⛽️ Polygon Hikes its Minimum Gas Price by 30x in Bid to Foil Spammers

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

News

• Polygon Hikes its Minimum Gas Price by 30x in Bid to Foil Spammers
• Fei Protocol is Still Swinging After Rocky Start and Launches v2

Weekend Read

• MakerDAO Chases ‘Real World’ Deals and Assets in Major Test for DeFi

Research

• Exclusive from DappRadar: NFTs Are Changing Everything But Are They Built to Last?

Video

• First Look: What are Perpetual Pools and How to earn 200% APY by staking in Tracer
• SuperMassive NFT Show: Everything That's Wrong With NFTs

Podcast

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

Links

• Gelato raises $11M from heavyweight backers for Web 3 automation: CoinTelegraph
• Regulatory Uncertainty a Recurring Theme at London’s Token2049: CoinDesk
• Sagittarius Tokenomics Engine: MakerDAO
• Merit Circle closes $4.5M seed round to revolutionize the P2E gaming industry: Merit Circle
• Our Proposals to the Senate Banking Committee: a16z
• The latest from across the metaverse ft.: OpenSea
• We're excited to announce our full lineup of DJs for @Amnesia_Ibiza SuperClub: Decentral Games

Most Read on The Defiant

• XRP Holders to Get Huge Airdrop of New Blockchain Songbird
• Abracadabra’s Stablecoin Races Past $1B and Sparks Talk of Overtaking MakerDAO
• DeFi Powerhouses Curve and Aave Deploy on Avalanche to Profit from Incentives

We’re excited. We’re getting ready to launch The Defiant Terminal, a platform for investors and analysts to track all DeFi data in one place. Join the waitlist today to be notified as soon as it’s live. You’ll want to be the first to get your eyes on that alpha.

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Gas Fees

⛽️ Polygon Hikes its Minimum Gas Price by 30x in Bid to Foil Spammers

GAS PRICE Polygon, the sixth-largest blockchain by assets locked, is increasing the minimum gas price for transactions on its network by a factor of 30.

SPAM The move comes as the network recently surpassed Ethereum in terms of Daily Active Addresses and is intended to reduce the number of spam transactions on the network.

There have been increasing numbers of spam transactions reported since the explosion in DeFi activity on the network earlier this year. In one curious case, a user was found to be repeatedly sending zero value transactions to themselves.

NO CONSENSUS CHANGE Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani confirmed the hike and said the change affects validators of the network. “They can set it to whatever minimum gas fee they want,” he told The Defiant. “No consensus change is needed. This is true for Ethereum nodes as well 🙂”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

DeFi Protocols

🥊 Fei Protocol is Still Swinging After Rocky Start and Launches v2

NEWS Fei Protocol is fighting to make a comeback. Back in April, the project’s stablecoin, meant to maintain a $1 peg, dropped as low as $0.92 after raising 639,000 ETH, worth $1.3B, in its highly anticipated launch.

SO WHAT The Andreessen Horowitz-backed project is still swinging however, and has just launched a v2 with a few key changes. First up is a change in the peg mechanism. Whereas Fei’s v1 relied on direct incentives and reweights to maintain the peg of FEI, the project’s stablecoin, in v2 $1 of FEI can be redeemed for $1 of the assets the Fei protocol controls.

TIGHTLY PEGGED Joey Santoro, founder of the Fei Protocol, said that the 1:1 redeemability of FEI will keep the stablecoin tightly pegged to its $1 target value on an Oct. 7 Twitter Space.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Weekend Read

💰 MakerDAO Chases ‘Real World’ Deals and Assets in Major Test for DeFi

After reporting on Société Générale’s experimental lending deal with MakerDAO last week, Brady Dale got curious about its mechanics and the broader ramifications of the TradFi-DeFi hookup. In this feature, Brady pulls back the curtain on the opportunities and challenges of bringing real world assets on-chain.

REAL WORLD DEALS Société Générale’s request for a $20M loan from MakerDAO is just one of several real-world deals that the DeFi protocol has coming soon. The O.G. decentralized finance protocol is on the move to fund projects that will make tangible differences in the world. That potentially includes MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen’s push for the organization to help combat climate change.

SOLAR ARRAY The organization has seven deals involving traditional assets in the works, including SocGen’s, according to Sébastien Derivaux, an economist in Maker’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) focused on real world assets. In an interview he said other transactions would contribute to financing farmland in Iowa, a film, and a solar array in New York state.

DEAL FLOW MakerDAO has already closed five deals for loans collateralized with real world assets, starting with those backed by real estate for New Silver. Three of the deals aren’t live yet. The fact that an upstart DAO is getting deal flow with Europe’s seventh biggest bank is an important moment in the development of DeFi. Unpacking how MakerDAO is using real world assets shows the rest of DeFi the pitfalls and opportunities on the road ahead.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Future of NFTs

In this special research report for The Defiant, DaapRadar goes deep on the state of play in the runaway NFT scene and unpacks what will separate the truly innovative applications from the fluff. Check it out:

🖼 NFTs Are Changing Everything But Are They Built to Last? (Hint: Some Are)

TLDR Are NFTs a bubble? That’s been the burning question ever since the first specimens of this breakthrough application on the Ethereum blockchain captured the imaginations of crypto heads and non-crypto fans alike. In this research piece for The Defiant, we will unpack this query as definitively as possible. And what better place to start than with definitions themselves.

