📺 First Look: Cardano's first DEX is here. Does it work?

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

News

• Anchor Protocol Burns Through Its Reserves As Deposits Pile Up
• Frog Nation Hops into SushiSwap to ‘Clean Up’ Tumultuous Exchange
• Google Searches for ‘NFT’ Outrun ‘Crypto’ As Asia Dominates Action

Video

• Cardano's first DEX is here. Does it work? | SundaeSwap First Look
• Quick Take: Market Dump, NFT pump + Metaverse giants roll in

Podcast

• 🎙Listen to this week’s podcast episode w/ Synthetix’s Kain Warwick

Links

• Bitcoin moves in lockstep with US stocks as big traders enter market: The Financial Times
• The Curve Wars | CurveMarketCap: Bankless
• Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Venture to Wind Down, Sell Assets: the Wall Street Journal
• Quadriga co-founder served time in U.S. prison for role in identity-theft ring, documents reveal: The Globe and Mail
• Ribbon Launches Vaults On Solana With Zeta Markets: Medium
• @LUNIonTerra is working hard to develop #LUNILAND- a metaverse on #Terra integrated with $LUNI token and LUNILAND NFTs: Terra

Trending in The Defiant

• OlympusDAO Created a Breakthrough DeFi Model – Now It’s Down 93% and Called a ‘Ponzi’
• Uniswap Crosses Milestone With Greater ETH/Stablecoin Volume than Coinbase or Binance
• LooksRare Surges to $7B Valuation as Torrid Volumes Fuel Staking Rewards

The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

Subscribe now

🙌 Together with:

• Step Finance is the portfolio management dashboard for Solana users to visualise, analyse, execute and aggregate transactions across all Solana contracts in one place. Get started now!
• ZerionZerion is Mission Control for Web3: an intuitive DeFi portfolio manager, multichain tracking & trading and the best place to show off your NFT collection
• Cryptex Finance (CTX) the fully decentralized creators of TCAP, The World’s First Total Crypto Market Cap Token.
• Concordiumis made for the future economy. It’s the first fully compliant blockchain with Layer 1 ID, predictable fees valued in FIAT and private and public transactions. Discover more.

DeFi Protocols

⚓️ Anchor Protocol Burns Through Its Reserves As Deposits Pile Up

SAFE RETURN Terra’s DeFi protocol for savers is burning through its savings account. Anchor is the DeFi protocol meant to offer a safe, predictable return for DeFi’s conservative investors. It’s widely considered the benchmark yield for the whole industry and currently sits at 19.33%.

WILDLY HIGHER In other words, Anchor aims to set the bare minimum yield that investors looking for a safe, boring DeFi investment should be able to expect, which is still wildly higher than anything found in the traditional market.

COLLATERAL Anchor is able to offer this high return based in part on interest paid by borrowers and in part on yield earned by those borrowers’ collateral. That said, too many savers are coming into the system and not enough loans are getting made, so Anchor has started to burn through its reserves in order to meet that ambitious benchmark. The community has noticed and started to discuss the issue.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Mergers

🐸 Frog Nation Hops Into SushiSwap to ‘Clean Up’ Tumultuous Exchange

MULTIPLE CHAINS The Frog Nation, a collective of crypto protocols meant to work together across multiple chains, has added SushiSwap to its ranks. What this means remains to be seen, but in a blog post from Frog Nation lead Daniele Sesta, it seemed that the team behind protocols such as Abracadabra and Wonderland will be taking over top level management at SushiSwap.

EFFICIENCY “As a first note, Frog Nation is here to clean up and bring efficiency back into Sushi, prior to the last 3-4 months LOTs of products were being shipped, Sushi proved that it was not simply just a Uni Fork,” Sesta wrote.

REACTION Market reaction to the news was tepid. SUSHI traded at about $4.48 just beforE Sesta tweeted out the blog post on Tuesday. By Thursday morning, it had slipped to $4.16. The news of the merger does not come as a surprise to close watchers of SushiSwap. Sesta first floated the idea in SushiSwap’s forums at the end of December.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFTs

🔎 Google Searches for ‘NFT’ Outrun ‘Crypto’ As Asia Dominates Action

MOJO In a sign that nonfungible tokens are picking up serious mojo despite market angst, Google searches for the term “NFT”are now firmly ahead of ‘crypto’ and “Ethereum”, according to Google Trends.

TRAFFIC The term “Bitcoin” continues to lead all comers. NFTs flipped crypto for the first time on other leading terms on Dec. 25 and have seen a surge in interest on the back of China’s plans to build NFT infrastructure, albeit with no cryptocurrency links. Indeed, Asian countries comprise six of the top ten sources of search traffic.

CHINA As Google is banned in China, we can safely infer that at least some of the searches routed through Hong Kong and Taiwan may be coming from the mainland.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

Unstoppable Domains is The #1 provider of NFT domains. With endings like .crypto, .x and .nft you can replace your long complex wallet addresses, verify ownership of your NFTs, login into web3 apps and join 10’s of thousands of people using them as their Twitter usernames. Better yet, with Unstoppable domains you don't have to worry about gas or renewal fees, YOU OWN IT. Get your name for as low as $5 here.

The Tube

📺 First Look: Cardano's first DEX is here. Does it work?

📺 Quick Take: Market Dump, NFT pump + Metaverse giants roll in

Links

🔗 Bitcoin moves in lockstep with US stocks as big traders enter market: The Financial Times

Bitcoin has mirrored the sharp fluctuations in traditional markets this year, highlighting the tightening link between cryptocurrencies and mainstream financial assets as more professional traders enter the digital finance arena.

🔗 The Curve Wars | CurveMarketCap: Bankless

The Curve Wars are the DeFi trenches. Deep in the realm of liquidity and incentives, a battle of tokenomics rages on. Many might not be clued into the mountains being moved in the Curve War, but CurveMarketCap is here to settle it all.

🔗 Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Venture to Wind Down, Sell Assets: the Wall Street Journal

Facebook’s ambitious effort to bring cryptocurrency to the masses has failed.

🔗 Quadriga co-founder served time in U.S. prison for role in identity-theft ring, documents reveal: The Globe and Mail

The co-founder of troubled cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX is a convicted felon who served time in the United States for his role in an online identity-theft ring.

🔗 Ribbon Launches Vaults On Solana With Zeta Markets: Medium

One of the advantages of building derivatives infrastructure on Solana is the ability to release the most cutting edge features in DeFi, creating the conditions to attract the most esteemed and talented protocols in DeFi.

Terra Daily 🌖 @TerraLUNADaily🎉@LUNIonTerra is working hard to develop #LUNILAND- a metaverse on #Terra integrated with $LUNI token and LUNILAND NFTs. 🤑#LUNILAND will allow users to own,trade various types of plots and combine them with $NFTs to generate a #passiveincome Details 👇 medium.com/@luniofficial/…

8:49 AM ∙ Jan 27, 202255Likes19Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• 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.
• Uniswap Crosses Milestone With Greater ETH/Stablecoin Volume than Coinbase or BinanceUniswap, the leading decentralized exchange by trade volume, now processes more ETH/stablecoin volume than any centralized crypto trading venue.
• LooksRare Surges to $7B Valuation as Torrid Volumes Fuel Staking RewardsLooksRare, the upstart NFT marketplace that airdropped its $LOOKS token to NFT traders on Jan. 9, is having a stellar run.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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.

Subscribe now

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)