💸 Major US Clearing House Experiments with CBDC for Real-Time Settlements

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

News

• Major US Clearing House Experiments with CBDC for Real-time Settlements
• DeFi Protocols Heed MakerDAO’s Call to Back DAI with Real-World Assets
• Ethereum’s Merge Delayed Despite Successful ‘Shadow Fork’ Test

Podcast

🎙Listen to this week’s podcast episode with Defiant’s Robin & Alp:

Video

• The Defiant Podcast: Meet the makers - The Defiant film team

Elsewhere

• Former Ethereum Developer Virgil Griffith Sentenced to 5+ Years in Prison for North Korea Trip: CoinDesk
• Circle announces $400 million raise, partnership with BlackRock: The Block
• Sega Lays Groundwork for Metaverse With 'Super Game' NFT Plan: Decrypt
• Polygon commits to going carbon neutral in 2022: Cointelegraph
• $215 billion wiped in major crypto crash: News.com.au

Trending in The Defiant

• Terra Hard Hit as DeFi Drops 20% in a Week
• Uniswap Joins the Hunt for Web3 Startups with New Venture Arm
• Refunds for NFTs? New Standard Sets Give-Back Period for Minters

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Financial Institutions Embrace CBDC Trials

💸 Major US Clearing House Experiments with CBDC for Real-time Settlements

By Samuel Haig

It takes a lot of complicated financial engineering to make it look like your stock market trades settle instantly. But in reality, it takes a vast shadow network of clearinghouses several days to shift your money around the market.

Yesterday, the U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced that it’s building ‘Project Lithium’, a CBDC prototype that it’s using to explore whether a Federal Reserve-issued digital currency could clear a trade as soon as a brokerage sends the money.

“Project Lithium represents the next major step in our exploration of DLT, tokenization, and other emerging technologies,” said Jennifer Peve, who heads strategy and business development at the DTCC. “[It] will lay the groundwork for the financial community to better evaluate the implications of a CBDC across the trade lifecycle.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

MakerDAO Gets Real

👀DeFi Protocols Heed MakerDAO’s Call to Back DAI with Real-World Assets

By Samuel Haig

If the crypto market gets wiped out – really, truly zonked – not even MakerDAO’s over-collateralized crypto loans might be able to save its U.S. dollar stablecoin, DAI. But how about if DAI wasn’t just backed by crypto, but by real-world assets, like factories, stocks and corporate debt, too?

Undercollateralized lending protocols think that diversifying DAI’s backing outside of crypto could add tens of millions of dollars to MakerDAO’s revenue and protect DAI from a crypto bear market. Plans to back DAI with real-world assets are already in the works.

Yesterday, crypto lending protocol Maple Finance, which has funded over $1 billion in undercollateralized loans since launching 11 months ago, announced plans to partner with MakerDAO to issue loans to institutional borrowers.

And on April 11, TrueFi, a lending protocol that’s facilitated $1.3 billion of uncollateralized loans since November 2020, launched a signal request for a pool of between 50 million and 100 million DAI.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

⏰Ethereum’s Merge Delayed Despite Successful ‘Shadow Fork’ Test

By Owen Fernau

A major test called “the shadow fork” was “a huge success,” Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden tweeted on Apr. 11.

The test aimed to ensure that “The Merge”, which will meld the proof-of-stake Beacon Chain with the Ethereum mainnet, replacing energy-intensive miners with ETH stakers, goes ahead without a hitch. The Merge is scheduled for sometime after July.

The most recent test processed mainnet transactions on a “shadow fork” – a subset of proof-of-work nodes that had been merged with the Beacon Chain to process proof-of-stake transactions.

The tests mimicked the real Merge with the nodes processing real Ethereum transactions from the blockchain’s mainnet. This differs from Ethereum testnets, which process transactions with pretend ETH in a sandbox environment.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 The Defiant Podcast: Meet the makers - The Defiant film team

Job Board

😆 The Meme Studio: Meme Artist / Shitposter / Illustrator / Designer / Artist

We are a fast growing crypto content agency focused on memes, animation and art. We have a large need for meme makers and illustrators who understand various internet sub-cultures especially useful if you have been or participated in the following:

- /biz/ on 4chan
- DeFi degen meme culture across Telegram & Twitter
- NFT/P2E/DeFi culture in Discords esp. meme channels

For more info, click here.

Elsewhere

🔗 Former Ethereum Developer Virgil Griffith Sentenced to 5+ Years in Prison for North Korea Trip: CoinDesk

Griffith previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate international sanctions for giving a talk at a crypto conference in Pyongyang in 2019. Virgil Griffith will serve 63 months in prison and pay a $100,000 fine for helping North Koreans use cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions.

🔗 Circle announces $400 million raise, partnership with BlackRock: The Block

Crypto payments company Circle announced a $400 million funding round on Tuesday. The firm is also partnering with management giant ​​BlackRock as a strategic investor.

🔗 Sega Lays Groundwork for Metaverse With 'Super Game' NFT Plan: Decrypt

Video game giant Sega is embarking on a five-year plan to create “Super Game,” an interconnected framework of AAA titles that could incorporate Web3 technologies such as NFTs. “It is a natural extension for the future of gaming that it will expand to involve new areas such as cloud gaming and NFTs,” said Sega producer Masayoshi Kikuchi.

🔗 Polygon commits to going carbon neutral in 2022: Cointelegraph

The Polygon network announced on Tuesday its commitment to going carbon neutral and climate positive this year by releasing their “Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth.” They also made a $20 million pledge to offset their carbon footprints and buy extra credits to eventually become carbon negative.

🔗 $215 billion wiped in major crypto crash: News.com.au

A major cryptocurrency crash has wiped away the gains made in the last three weeks, sending the values of the digital tokens plummeting. In total, cryptocurrency’s market cap dropped by eight per cent, from US $2 trillion to $1.84 trillion.

Trending in The Defiant

• Terra Hard Hit as DeFi Drops 20% in a Week The DeFi sector has lost a fifth of its value in the last week and a third going back to the heady days of November. Terra’s LUNA token has been among the hardest hit in the crypto sell-off, plunging 30% since posting an all-time high of $119 one week ago.
• Uniswap Joins the Hunt for Web3 Startups with New Venture Arm Uniswap Labs, the team behind the leading decentralized exchange, has launched a venture wing to make early-stage investments in web3. “As a crypto-native development team, we’re uniquely positioned to support the teams we invest in as they launch and grow,” Uniswap said.
• Refunds for NFTs? New Standard Sets Give-Back Period for Minters Maybe every wild west must become civilized in the end. If so, then the taming of NFTs may be about to begin. The catalyst for a more stable NFT space is a new token standard called ERC721R. It builds off the ERC721 standard, which NFTs typically use. Its twist: refunds.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by 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. Signest, 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)