2021 – The year of the NFT

EXPERIMENT NFTs (short for Non-Fungible Tokens) are not something new. The idea of tokenizing an asset in a manner that each representation is unique, has been around for quite some time. NFTs have their origins in 2013 with Colored Coins, a colorful representation of bitcoin coins. However, these tokens presented technical flaws and were just an experiment. Yet the foundations for a future revolution were set.

CRYPTOPUNKS In June 2017, Matt Hall and John Watkinson created 10,000 unique characters generated on the Ethereum blockchain. The number of these characters could never change and no two items would be identical. The two creators let anyone with access to the Etherum network claim their creations for free and the CryptoPunks were officially born.

FLASH FORWARD A few months later, CryptoKitties, a game that consists in trading and breeding digital was brought to the light, paving the way for NFTs to be recognized beyond the blockchain sphere. Flash forward four years and you will find a market that attracts 108,000 Unique Active Wallets per day whilst generating $5.2 billion in a single month.

EVOLUTION By 2021, the blockchain industry was showing clear signs of a sustained evolution. The movement called DeFi, short for Decentralized Finance, was in full flower. The environment surrounding the industry was no longer just about trading cryptocurrency and embedding blockchain technologies into real business models. The real sensation of getting rid of the middleman was truly ground-breaking and managed to capture the attention of thousands.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 First Look: What are Perpetual Pools and How to earn 200% APY by staking in Tracer

📺 SuperMassive NFT Show: Everything That's Wrong With NFTs

🧑‍💻 🦄 🌈 NYC DeFi Hub: The Defiant has just launched Colony, a co-working space in Dumbo for teams building DeFi and Web3 to join and find a community. There are 20 desks in an open floor plan at a reformed factory building. Fill out this form if you’re interested in working there or sponsoring the space.

Links

🔗 Gelato raises $11M from heavyweight backers for Web 3 automation: CoinTelegraph

Smart contract automation network Gelato has become the latest to receive big backing from crypto venture capital giants. Gelato has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Dragonfly Capital and with participation from ParaFi Capital, Nascent, IDEO CoLab Ventures, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

🔗 Regulatory Uncertainty a Recurring Theme at London’s Token2049: CoinDesk

Regulatory uncertainty kept coming up at London’s Token2049 conference on Thursday. Speaking via Zoom, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler was smart and committed but questioned the scope of the regulator’s purview where crypto is concerned.

🔗 Sagittarius Tokenomics Engine: MakerDAO

MakerDAO first introduced smart contract based tokenomics with token burn in the original Single Collateral Dai protocol in 2017. Since then, there have been numerous breakthroughs in the DeFi industry related to tokenomics, including concepts such as yield farming and rewards based on staking or locking.

🔗 Merit Circle closes $4.5M seed round to revolutionize the P2E gaming industry: Merit Circle

Merit Circle takes pride in announcing the closure of our seed round raising $4.5 million from a series of reputable venture capitalists and strategic partners. The recently formed DAO will consist of industry-leading names like DeFiance Capital, Mechanism Capital, Spartan Group, DCG, Maven11, OP Crypto, Dialectic, CitizenX, Yield Guild Games and Bitscale Capital.

🔗 Our Proposals to the Senate Banking Committee: a16z

We are at the threshold of the third generation of the internet: web3. Given the pace of innovation in this space, it has been challenging for many policymakers to keep up. That’s why we were so heartened by the Senate Banking Committee’s call for feedback on clarifying laws around digital assets and decentralized technology.

OpenSea @opensea// Trending NFTs 🌐 The latest from across the metaverse ft. @aiivart, @ISO50, @MekaVerse, @JungleFreaksNFT, @ArtinMotionNYC, and more ↯ opensea.io/blog/spotlight…8:57 PM ∙ Oct 7, 2021223Likes48Retweets

Decentral Games @DecentralGamesWe're excited to announce our full lineup of DJs for @Amnesia_Ibiza SuperClub launch this Oct 9 with the Arena hosted by @djenerates 🥳 Bringing the essence of Amnesia into our metaverse with exclusive DJ sets by the renowned artists 🎧 👉dglive.org #dgfestival 🎉 7:58 PM ∙ Oct 6, 202172Likes23Retweets

Most Read on The Defiant

• XRP Holders to Get Huge Airdrop of New Blockchain SongbirdNot only is DOGE a very good boy, its coin is about to be very smart, too — as in, smart contract-ready.
• Abracadabra’s Stablecoin Races Past $1B and Sparks Talk of Overtaking MakerDAONew collateralized stablecoin, Magic Internet Money (MIM) is challenging MakerDAO, the grandaddy protocol of DeFi.
• DeFi Powerhouses Curve and Aave Deploy on Avalanche to Profit from IncentivesIncentives work. Or at least they do in terms of wooing DeFi protocols to deploy on other blockchains.

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Bailey Reutzel, DeFiDad and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, Bailey Reutzel, 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. 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.