🏛 DAOs Will be Ready the Next Time Washington Comes After Crypto

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

News

• DAOs Will be Ready the Next Time Washington Comes After Crypto
• Tokens Don’t Make a Democracy: Buterin Critiques On-Chain Voting
• Solana’s SOL Breaks All-Time High as Ecosystem Rallies Together

Research

• Inside the Data Driving Axie Infinity’s Torrid Growth

Video

• Quick Take: Pudgy Penguins; a story of love and FUD

Links

• Future of Diem hangs in the balance as Novi looks for an alternative: The Block
• MISO: Minimum Initial SushiSwap Offering
• Alex Saunders again under fire after virtual HQ in Decentraland fails to launch: CoinTelegraph
• Poly Network Hack Not Over as Attacker Prolongs Return of Funds: CoinDesk

Podcast

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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DAOs Get Political

🏛 DAOs Will be Ready the Next Time Washington Comes After Crypto

NEWS It didn’t take long for DeFi’s rank-and-file to mobilize after the U.S. Senate ran roughshod over the community’s concerns last week. An array of players in decentralized finance are now marshaling forces to stand up for the industry.

TASK FORCE On Friday, August 13, the decentralized autonomous organization behind yield maximizer Yearn Finance authorized a transfer of 1 million DAI to the LeXpunK Army, a new legal task force devoted to protecting the decentralized finance ecosystem from legal threats.

MORE DAOs It appears that Lido, the staking derivative DAO, and the Curve DAO, which runs the automated market maker, are apt to shortly do the same. More DAOs will also float joining the push to their members, LeXpunK insiders told The Defiant.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Markets

📈Solana’s SOL Breaks All-Time High as Ecosystem Comes Together

CLIMBING The Solana blockchain’s SOL token is soaring to an all-time high, climbing the ranks to become the tenth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization.

CATALYST SOL rallied as much as 38.8 % to $68.24 today, the highest ever. The digital asset is up 3,441.9% this year, compared with 353.3% for ETH and 58% for BTC. People are searching for a catalyst.

MASSIVE DEMAND “I wonder if Grayscale or something big was what kicked this off,” said a user on the cryptocurrency’s Reddit. Another asked whether the pump was due to an NFT project on Solana. This may be the truth as people realize it’s cheaper and faster to mint NFTs on Solana, prop trader Jeffrey Scott told The Defiant. “It’s possible this is the start of a trend similar to ETH and ICOs in 2017,” Scott said.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Token Debate

🗳 Tokens Don’t Make a Democracy: Buterin Critiques On-Chain Voting

TLDR Vitalik Buterin, criticized the state of on-chain governance yesterday on his blog, arguing blockchain projects have become overly reliant on token-based voting as they try to become more decentralized.

VOTING Buterin wrote: “The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization. Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral: anyone can go and get some units of the governance token on Uniswap.”

ARGUMENTS The post from Buterin, who as Ethereum’s founder is one of blockchain’s most influential researchers and developers, throws cold water on the increasingly prevalent notion that decentralized protocols should strive to have most of their decision-making process happen on-chain via token votes. Buterin’s arguments may further push founders and developers to find more democratic governance mechanisms.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

SPONSORED POST

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Hegic V8888 is live in mainnet: https://www.hegic.co/

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Hegic was founded 1.5 years ago in February, 2020. Hegic V888 (the previous version) was live for 10 months. The results achieved by V888:

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Research

👨🏻‍💻 Inside the Data Driving Axie Infinity’s Torrid Growth

In this weeks research piece, Juan Pellicer of IntoTheBlock crunched the numbers on Axie Infinity’s explosive performance. Delving into what makes the gaming platform tick, Juan discovered some surprises about the evolution of the Metaverse and its revenue models.

Axie Infinity has recorded unprecedented growth in the crypto space. This week the data confirmed that it surpassed more than $1 billion in sales and the equally spectacular achievement of one million daily users. Where is the limit for Axie Infinity? Will play-to-earn help to expand crypto adoption to the young generations? Can traders benefit as well from this growth?

Up until last week, OpenSea was the sole platform to break the threshold of $1B in cumulative traded volume in the NFT space. To put this performance in perspective, other popular NFT projects like NBA Top Shot or Cryptopunks are approaching $700M in accumulated total volume.

Accumulated volume of Axie Infinity and OpenSea, data by Axieworld and Etherscan.

It is worth considering that the August data is only accounting for less than half this month so far. This exponential growth in the future could still see even bigger numbers. Such is not off the table considering that both Axie Infinity and Open Sea marketplaces are trading between $50 and $30 million.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 Quick Take: Pudgy Penguins; a story of love and FUD

Links

🔗 Future of Diem hangs in the balance as Novi looks for an alternative: The Block

A months-old partnership between Silvergate and the Diem Association has apparently hit regulatory headwinds. Now Novi, Facebook’s crypto wallet subsidiary, is looking for a different stablecoin.

🔗 The BIT-SUSHI is still live with airdrop bonuses: @SushiSwap

SushiChef @SushiSwapThe BIT-SUSHI auction is still live with airdrop bonuses equally accessible to those who participate in the SUSHI-BIT auction 🎈 early participants and higher, current bonus tranche outlined by the auction creator still apply miso.sushi.com/auctions/0x831… More informations soon!

miso.sushi.comMISO | Minimal Initial SushiSwap OfferingList new tokens on Sushiswap by starting with a nice hot MISO3:09 AM ∙ Aug 17, 202128Likes10Retweets

🔗 Alex Saunders again under fire after virtual HQ in Decentraland fails to launch: CoinTelegraph

Australian crypto influencer and Nuggets News founder Alex Saunders is facing backlash over his non-fungible token (NFT) sale from late last year.

🔗 Poly Network Hack Not Over as Attacker Prolongs Return of Funds: CoinDesk

The Poly Network cyberattack saga has dragged into its second week with the hacker or hackers yet to provide the key for the multi-signature wallet needed to complete the full return of the roughly $600 million that was stolen, with the exception of the $33 million worth of the stablecoin USDT (0%) that was frozen by Tether.

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✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau and Juan Pellicer, and edited by Camila Russo, Bailey Reutzel and Edward Robinson. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was 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).