🧐 Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and Controversy

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

News

• Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and Controversy
• Market Action: Terra Leapfrogs Binance Smart Chain with Surge in TVL

Announcements

• The Infinite Machine Collection for Whitelisted Wallets is Underway with 100 ETH Raised Overnight

Links

• Stablecoin supply grew by 388% this year, driven by DeFi and derivatives: The Block
• DeFi protocol Grim Finance lost $30M in 5x reentrancy hack: CoinTelegraph
• The Bank of England will push for tighter rules as institutions embrace crypto, official says: The Block
• We All Need to Stop Only Seeing the Dark Side of Crypto: Wired
• Let's take a look at this paper to understand why Optimistic Rollups is considered as the future of #Ethereum scaling!: Aribitrum
• One of our favorite storylines is how a group of generative artists raised around 45 million dollars for charity... in less than ONE year: Art Blocks

Trending in The Defiant

• Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and Controversy
• DeFi Kingdoms Challenges Axie Infinity’s GameFi Supremacy with NFT Play
• DappRadar Exclusive Report: The Metaverse May be an Old Idea But It’s Just Getting Started

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Announcements

🌈 The Infinite Machine Collection for Whitelisted Wallets is Underway With 100 ETH Raised Overnight

The Infinite Machine Collection sale of NFTs for whitelisted addresses started last night with over 100 ETH raised so far. Funds raised will go towards producing the movie based on Camila Russo’s best-selling book about the history of Ethereum, The Infinite Machine. About one-third of the NFTs carry the chance to be a part of the filming process, as an extra or visiting the shooting, among others prizes.

The sale will be open to the general public at 7pm EST. Those who didn’t use their whitelist spots this time will be excluded from future lists, so…

📣 Make sure to mint now if you’re on the whitelist!

Blockchain Forking

🧐 Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and Controversy

A CROWD In web3, there aren’t many words more fought over than “decentralization.” So if someone calls a blockchain’s decentralization into question, it’s going to draw a crowd.

UPGRADE A Dec. 15 tweet from engineer Nathan Worsley claiming that Polygon hard forked its blockchain without warning raised eyebrows. That’s because a project would have to be centralized to get nodes to upgrade so easily.

SECURITY Worsley’s tweet garnered over 1,800 likes on Twitter, and people like Chris Blec, an ardent critic of many DeFi projects’ security practices, chimed in. “It’s more surprising to me that people are still shocked that Polygon is centralized enough to pull off this upgrade so quickly,” he said.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Markets

📈 Market Action: Terra Leapfrogs Binance Smart Chain with Surge in TVL

MARKETSHARE Terra is still on a roll. Defying a relentless selloff across crypto markets, the Layer 1 smart contract platform’s LUNA continues to capture DeFi marketshare. In the last week, the network’s TVL surged 43% to surpass Binance Smart Chain and rank second with 17.7B in total value locked. LUNA now accounts for one-fifth of the combined DeFi market cap, according to according to CoinGecko.

RANKINGS LUNA was the third-best performing DeFi token for the week, with cross-chain bridge AnySwap and yield aggregator Yearn Finance topping the rankings with 53.7% and 51.4% respectively. DeFi assets currently represent $140.7B or 6.1% of the combined cryptocurrency market cap.

Combined market cap of DeFi tokens. Source: CoinGecko

TOP GAINERS

With top crypto markets trending sideways this past week, only 20 of the top 90 non-stablecoins DeFi tokens posted gains for the week, half of which are up by double digits.

• Anyswap (ANY) + 53.7%
• Yearn Finance (YFI) + 51.4%
• Terra (LUNA) + 28.2%
• Wrapped NXM (WNXM) + 25.9%
• Spell Token (SPELL) + 20.9%

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Links

🔗 Stablecoin supply grew by 388% this year, driven by DeFi and derivatives: The Block

The market for stablecoins experienced breakneck growth in 2021, with the supply for dollar-backed cryptocurrencies surging by 388%, according to data compiled by The Block Research.

🔗 DeFi protocol Grim Finance lost $30M in 5x reentrancy hack: CoinTelegraph

The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Grim Finance reported $30 million in losses due to a reentrancy exploit of the platform’s deposits.

🔗 The Bank of England will push for tighter rules as institutions embrace crypto, official says: The Block

The Bank of England wants stronger rules for crypto assets on an international scale as banks and institutional investors deepen their involvement, according to an official at the UK central bank.

🔗 We All Need to Stop Only Seeing the Dark Side of Crypto: Wired

IN 2021, BITCOIN went mainstream. Wall Street set its eyes on the world of crypto, with hotshot investors like hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones leading the pack.

Arbitrum Daily @ArbitrumDailyTK🤔Let's take a look at this paper to understand why Optimistic Rollups is considered as the future of #Ethereum scaling!🚀 🥰OR is the best way to meet users’ realistic needs for a secure, trustless, EVM-compatible L2.💯 🔎medium.com/offchainlabs/o…

medium.comOptimistic Rollups: the present and future of Ethereum scalingWe’re hearing a lot of talk about how ZK rollups are supposedly the future of general smart contract systems. We disagree — and this post explains why. It draws on the practical lessons we have…7:03 PM ∙ Dec 19, 20213Likes2Retweets

Art Blocks @artblocks_ioOne of our favorite storylines is how a group of generative artists raised around 45 million dollars for charity... in less than ONE year. 🤯🤯🤯 Check out this article from our newsletter: bit.ly/3H2OvAZ

bit.lyCharity on Chain: 2021 Wrap-UpWhat a wild year it’s been. As we inch closer to 2022, we’ve had some time to stop, take a breath, and look at just how crazy this ride has been so far. One of the more incredible things about our…9:16 PM ∙ Dec 19, 2021182Likes44Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• Polygon’s Surprise Code Change Triggers Questions and ControversyIn web3, there aren’t many words more fought over than “decentralization.” So if someone calls a blockchain’s decentralization into question, it’s going to draw a crowd.
• DeFi Kingdoms Challenges Axie Infinity’s GameFi Supremacy with NFT PlayQuestioning the utility of NFTs as simple collectables may be missing the point. DeFi Kingdom, an entrant to the blossoming GameFi sector, is expanding the definition of NFTs by offering its version of the tokens, called Heroes.
• DappRadar Exclusive Report: The Metaverse May be an Old Idea But It’s Just Getting StartedEver since Facebook, the sixth most valuable company in the world, announced its corporate rebranding to Meta, the metaverse concept has gone mainstream.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, 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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