🤭 Questions Swirl as Solana Loses a Fifth of its Value in Seven Days

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

News

• Questions Swirl as Solana Loses a Fifth of its Value in Seven Days
• CloneX NFT Prices Spike on Nike’s Acquisition of Studio RTFKT
• Layer 2 Optimism to Remove Whitelist and Open Floodgates to Devs

Video

• Tuesday Tutorial: Turn your NFTs into cash WITHOUT selling them

Links

• Ethereum vs. Alt L1s - with Su Zhu and Hasu: Uncommon Core
• Vulcan Forged Play-to-Earn Gaming Platform Refunds Users After $140M Hack: CoinDesk
• Announcing the ETHGlobal 2022 Season: ETHGlobal
• Dogecoin is better than Bitcoin for payments, Elon Musk declares: CoinTelegraph
• Time Person of the Year: Elon Musk: Time
• The Solana Foundation is partnering with projects in the ecosystem to launch a pilot Bounty Program: Solana
• The world's fastest-growing dollar digital currency $USDC is now supported natively on #Avalanche: Avalanche

Trending in The Defiant

• Kickstarter’s Embrace of Celo Blockchain May Lead to Token for Crowdfunding Giant
• What is DeFi? The Ultimate DeFi 101 Guide to Ethereum, Layer 2s, Yield Farming, and More
• DappRadar Exclusive Report: The Metaverse May be an Old Idea But It’s Just Getting Started

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DeFi Markets

🤭 Questions Swirl as Solana Loses a Fifth of its Value in Seven Days

TUMBLED The carnage has been widespread in this latest selloff. Yet no major DeFi name has tumbled as much as Solana, the would-be challenger to Ethereum.

WORST PERFORMANCE After quintupling between August and November, SOL became the fifth most valuable token in crypto with a market cap exceeding $77B. In the last seven days, Solana’s SOL has skidded 17%, the second-worst performance in the top 20 of all crypto tokens, according to data in early morning trading New York time from CoinGecko.

DDOS ATTACKS So what gives? Why is Solana, a protocol that Sam Bankman-Fried said had the potential to become as big as Ethereum, dropping so precipitously? That’s not an easy question to answer and it may be that investors simply believe Solana was way too frothy. But the drop does come on the heels of a tumultuous weekend when the project was criticized for reported DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

Solana’s market cap (in blue) has underperformed Ethereum’s in the last seven days. Source: CoinGecko

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFT Deals

👟CloneX NFT Prices Spike on Nike’s Acquisition of Studio RTFKT

NEWS Nike, Inc. has made a running start into the metaverse. On Dec. 13, the sporting goods behemoth announced that it has acquired RTFKT, an NFT studio that blurs the lines between the digital and physical through virtual sneakers and collectibles like one of a kind sneakers. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CREATORS “This acquisition is another step that accelerates Nike’s digital transformation and allows us to serve athletes and creators at the intersection of sport, creativity, gaming and culture,” said John Donahoe, Nike’s President and CEO,. in a statement.

FLOOR PRICE Following the announcement, secondary sales of RTFKT’s CloneX NFTs shot through the roof as investors piled in. The floor price of the collection is currently around 6 ETH, up from 3 ETH before the news was made public.

CloneX NFT prices spiked on the Nike deal news.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Layer 2s

👐🏼 Layer 2 Optimism to Remove Whitelist and Open Floodgates to Devs

EVM Optimism, the Ethereum Foundation-backed Layer 2 optimistic rollup network, will remove its whitelist “very soon,” opening the floodgates to developers working with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

UPGRADES Announced on Dec. 11, the move will follow roughly one year of whitelisted development. The team said the whitelisting process had allowed them to “communicate directly with projects” and coordinate upgrades while maintaining “a modicum of oversight.”

MAINNET “As long as you completed the form, you were greenlit,” Optimism said, noting that 90 applications have been successful so far. David Hoffman of crypto media outlet Bankless described the removal of Optimism’s whitelist as a “one-way” decision signposting the team’s commitment to launching a permanent mainnet.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 Tuesday Tutorial: Turn your NFTs into cash WITHOUT selling them

Links

🔗 Ethereum vs. Alt L1s - with Su Zhu and Hasu: Uncommon Core

n this episode - What the “Crypto Villain of the Year” thinks about his image - The arguments for Ethereum’s scaling roadmap.

🔗 Vulcan Forged Play-to-Earn Gaming Platform Refunds Users After $140M Hack: CoinDesk

Play-to-earn NFT platform Vulcan Forged said on Tuesday it has refunded $140 million worth of PYR tokens to nearly all investors a day after the platform was hacked.

🔗 Announcing the ETHGlobal 2022 Season: ETHGlobal

We know everyone is busy this time of year, so we’ll try to be brief—thank you for making this year such an incredible success.

🔗 Dogecoin is better than Bitcoin for payments, Elon Musk declares: CoinTelegraph

Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes that Bitcoin (BTC) is not that good for everyday payments as the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE).

🔗 Time Person of the Year: Elon Musk: Time

The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune.

Solana Foundation @SolanaFndn1/ The Solana Foundation is partnering with projects in the ecosystem to launch a pilot Bounty Program. If you’ve ever been interested in hacking away on a great project and earning a bounty in return, now’s the best time to get involved!

6:12 PM ∙ Dec 13, 2021291Likes48Retweets

Avalanche 🔺 @avalancheavaxThe world's fastest-growing dollar digital currency $USDC is now supported natively on #Avalanche. One of the cornerstones of DeFi, @circlepay’s USD Coin provides more seamless transaction and payment options for the whole Avalanche ecosystem.

avalancheavax.medium.comCircle Launches USDC on Avalanche to Accelerate DeFi AdoptionNative USDC on Avalanche will empower more developers and users to build and access the Avalanche ecosystem. Circle, a global internet finance firm that provides internet-based payments and financial…12:06 PM ∙ Dec 14, 2021312Likes90Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• Kickstarter’s Embrace of Celo Blockchain May Lead to Token for Crowdfunding GiantAre governance tokens a public market by another name? Kickstarter, the crowdfunding leader, announced on Dec. 8 that it would begin work on a decentralized crowdfunding platform on the mobile-friendly Celo blockchain.
• What is DeFi? The Ultimate DeFi 101 Guide to Ethereum, Layer 2s, Yield Farming, and MoreThroughout history, money is often moulded to benefit autocratic regimes. But in light of recurrent issues like debasement and rising inflation – alternatives such as decentralized finance, or DeFi, have emerged as an effort to re-establish sovereignty and power to the everyday person.
• 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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