📉 Milady NFTs Plummet As Founder Comes Clean

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Controversial NFT Collection Nosedives

📉 Milady NFTs Plummet As Founder Comes Clean

By Aleksandar Gilbert

Gharlotte Fang had a confession to make on Saturday morning.

“I was Miya,” the Twitter user once called the mastermind behind the Milady NFT collection, said.browsers, and an iOS version of the app is “coming soon.”

For a brief period in mid-April, the cheapest of the 10,000 generative, doe-eyed, anime avatars “inspired by 00’s Tokyo street fashion” was selling for a little more than $6,000. But the price began to drop, and fell even further after a May 5 story from CoinDesk exploring the Milady founder’s sordid history.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Tokenized Credentials

📈 Vitalik Proposes Soulbound Tokens as Web3 Credentials of the Future

By Jason Levin

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin recently proposed a new kind of token standard that will help users gain insights into others’ real-world activities, accomplishments, likes and dislikes – something like a glimpse into their soul.

Buterin’s soulbound tokens (SBTs) are non-transferrable NFTs held by unique crypto wallets called Souls. In the paper Buterin co-authored to introduce the concept, he described multiple ways SBTs could be used – as university degrees, education credentials, and as web3 credit scores.

Instead of a web3 hiring manager calling up your alma mater or checking LinkedIn, he could check your on-chain resume for a transaction showing the university’s Soul transferring you an SBT. As Buterin writes, “‘Souls can encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Stablecoins Under Fire

👀 OpenSea Drops New Marketplace Protocol for NFTs

By Jason Levin

NFT developers just got a new tool to build with as the bear market rages on.

OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, has launched what the company bills as a “web3 marketplace protocol for safely and efficiently buying and selling NFTs.”

The protocol, called Seaport, will allow for a more varied, but also more specific, NFT trading experience — users will be able to post offers for NFTs including ERC20, ERC721, and ETH, instead of just ETH trading like OpenSea facilitates currently.

This means that instead of listing an NFT for a certain amount of ETH, users will be able to list a potential trade for specific NFTs. For example, a user could use Seaport to create an offer to trade a Bored Ape for a bundle including a CryptoPunk, a Cryptoadz, and a bit of Uniswap’s UNI token.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

💪🏼 MakerDAO Regains Top Spot on TVL Leaderboard

By Owen Fernau

MakerDAO, one of DeFi’s longest-standing protocols, is once again top of the leaderboard in terms of total value locked (TVL), according to DeFi Llama. MakerDAO has a TVL of $9.75B, as of May 23.

The TVL of the previous market leader, automated market maker (AMM) Curve Finance, dropped by more than half in the last month from $19.91B to $9.02B, data from DeFi Llama shows.

Curve held the top spot in TVL terms for much of 2021, but since the AMM is primarily designed to swap like-kind assets (primarily stablecoins, which included the now-defunct UST), Curve ceded the TVL crown to Maker when stablecoin supplies dropped.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Experts Weigh In On Crypto Downtrend

🚀 Filecoin and Lockheed Martin To Launch IPFS Into Space

By Owen Fernau

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a protocol for peer-to-peer file data sharing and storage, is set to live up to its name through a partnership with Filecoin and U.S. space and weapons company Lockheed Martin.

Filecoin, which relies on IPFS, wants to store an IPFS node on one of Lockheed Martin’s spaceships. When the spaceship gets shot into Earth’s orbit, IPFS could use the node as a relay to further decentralize its network, which hosts things like non-custodial domain names and censorship-resistant websites.

Filecoin and Lockheed hope that it will demonstrate the protocol’s usefulness and help power the fledgling space economy. IPFS grabs data from the closest server, so shooting nodes into space could be useful in case astronauts get into NFTs.

“Soon, space will no longer just be a destination. It will be home to the new space economy, independent of Earth. The work we’re doing with Filecoin reinforces an investment in building space infrastructure,” said Joe Landon, a vice president at Lockheed Martin.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi 101

🦄 What Is A Layer 1 Network?

By Rahul Nambiampurath

Although Bitcoin launched in early 2009, it took until 2017 for blockchains to go mainstream. And only in November 2021 – almost 12 years after Bitcoin’s launch – did crypto’s market cap peak at $2.9T.

Bitcoin’s growth created immeasurable wealth and changed how society perceives money – and who controls its issuance. But along the way, blockchains became victims of their own success. They couldn’t handle all the traffic, leading to long transaction times and high fees.

To understand why that is, we must understand why blockchain networks are also called layer 1 networks, and what makes blockchains different from regular computer networks.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Op-Ed

🙊The Age Of Tokies

By Sasha Kapustina

NFTs are dead. Long live NFTs! The last few weeks have brought an enormous amount of drama and gray hair to the space. It’s time to put the degening on pause and go back to the fundamentals.

What are we doing here with these jpegs? Is it art? Is it an access token? Where does the value come from?

All art is about storytelling. This is how humans are wired. Whether you listen to a writer, composer, architect, or chef, they will all talk about moving their audience through a story with a beginning, middle, and end. NFTs are just a new way of telling stories —with tokens. We are witnessing the birth of a new artform – tokenized storytelling.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Quick Take: How to research stablecoins | USDC, USDT, BUSD, USDP

Elsewhere

🔗 ECB: One in ten households in eurozone population centers now own cryptocurrency: Cointelegraph

On Tuesday, the European Central Bank, or ECB, published the results of a new survey conducted in six eurozone areas; the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, and Germany. Together, approximately 10% of respondents from the surveyed countries said they own cryptocurrencies. Out of this group, only 6% of respondents said they own digital assets worth more than 30,000 euros. Meanwhile, 37% of respondents said they owned up to 999 euros in crypto.

🔗 US Senators Lummis and Gillibrand Set to Propose Crypto Oversight Bill Next Month: CoinDesk

One of the highest-profile efforts to create a cryptocurrency law in Washington, D.C., would finally differentiate the roles of the two key U.S. market watchdogs as well as free crypto miners from being considered broker-dealers, according to the two U.S. senators pushing the bill. “We are truly committed to creating the type of baseline and framework legislation that will allow this industry to grow, allow it to flourish,” said Gillibrand. “The best thing we can do for all these businesses is to bring clarity.”

🔗 a16z announces $4.5 billion fund for crypto and blockchain startups: The Block

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) will launch a $4.5 billion fund for crypto and blockchain startups, it announced on Wednesday. The company is betting on finding new opportunities, despite the market downtown. It said that $1.5 billion out of the fund will be dedicated to seed investments, while $3 billion will go to venture investments.

Trending in The Defiant

GameStop Launches Beta Version of Non-Custodial Crypto WalletGameStop, the embattled video game store and meme stock, launched a non-custodial Ethereum browser wallet in beta on Tuesday. Users control their assets and must manage the wallet’s private keys themselves. The wallet is available from the Chrome Web Store for the Chrome and Brave browsers, and an iOS version of the app is “coming soon.”
Federal Reserve Survey Finds 12% of U.S. Adults Held Crypto Last Year In the central bank’s Economic Well-Being Of U.S. Households in 2021 report, the Fed found that 12% of the 11,000 U.S. adults surveyed held cryptocurrency last year. About 92% of the Americans held crypto to speculate on its price. Last year, the combined market cap of crypto assets surged from $763B to $2.9T in November, before crashing to about $1.3T in 2022.
Stablecoins In Regulators’ Crosshairs After Terra CollapseAfter Terra’s collapse last week, regulators across the globe have started to take aim at stablecoins. On May 20, Bloomberg reported that Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a moderate Democrat, are working together on a proposal that aims to prevent crises like Terra’s collapse. Their proposed bill would require stablecoins to keep 100% reserves on hand and maintain a 1-1 peg with those assets, thus ending innovation around algorithmic stablecoins.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, DeFiDad, Aleksandar Gilbert, 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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