📈 CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Rule New Index Fund for NFT Blue Chips

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

News

• CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Rule New Index Fund for NFT Blue Chips
• Liquidity Providers Hold the Line in DeFi Selloff
• Video Game News Pushes Forgotten Runes NFT Floor Up 88%

Opinion

• DeFi Needs to Simplify Design to be Truly Accessible to the Masses

Video

• SuperMassive NFT Show: 2021 NFTs in review with Sergito, gmoney, Cool Cats

Links

• Ethereum Privacy Startup Aztec Raises $17M in Paradigm-Led Series A: CoinDesk
• Nansen Raises $75 Million in Series B Funding: Nansen
• A ‘false solution’? How crypto mining became the oil industry’s new hope: The Guardian
• Swap and Add Liquidity Atomically: Uniswap
• With over $77 billion assets under management, VanEck clients can now get exposure to $AVAX: Avalanche
• LFG! We’re excited to innovate and experiment. s/o to @0xJim who joined @aaveaave to lead this endeavor: Aave

Trending in The Defiant

• DeFi Kingdoms Challenges Axie Infinity’s GameFi Supremacy with NFT Play
• Avalanche Accelerates AVAX Adoption with BitGo Deal
• Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado’s Cooperative Laws

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• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at this link.
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NFT Markets

📈 CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Rule New Index Fund for NFT Blue Chips

NEWS In the latest sign that NFTs are rapidly morphing into a new type of security, an index fund has hit the market, and CryptoPunks and Bored Apes are firmly in charge.

BLUE CHIPS On Dec. 17, Bitwise Asset Management, a leading crypto index fund manager with more than $1.7B in managed assets, launched the Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Index Fund. Matt Hougan, the firm’s Chief Investment Officer (CIO), says it is the first fund of its kind. But it will only be available to accredited investors, with a minimum investment size set at $25,000.

FLOOR PRICES The index fund is designed to make it easier for investors to own the top 10 most valuable nonfungible token collections, weighting and selecting collections based on their market capitalization and floor prices. The product, which is similar to equity index funds, rebalances quarterly.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Markets

💦 Liquidity Providers Hold the Line in DeFi Selloff

HODL The crypto market is down, but liquidity providers in decentralized finance are staying in regardless — some are even upping their positions. “We’re hodling and investing more into new DeFi stuff,” Matti, of the reflexivity-oriented VC firm Zee Prime Capital told The Defiant over Telegram.

16% DROP This despite the fact that the market took a turn on Dec. 1, when ETH was at almost $4,800. The price has since fallen to as low as $3,671, according to CoinMarketCap, more than 20% down. But DeFiLlama put the total value locked (TVL) for all the decentralized finance (DeFi) projects it tracks at $275B on that day. Now it’s at $232B, which is a 16% drop.

TVL The upshot: Investors are going into DeFi rather than out. After all, if everyone just stayed put, dollar-denominated TVL should be down the same as the market. If they were leaving, the TVL drop would be worse than the market.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT GameFi

🧙🏻‍♂️ Video Game News Pushes Forgotten Runes NFT Floor Up 88%

NEW GAME The floor price for NFTs from the Forgotten Runes Wizard Cult has nearly doubled since Tuesday on the news that it’s got a new game coming out to make use of its Wizards.

FLOOR PRICE The floor price for Wizards has risen 88% in the past 24 hours to 1.089 ETH, according to Coingecko. The floor price is the lowest price at which an NFT in a set can be purchased.

RALLY The rally follows news that Bisonic, a metaverse gaming company, has partnered with Magic Machine, the company that made the NFTs, to create a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) for NFT owners.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Opinion

👩🏽‍💻 DeFi Needs to Simplify Design to be Truly Accessible to the Masses

In this guest column, Hisham Khan urges the DeFi community to take more care in designing platforms and apps so they are accessible to the people who truly need them.

CORE MISSION DeFi’s purpose is to create greater financial inclusion. That’s the core mission, to lower the barriers of access to wealth generation so anyone with the internet can participate.

SCHOOL How do we get a mother in Mozambique to be empowered and participate? She’s not looking to day trade and purchase a Lamborghini. She might be looking to seek passive income so she can afford to pay bills or put her children through school.

SIMPLE APP For her, the DeFi user experience needs to be easily accessible, and easily understandable. She should be able to access it from her phone via a simple app, and be aware of the different options available to her.

RESOURCES But so far, it is those with the time and resources to understand and access the underlying technology and new financial tools who are reaping the benefits. This is a serious problem.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

Introducing YuzuSwap, the first DEX built on Oasis, the leading layer-1 blockchain

You might have noticed that Oasis Network has recently been making waves.

