✊🏼 DeFi Stalwarts Buck Bear Market

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

News

• Rocket Pool to Offer Staking Services in Race to Catch Lido
• Lido To Expand stETH To Layer 2 Networks
• New Token Standard Lowers Costs for NFT Creation

Markets

• DeFi Stalwarts Buck Bear Market
• Bankrupt Celsius’ CEL Token Is Up 30% Since Halting Withdrawals
• Ethereum Hits Five Week High as DeFi Rallies

DeFi Essay

• The Center Will Not Hold: How Decentralization is Reshaping Technology and Governance

Opinion

• Exclusive: MetaMask Girds for Crypto Winter by Drawing Lessons From the Last One

Video

• Quick Take: Crypto bounces back. ETH DGAF. YCC is the acronym of the week

Elsewhere

• Celsius Lays Out Mining-Focused Reorganization Plan at First Bankruptcy Hearing: Coindesk
• Dubai to ramp up metaverse efforts with 40,000 new jobs: CoinTelegraph
• Startups race to build a crypto-native, consumer-friendly messaging platform for web3: TechCrunch
• The #PolkadotHackathon North America is finished now. Check the projects that made it to the final stage, and vote for your favorites!: Polkadot

Trending in The Defiant

• DeFiance Founder Had ‘No Visibility’ on Three Arrows’ Condition: StatementDeFiance Capital said it has been “materially affected” by the liquidation of Three Arrows Capital in a statement released Friday. The investment firm sought to distance founder Arthur Cheong from the failed $10B crypto hedge fund.
• StarkNet Testers Fume After Token AnnouncementStarkWare, the company behind Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution StarkNet, plans to launch a native token designed to decentralize control and maintenance of the network.
• Three Arrows’ Su Zhu Breaks Silence Accusing Liquidators of Playing DirtySu Zhu, the co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, has accused the hedge fund’s liquidators of operating in bad faith, breaking a month-long silence during which his firm suffered a stunning fall from grace.

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Market Action

✊🏼 DeFi Stalwarts Buck Bear Market

Aave, Uniswap and MakerDAO Outperforming Bitcoin and Ether

By Aleksandar Gilbert

BLUE CHIPS Governance tokens for blue chip DeFi protocols Aave, MakerDAO and Uniswap have outperformed Bitcoin and Ether in the three months since the crypto market began its collapse.

CHOPPY WATERS As crypto companies that once managed billions in user assets declare bankruptcy, established DeFi protocols have, thus far, stayed afloat amid choppy waters.

IMPLOSION Crypto markets have, by and large, followed stocks in a broad decline this year. But crypto was also rocked by the implosion of Terra and its UST stablecoin in May, which set off a chain reaction that has culminated in the liquidation of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and the bankruptcies of Voyager Digital, a publicly-traded cryptocurrency platform, and crypto lender Celsius.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Market Action

📈 Bankrupt Celsius’ CEL Token Is Up 30% Since Halting Withdrawals

By Jason Levin

Despite crypto lender Celsius halting withdrawals on June 13 and declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 13, its native $CEL token has risen 30% since all hell broke loose.

What’s more, it’s outperforming the S&P 500. Over the last 30 days, the S&P 500 Index is up 4.61% while CEL is up 30.8%. If Celsius is bankrupt, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize something strange is going on.

CEL vs S&P 500

WHALE GAMES Many on Twitter speculated that there was reckless trading or “whale games” going on, but our source at crypto analytics firm Messari said this is not the case.

HOLD THE TOKENS “The only way price goes down is that people sell. But in order for that to happen, they need to hold the tokens to sell in the first place,” Messari analyst Dustin Leander explained. “Currently, over 90% of the supply is held in various Celsius wallets. Celsius naturally isn’t a seller of their own token and the remaining holders aren’t large enough to drive the price down significantly.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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Market Action

😲 Ethereum Hits Five Week High as DeFi Rallies

By Samuel Haig

JUMP Maybe these are famous last words, but the weekend rebound in crypto doesn’t feel like a dead cat bounce. Ether surged to its highest level in five weeks and other DeFi names finally shook off the doldrums and posted handsome gains of their own. Many top DeFi projects increased since posting a local low on July 13. Uniswap is up 33% in the last seven days, and Aave jumped 38%.

