s announcement confirms what we previously reported: Lens Protocol is a new social media effort from the team at Aave, the money market that first launched on Ethereum.

COMPOSABLE The announcement says that “the purpose of the Lens Protocol is to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, decentralized social graph.”

PROTOCOL The first thing everyone wants to know about any new protocol is: when token? Well, the new Lens Protocol from the Aave team mentions a “fair launch” in its announcement post, so there must be something on the way…

PERMISSIONLESS So, if that’s top of mind, join their Discord and get on the #FairLaunch channel, but it’s also worth getting into what the protocol actually is: a permissionless social graph that will permit any developer to build on it. What’s more, no one can kick anyone off it.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT Whitelists

🏎 Scramble for Spots on Lucrative NFT Whitelists Sparks Grind-to-Earn Trend

HYPED Getting on the whitelist for a hyped NFT drop can mean tens of thousands of dollars in profits. But with new projects launching daily and whitelist requirements getting more arduous, some NFT collectors and flippers are looking to outsource the task.

SEARCH A search for “NFT whitelist” on popular freelancing website UpWork shows over 1,000 job postings offering $3-$5 an hour. Here’s an example.

MINT Whitelists are lists of blockchain addresses that are given early access to an NFT mint, sometimes at discounted prices. Originally intended as a way to reward early community members and avoid gas wars, the influx of new entrants into the NFT space has led to fierce competition for these coveted slots.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Markets

📈 Market Action: Terra Jumps 7% to Lead Rebound in DeFi Names

SURGE The DeFi markets have surged to post an emphatic recovery from January’s lows despite lingering concerns about heavy-handed regulation. The combined capitalization of DeFi tokens sits at $121B, having bounced 16.7% since posing a local low of $103.7B on Feb. 3 according to CoinGecko.

TERRA Just two of the top 100 non-stablecoin DeFi assets have shed value since the beginning of January, while one-third of tokens rallied by more than 30%. Terra (LUNA) jumped 7% in the last seven days and is the sector’s top token with a market cap of $23.5B. It represents almost a fifth of the entire DeFi capitalization.

Top Gainers

Idex (IDEX) + 70.2%

bZx Protocol (BZRX) + 64.2%

Benqi (QI) +52.8%

STP Network (STPT) + 39.7%

Just (JST) + 38.6%

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

🚀 From Airdrop to $307M in Revenue in 30 Days — LooksRare Surges Past OpenSea in Torrid Month

REVENUE Maybe it’s the decentralized architecture? Or maybe it’s liquidity mining Whatever the cause, LooksRare, the newly launched NFT marketplace, pulled ahead of the centralized market leader, OpenSea, in terms of protocol revenue almost immediately, according to data site TokenTerminal.

AIRDROP In the last 30 days, LooksRare produced $307M in protocol revenue vs. $110M at OpenSea. LooksRare launched with an airdrop of its LOOKS token to past OpenSea users, and it has been growth hacking marketshare ever since by giving more LOOKS to anyone who makes a trade on the platform (also known as liquidity mining). Though much of that volume has come from wash trading done to boost LOOKS rewards.

REWARDS LOOKS currently trades at $3.44. Its high point so far was $7.07 on Jan. 20, according to CoinMarketCap. For context, daily rewards in LOOKS are worth roughly as much as trading revenue.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Opinion

🗳 What the History of Democracy Can Teach Us About Blockchain Governance

Prof. Andrew Hall writes that DAOs can solve thorny governance problems by looking to antecedents in the political world.

GOVERNED DAOs can reshape society by bringing democratic control to important economic and social activities previously governed through more hierarchical means. But as many people have pointed out, DAOs have not yet achieved their goal of true decentralization.

MECHANISMS Participation in DAO governance is too low, and tokenholders often lack the expertise and time to make informed decisions. Many DAO decisions are taken by a small number of actors, and we lack formal mechanisms to ensure these decisions are aligned with the interests of the tokenholders at large.

MILLENNIA As it turns out, these challenges are identical to the governance challenges faced by democratic societies in the physical world. Lessons we have learned from two millennia studying and designing democratic governments provide useful insights into improving DAO governance.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 The Defiant Weekly: Are we unfairly ignoring Harmony (ONE)?

📺 Quick Take: Doxxes, Hacks, Bailouts & Cancellations

Links

🔗 Polygon raises $450 million from SoftBank, Tiger, and others in a token sale : The Block

Ethereum scaling project Polygon has raised $450 million in a private token sale.

🔗 Nasdaq will list Valkyrie’s ETF linked to Bitcoin mining firms on Feb. 8: CoinTelegraph

Crypto asset manager Valkyrie will have an exchange-traded fund (ETF) with exposure to Bitcoin mining firms available for trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market starting Tuesday.

🔗 Finding Common Ground | Solana, Avalanche, Terra: Bankless

Crypto has grown a lot in 2021!

🔗 Web 3 & The Curse of Solutionism: Substack

“What problem are you solving by building this Metaverse for cats?” “Well, today cats don’t have a Metaverse to hang out in. With Cataverse, they will!”

https://twitter.com/FantomFDN/status/1490929082577879042?s=20&t=0IHPjNSsChpyo7hjPpG4yAhttps://twitter.com/solidity_lang/status/1490724202613202947?s=20&t=0IHPjNSsChpyo7hjPpG4yA

Trending in The Defiant

• Crypto Stakers’ IRS Tax Refund Marks Milestone for PoS ValidatorsThere may be good news ahead for those looking to earn new tokens by providing security to major blockchains that operate using proof-of-stake.
• 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.
• OlympusDAO Created a Breakthrough DeFi Model – Now It’s Down 93% and Called a ‘Ponzi’OlympusDAO held so much promise when it exploded on the DeFi scene in 2021.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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.

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr)