⚡️ Neon Labs’ Solana Move Tempts Developers with Scaling Power

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

News

Tutorials

Defiant Degens: How to Farm Up to 152% APR in Balancer Polygon Pools

Opinion

Deflation is About to Whack DeFi Tokens — Is This Actually a Good Thing?

Podcast

🎙Listen to this week’s podcast with Raoul Pal here:

Video

School of Block | Episode 19 | How to protect your crypto

Links

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Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
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Dive

⚡️ Neon Labs’ Solana Move Tempts Developers with Scaling Power

TLDR Neon Lab’s announcement that it will offer its Ethereum Virtual Machine scaling solution on Solana made quite a splash this week. It also prompted a cryptic response from 0xMaki, Sushiswap’s “fearless leader,” as he’s identified on the project’s website.

EMOJIS 0xMaki responded to Neon Labs’ tweet with a string of pencil on paper emojis, the sun, and a sushi one.

SCALING It’s hard to know what 0xMaki meant, but it seems likely he and the developers of other leading protocols will be taking a long look at deploying to Solana through Neon Labs. Sushiswap already supports 14 chains, according to the project’s website. And the scaling Solana offers to apps on a full-to-the-brim Ethereum network may be too tempting for DeFi developers to pass up.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Markets

📈 Immutable X Releases Token and Plans Airdrop for Gods Unchained Owners

NEWS Immutable X, an NFT-focused layer 2 solution on Ethereum from the team behind the NFT trading card game Gods Unchained, has unveiled its native token, $IMX.

MINTING Since launching its Alpha version in April the Immutable X protocol has facilitated over 250K NFT trades. It offers gas-free NFT minting, trading, and collecting.

PROTOCOL The $IMX token will be used for fees, staking, and governance. A fifth of every transaction fee on Immutable X will be paid in $IMX, and the protocol will automatically purchase that fee with ETH for users who don’t hold $IMX. These $IMX transaction fees will then be sent to a staking reward pool to be proportionally distributed amongst users who stake $IMX.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Show Biz

🐱 Weed, Cats and NFTs: New Animated Series Combines All Three

TLDR A new NFT project, backed by some real star power, will have you burning green in more ways than one.

MARIJUANA “Stoner Cats” is an upcoming series of animated shorts about, well, house cats high on marijuana. And it will only be available to those who drop some greenbacks on its unique, algorithmically-generated NFTs.

PILOT The series is produced by That ‘70s Show star Mila Kunis’ Orchard Farm Productions, and features Kunis and her former co-star Ashton Kutcher in lead voice over roles. Ash Brannon, one of the show’s creators who hand-drew every frame of the pilot episode, also co-directed Toy Story 2.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Tutorial

🎓 Defiant Degens: How to Farm Up to 152% APR in Balancer Polygon Pools

By DeFi Dad

This is a weekly tutorial on the most compelling opportunities in yield farming, written by our friend DeFi Dad, an advisor to The Defiant and Head of Marketing and Portfolio Support at Fourth Revolution Capital.

TLDR The fundamentals among top tier automated market makers, or AMMs, in DeFi is fiercely competitive. While just a year ago, we might have debated the pros and cons of deploying liquidity on other blockchains like Matic/Polygon, the reality of market demand for L2s and sidechains of Ethereum has officially arrived.

BALANCER After Curve, SushiSwap and native Polygon teams like QuickSwap grew parabolic demand for liquidity, yet another marquee name in DeFi, born on Ethereum, was forced to launch on Polygon. This time, it’s Balancer!

FEES Balancer allows for automated portfolio management and providing liquidity while you collect fees from traders. On Ethereum and Polygon combined, Balancer has grown liquidity from nearly $1.5B TVL on July 1 to $2.2B on July 20 and notably, while the crypto market headwinds have drawn down against the price of most tokens.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Opinion

📉 Deflation is About to Whack DeFi Tokens — Is This Actually a Good Thing?

By Masha Prusso

In this week’s opinion-analysis piece, guest writer Masha Prusso explores how deflation, the decrease of DeFi tokens over time, will impact the market, especially with the advent of big changes in Ethereum. Her conclusions may surprise you!

THE LEAD During the crypto bull market of the last year, deflationary tokenomics were a major force in many of the record price increases in the industry. The knowledge that the amount of certain tokens was decreasing over time triggered a stampede of investors to get in early, multiplying a token’s value many times over, sometimes in just a matter of days.

WHAT’S HAPPENING? That may have been just a prelude to what’s coming. Deflationary tokenomics are likely to become an even more significant part of the crypto industry in the months to come. Why? For starters, Ethereum will soon switch to a model that burns tokens every time a transaction occurs on the network and this will likely lead to the blockchain becoming deflationary. The effect this will have on the industry is hard to gauge but Ethereum is the second largest and arguably the most influential of the blockchains, and if the fork proves successful many may adopt the model.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 School of Block | Episode 19 | How to protect your crypto

Links

🔗 Blockchain Protocol Thorchain Suffers Another Hack Totaling $8M: CoinDesk

“Thorchain has been hit by another exploit, this time costing around $8 million. Thorchain also told CoinDesk a hacker deployed a custom contract that was able to trick the Bifrost into receiving a deposit of fake assets. The network then processed a refund of real assets to the hacker. Last week, the protocol was drained of around 4,000 ether (ETH, +3.72%) in a separate incident.”

🔗 I’m All Shook Up: Arthur Hayes

“Zooming out, I am only focused on one piece of macro data, and that is the pace of central bank balance sheet expansion. If the quantum of money increases, it must go somewhere. Crypto alongside stonks, commodities, housing, and bonds etc. will all receive the manna from unelected bureaucrats. Let’s take stock of what our monetary masters cooked up for our financial wellbeing in the first half of 2021.”

🔗 Crypto venture studio Thesis raises $21 million in Series A funding: The Block

“Thesis, a crypto venture studio behind the projects like tBTC, has raised $21 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by ParaFi Capital and Nascent, with participation from Fenbushi Capital, Polychain Capital, and Draper Associates.”

🔗 No, Jack Dorsey isn't trolling ETH by making its logo the Ethiopian flag: CoinTelegraph

“Crypto Twitter was united in amusement today when the hashtag #eth began to automatically show the Ethiopian flag as the Ethereum 'logo'.”

🔗 Dfinity Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Claiming ICP Token Is Unregistered Security: Decrypt

“Dfinity has been hit with a class-action suit in California alleging that the company sold its native Internet Computer Project (ICP) tokens as an unregistered security. The complaint has been filed by California resident Daniel Ocampo “on behalf of all investors who purchased Internet Computer Project tokens on or after May 10, 2021.”

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✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Owen Fernau, Dan Kahan, DeFiDad and Masha Prusso, and edited by Edward Robinson, Bailey Reutzel and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was 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. 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).