ASSETS The rally follows a devastating second quarter for crypto and DeFi, with the sector losing two-thirds of its market value since early April. The value of assets locked in DeFi protocols also evaporated, tanking 65% to $83.1B.

BUYING ETH has jumped 4% in the last 24 hours in mid-morning trading U.K. time Tuesday, and 39% in the last seven days, according to CoinGecko. While ETH spent the past three weeks swinging between the $1,000 and $1,300 range, on July 16 it broke through $1,300 and apparently triggered a round of buying.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Staked Ether

🚀 Rocket Pool to Offer Staking Services in Race to Catch Lido

By Samuel Haig

UPGRADES In a bid to improve its capital efficiency, Rocket Pool, the second-largest liquid staking provider representing 4.3% of the sector’s capital, is cooking up a series of upgrades designed to improve capital efficiency and expand its market share, said Marceau.eth, a DAO member of Rocket Pool, in a tweet “scaling thread” on July 17.

GROWTH Perhaps the most intriguing is Rocket Pool’s plan to launch a Staking-as-a-Service offering for infrastructure companies and institutional custodians. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been an important model and key source of growth in the traditional software industry for years.

SOLUTION The moves are designed to enable Rocket Pool to scale up and compete with Lido, a leading staking solution. Rocket Pool is the second largest liquid staking protocol with a TVL of $289.7M. Users have staked 2.5M ETH via Lido since the start of the year, 20 times more than Rocket Pool’s 122,000 ETH.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Layer 2s

👉🏼 Lido To Expand stETH To Layer 2 Networks

By Aleksandar Gilbert

LOWER FEES Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol, plans to bring its stETH token to Ethereum’s layer 2 (L2) networks. “For Ethereum stakers, this means staking with lower fees and access to a new suite of DeFi applications to amplify yields,” Lido said Monday in a blog post detailing the expansion.

INTEGRATED No timeline was given for Lido’s L2 ambitions. But the company said it had already “integrated with Argent to make wstETH available on zkSync and with Aztec” and would “support stETH on all sufficiently proven Layer 2 networks with demonstrated economic activity, starting out with Arbitrum and Optimism.”

LOCKED LIQUIDITY Lido and similar protocols, such as Rocket Pool, allow users to simultaneously stake their Ether in the Beacon chain and access their locked liquidity using derivative tokens backed 1:1 by their staked ETH. These tokens, like stETH and Rocket’s rETH, can then be used to earn yield in the wider DeFi ecosystem.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT Creation

🧑🏼‍🎨 New Token Standard Lowers Costs for NFT Creation

By Owen Fernau

NEWS The trope that bear markets are for building may have the benefit of being true. Case in point: Charged Particles, a project that allows users to deposit digital assets into NFTs, introduced a new token standard called ERC721i on July 15.

PRE-MINT The standard brings a new capability to the NFT space. ERC721i will allow creators to pre-mint their projects’ NFTs for a very low cost. Charged Particles used the standard to mint one million NFTs for under $2 to demonstrate ERC721i’s capabilities.

CREATORS This matters because, while creators obviously make the art for NFTs before they mint them, ERC721i will allow creators to interact with their NFTs on-chain before they’re released to the public. “I separated concerns – mints from transfers,” Rob Secord, Charged Particles’ CTO told The Defiant over Discord on July 18.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Essay

🧐 The Center Will Not Hold: How Decentralization is Reshaping Technology and Governance

Part One: A Convergence of Forces Disrupts the Logic of Centralization

Guest writers Bruno Lulinski and David Kerr deliver a definitive three-part essay on how decentralization is disrupting business, culture, and technology.

This article is part of a limited series of overviews on DAO fundamentals, a collaboration between the DAO Research Collective and The Defiant. Visit www.daocollective.xyz for more information and continue following The Defiant for future pieces on DAO governance, treasury management, community, employment and other topics.