Founded by Dawn Song, renowned Berkeley professor and one of the world’s foremost experts in artificial intelligence, Oasis is the leading privacy-enabled Layer-1 blockchain network.

The Oasis Network is scalable and ideal for DeFi due to its instant finality, 99% lower gas fees versus Ethereum, high throughput, privacy protection, and defense against MEV.

Recently the team announced a substantial $160 million Oasis Ecosystem Fund. Supported by top industry backers, such as Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Jump Capital, Pantera, and more, the Fund is dedicated to helping DeFi projects build on Oasis.

Some exciting DeFi news! YuzuSwap, the first Decentralized Exchange (DEX) built on Oasis, is now live on Testnet and allows for:

• Swapping between ETH-based and Oasis-based tokens
• Liquidity pools and pairs
• Earning YUZU for providing liquidity to pools
• A voting system for governance of the funds collected with 20% of the transactions fees

YuzuSwap uses a fair launch system, meaning no tokens are pre-mined. All tokens are mined and released block by block and distributed fairly to the users and contributors, which prevents large sell-offs and damage to the health of the token price. Also, YuzuSwap works to actively support price health by taking a 0.3% transaction fee on all transactions. 80% of which is pooled in a Smart Contract that buys YUZU if the token price drops below the 72-hour average. The more transaction fees that are taken, the healthier the YUZU price should be. The remaining 20% goes to a vault that will be governed by YUZU token holders.

The 50,000 $YUZU Airdop is already running! Register now

The Tube

📺 SuperMassive NFT Show: 2021 NFTs in review with Sergito, gmoney, Cool Cats

Links

🔗 Ethereum Privacy Startup Aztec Raises $17M in Paradigm-Led Series A: CoinDesk

The Aztec Network has raised $17 million in a Series A funding round to further its efforts to bring programmable privacy to Web 3 transactions, the Ethereum startup announced Thursday.

🔗 Nansen Raises $75 Million in Series B Funding: Nansen

Today, we are thrilled to announce Nansen has raised $75M for our Series B! This funding round was led by Accel, with participation from GIC, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, SCB 10X, additional prominent VCs and angel investors.

🔗 A ‘false solution’? How crypto mining became the oil industry’s new hope: The Guardian

In January of 2019, Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, recently reunited prep school pals from Denver, drove out to the snow-covered plains of Wyoming to bring a piece of tech culture to the American heartland.

🔗 Swap and Add Liquidity Atomically: Uniswap

When adding liquidity to a Uniswap v3 pool, you must provide two assets in a particular ratio. In many cases, your contract or the user's wallet hold a different ratio of those two assets. In order to deposit 100% of your assets, you must first swap your assets to the optimal ratio and then add liquidity.

Jay Kurahashi-Sofue 🔺 @jayks17With over $77 billion assets under management, VanEck clients can now get exposure to $AVAX with VanEck’s exchange-traded note $VAVA. ETNs are tradeable like ETFs on regulated exchanges. Few.

VanEck Europe @vaneck_euVanEck expands its #crypto investment offering with two new ETNs on crypto platforms #Avalanche and #Polygon. More information on https://t.co/mO3qOHWBGX and https://t.co/IUf67GSBUV. https://t.co/lkzHgza8134:37 PM ∙ Dec 16, 2021362Likes63Retweets

Aave @AaveAaveLFG! We’re excited to innovate and experiment. s/o to @0xJim who joined @AaveAave to lead this endeavor. See you in the Newt lab 🤝

Newt (🦎.🦎) @wearenewt1/ HELLO WORLD! I am Newt 🦎, the experiments arm of @aaveaave dedicated to building and innovating in total transparency 🧪🥽 Read me for all the alpha: https://t.co/0tqqSUPRwe6:20 PM ∙ Dec 16, 2021120Likes11Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• DeFi Kingdoms Challenges Axie Infinity’s GameFi Supremacy with NFT PlayQuestioning the utility of NFTs as simple collectables may be missing the point. DeFi Kingdom, an entrant to the blossoming GameFi sector, is expanding the definition of NFTs by offering its version of the tokens, called Heroes.
• Avalanche Accelerates AVAX Adoption with BitGo DealAvalanche may have started as a favorite of DeFi enthusiasts. Now financial institutions are poised to hop aboard.
• Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado’s Cooperative LawsSelf-governing entities like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are unique and largely incompatible with traditional U.S. legal entities.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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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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).