👽 FlamingoDAO & its $760k Alien CryptoPunk

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

• DeFi outperforms rest of crypto
• FlamingoDAO talks about buying a CryptoPunk for $760k
• BadgerDAO Digg airdrop
• Kyber’s KNC rallied after upgrade

and more :)

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🐂 DeFi Outperforms Amid Crypto Bull Market

TLDR As Ethereum pushed past an all-time, DeFi too, broke away. DeFi tokens make up four of the top 10 gainers over the last seven days, and 10 of the top 25.

🧐 WHY? Once you buy Bitcoin, next up is DeFi. Plus, ETH is so hot rn.

“It’s a combination of strong fundamentals and BTC consolidation,” Qiao Wang, of accelerator DeFi Alliance, told The Defiant.

“DeFi is the primary bet on the Ethereum ecosystem (besides ETH itself). This is becoming clear to larger investors who carefully entered crypto by investing in BTC,” said Alex Svanevik, founder of blockchain analytics platform, Nansen.

📈 OTHER METRICS Total value locked (TVL) in open finance protocols is at an all time high of over $26B and the number of unique users in the space has breached 1M.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

💰 FlamingoDAO On Why it Paid $760k for Pixelated Jpeg

TLDR CryptoPunk 2890, one of nine legendary Alien Punks —the single-rarest kind of Punk out there, was sold for 605 ETH, or ~$760k USD. It’s the first time an Alien Punk has been put up for sale since 2017.

CryptoPunk 2890 Source: Larvalabs.com

🎨 DIGITAL PROPERTY All property is becoming digital, including art, Priyanka Desai, community representative for FlamingoDAO, said in an interview.

“The NFT ecosystem is so vast. If you think about it we haven’t even really scratched the surface,” Desai said. “If you think of any sort of property in the real world, now just put that in the digital realm,” and there’s so much more you can do with it.

Deciding to purchase a rare “OG” NFT like the Alien was practically a no-brainer for FlamingoDAO.

“The Aliens very rarely come up on the market,” says Desai. “It was offered on Friday night and we bought it Saturday, early afternoon. Things moved pretty quickly.”

🛸 CONTEXT CryptoPunk 8129, one of only 24 super-rare Ape Punks, made major waves when it sold for a whopping 140 ETH ($176k at time of purchase) less than two weeks ago. But the newest major Punk sale makes 140 ETH look like a drop in the bucket.

Over $5M worth of tokens traded in the past week alone. Of the $10.7M all-time volume of CryptoPunks, $1.8 million moved in the past week.

📖 NFTS? NFTs are tokens of unique characteristics which are made to represent ownership in things, like art, real estate, in-game assets and collectibles (unlike BTC, ETH, and ERC-20 tokens which are meant to be interchangeable and used like currency). There are 10,000 CryptoPunk NFTs and each one is different.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ALIEN While the community hasn’t come to any final decisions on what to do with the Alien, possibilities include DAO-ifying it, fractionalizing it, or even bringing it to life as a digital avatar.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

🦡 BadgerDAO Airdropped Bitcoin-Pegged Token Digg

TLDR BadgerDAO distributed 600 Digg to over 7,898 addresses, which were airdropped tokens based on a snapshot of the user’s engagement with the protocol.

🍊 SO WHAT Digg is the newest version of Bitcoin to come to Ethereum. While WBTC and others are backed by BTC held in centralized parties or smart contracts, Digg aims to achieve its peg to the biggest cryptocurrency by expanding and contracting its supply, similar to other rebasing tokens like Ampleforth’s AMPL.

REBASE There have been three rounds of daily rebases so far, where the supply of the crypto cryptocurrency increased to bring Digg’s price in line with Bitcoin’s. Digg is currently trading at $47.3k, while BTC is at $31.5k, a sign it will need to further increase its supply.

🤑 FREE MONEY “Over 90% of all airdropped DIGG have been deposited back in our app either as a solo asset or after providing LP on Sushi or Uniswap and redepositing those,” operations lead Chris Spadafora told The Defiant,

As immediate sales following airdrops based on prior use of an app are common, the retention rate is indeed a rarity, suggesting that Digg recipients don’t see their new tokens just as “free money.”

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

💫 Kyber Overhauled its Protocol and Token Holders Love It

TLDR Kyber’s KNC jumped 25% on Thursday to the highest since 2018 after it announced its upgrade, compared with ETH’s 10% increase. The move signals traders are betting Kyber earn more market share and push more value to its token.

KYBER 3.0 The upgraded Kyber will become a hub of token pools with the goal of attracting greater liquidity. The DEX is launching a so-called “DMM” or an automated Dynamic Market Maker - allowing for permissionless liquidity contribution.

Kyber DMM’s Programmable Pricing Curves allows liquidity pool creators to customize the pricing curve. This means that liquidity providers can have the opportunity to earn more fees relative to their contribution size. Higher adoption of Kyber DMM would potentially increase the fees collected by the KyberDAO (and KNC voters) in the long run.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

💸 dYdX Closes Series B with $10M Investment

TLDR dYdX closed its Series B round with an investment of $10M led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital. Other investors include Wintermute, Hashed, GSR, SCP, Scalar Capital, Spartan Group, and RockTree Capital.

SCALING dYdX is in the process of building a new product for perpetual contracts on Layer 2 solution based on StarkWare’s Zero-Knowledge Rollups. The product aims to reduce the cost of perpetuals trading and is set to launch in February.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

Badgers Diggs Sushi: Rekt

“We were alerted to a trade that appeared to show an experienced DeFi user turning 0.001 into 81.68 ETH via the Badger DAO token DIGG,” Rekt reported. “After researching further, we found that although there had been an exploit, the damage had already been contained, and what had been perceived as a threat to the entire SushiSwap protocol was simply a smart scavenger picking up food that had been left behind.”

Galaxy, Coinbase Bet $25M on DeFi Using Terra Stablecoins: CoinDesk

“Terraform Labs raised $25M in a new round from Galaxy Digital, Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital and others. Previous investors Hashed, Arrington XRP and Kenetic Capital also participated in what Terraform Labs is calling a ‘growth fundraising round,” CoinDesk reported. “Terraform is Tendermint-based, making it part of the larger Cosmos ecosystem. It says its blockchain generates $13M in fees annually. Its payments system, Chai, has 2M users and sees $1.2B in transaction volume using its TerraKRW stablecoin, which tracks the price of the South Korean won.”

✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Daniel Kahan and Owen Fernau, and Sydney Lai, and edited by Camila Russo. Video was produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov.

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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 ($10/mo, $100/yr).