GOVERNANCE Decentralization is a concept that historically describes local governance structures where the responsibilities of planning and decision-making are not made by a centralized authority, but rather distributed throughout its membership.

CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY Although the terms “centralization” and “decentralization” were not coined until the 19th century in relation to significant political upheaval across Europe, the concepts have existed since the very inception of society. In spite of the obvious benefits of decentralization regarding inclusivity, representation and personal freedom, human history has primarily been a study in centralized authority because of the benefits it provides in efficiency in making decisions and its ability to be effective over large geographic areas.

ROBUST However, recent technological advancements have allowed for decentralized principles to be utilized more effectively and many of the historical limitations are no longer applicable as robust mechanisms of governance utilizing decentralization are now available.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Opinion

🦊MetaMask Girds for Crypto Winter by Drawing Lessons From the Last One

MetaMask's Co-Founders Reflect on Six Years of Building Their Crypto Wallet Venture

In this exclusive column for The Defiant, Aaron Davis and Dan Finlay share insights into what comes next for their project, and DeFi.

ETHOS From our humble beginnings as a pair of starry-eyed techies eager to make a in a brand-new industry, it’s hard to believe how far MetaMask has come over the last six years. While this anniversary is worth celebrating, we also want to reflect on MetaMask’s growth and how our journey has shaped the ethos of this project.

NETWORKING Our shared history goes back to 2013 when we both worked on an open source project called VoxelJS. We then worked at a startup called MochaLeaf, which was acquired by Apple. We bonded over a project called VoxelJS. It was a software engine that allows you to create Minecraft-type browser games. Over the next few years, we dabbled in other areas, including peer-to-peer networking, and came up with a whole bunch of crazy, ambitious ideas for changing the world.

CONVERGENCE We were both drawn to many of the concepts swirling around the crypto space, particularly at the convergence of technology, politics, and data sovereignty. Ideas like creating more effective and participatory systems of governance and being able to democratize the distribution of wealth seemed daring and intriguing.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Quick Take: Crypto bounces back. ETH DGAF. YCC is the acronym of the week

Shoutout

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Elsewhere

🔗 Celsius Lays Out Mining-Focused Reorganization Plan at First Bankruptcy Hearing: Coindesk

Crypto lender Celsius has half a million creditors owed more than $5 billion, attorneys for the company said during its first bankruptcy hearing Monday.

🔗 Dubai to ramp up metaverse efforts with 40,000 new jobs: CoinTelegraph

One of the leading crypto hubs in the Middle East, the emirate of Dubai, launches the Dubai Metaverse Strategy that aims to turn it into one of the world’s top 10 metaverse economies.

🔗 Startups race to build a crypto-native, consumer-friendly messaging platform for web3: TechCrunch

There’s no shortage of headlines about the onset of “crypto winter.” Amid a growing pile of bankruptcies, one of the buzziest startups in the business, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, announced a major layoff just today.

Polkadot @PolkadotThe #PolkadotHackathon North America is finished now. Check the projects that made it to the final stage, and vote for your favorites! Take part in the Community Choice voting before July 27th, 5pm PDT: polkadot-na.devpost.com/project-gallery

4:33 PM ∙ Jul 18, 2022245Likes43Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• DeFiance Founder Had ‘No Visibility’ on Three Arrows’ Condition: StatementDeFiance Capital said it has been “materially affected” by the liquidation of Three Arrows Capital in a statement released Friday. The investment firm sought to distance founder Arthur Cheong from the failed $10B crypto hedge fund.
• StarkNet Testers Fume After Token AnnouncementStarkWare, the company behind Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution StarkNet, plans to launch a native token designed to decentralize control and maintenance of the network.
• Three Arrows’ Su Zhu Breaks Silence Accusing Liquidators of Playing DirtySu Zhu, the co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, has accused the hedge fund’s liquidators of operating in bad faith, breaking a month-long silence during which his firm suffered a stunning fall from grace.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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