🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of Feb. 1
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend. Summing up: Another week amid this crypto bull run, with ETH climbing off the charts, above $1,700 for the first time, while BTC smashed through $40k. Most every data point in DeFi is also surging to reco...
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up: Another week amid this crypto bull run, with ETH climbing off the charts, above $1,700 for the first time, while BTC smashed through $40k. Most every data point in DeFi is also surging to records (TVL, DEX volume, total volume), but we report that users measured by wallets are climbing slower than other metrics.
In our most-read article of the week, a DeFi engineer was able to refinance his mortgage and continue paying it off with a DeFi loan, via lending protocol Notional. In other non-speculative DeFi use cases, Goldfinch says it enabled $1M in uncollateralized loans in emerging markets.
Lots of developments in the NFT space; Hashmasks were the latest digital art/collectibles experiment to blow up, Foundation launched its V2 with a 100-piece NFT auction, Rarible raised $1.75M. Our podcast this week is with MetaKovan, owner of the largest NFT collection. Foundation’s Kayvon Tehranian argued dapps’ UX should be “unabashedly crypto-native” in a guest post.
And there was more! There’s a lot going on, but we’ve got you covered :)
Subscribe to get the latest DeFi news and analysis straight to your inbox and you don’t miss a thing. Free-signups get partial content, paid subscribers get everything. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or click on the button below to subscribe with fiat ($100/yr, $10/mo).
🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance. Ledger, a hardware wallet combined with the Ledger application to securely buy, sell, exchange, stake, lend & manage your crypto, Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi, and Casper, an enterprise-focused blockchain which aims to introduces unprecedented security, speed and scale for businesses.
Video
The Defiant Weekly
DeFIRE: how to retire using only DeFi with passive income
Tuesday Tutorials
How to trade stocks if your Robinhood account is frozen
Interview
"For the First Time, You Can Buy a Piece of the Art, and a Piece of the Gallery:" MetaKovan
In this week’s podcast episode we interview MetaKovan, the pseudonymous investor who holds the largest known NFT collection in his Metapruse fund, which he leads with his (also pseudonymous partner) Twobadour. MetaKovan made waves in the surging NFT space after buying all 20 pieces of the Beeple collection at auction for $2.5M. In this interview, we dive into how exactly he managed to get his hands in the entire collection and what the bigger purpose of holding those pieces was.
MetaKovan didn’t buy the 20 pieces to just hold them in his wallet. Instead he and Twobadour built sprawling museums across the metaverse, added original ambient music by 3LAU, bundled it all together, and tokenized it. The B20 tokens are now the keys to owning this experience.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
Op-ed
"Crypto Wants to Be Seen," By Kayvon Tehranian
The consensus about crypto user interface has so far been; abstract it and they will come. The holy grail is to hide away the crypto-ness of dapps so that users are “tricked” to believing they are interacting with another Web2 application. No signing transactions, no paying for gas, no wallets and private keys. They should be able to use a DeFi protocol without even knowing what Ethereum is. But what if the best way forward is exactly the opposite? What if users should* be seeing all the weirdness of crypto upfront? That’s what Kayvon Tehranian, founder & CEO at Foundation Labs, argues in this column.
Friday
Dives
- Yearn Loses $11M in 2021’s First DeFi Hack: Yearn Finance, the yield aggregation protocol founded by Andre Cronje, has been hacked. One of the platform’s so-called vaults lost $11M, and the attacker got away with $2.8M.
Thursday
Dives
- Battle of the DeFi Lending Giants: Aave Vs. Compound: Compound has reigned supreme as DeFi’s most popular lending protocol since its inception in 2018, but according to recent data trends, Aave has a fighting chance to take its crown.
Markets
- LINK Re-Enters Price Discovery Mode Above $25: The LINK marines are pushing all time highs again as whales hoard token supply and LINK balances on exchanges keep dwindling.
- DeFi Prices Ride the Elevator; Users Take the Stairs: It’s buy everything season in DeFi land. But while everything blows up, actual users are climbing at a slower pace.
Bytes
- Rarible Raises $1.75M to Become the “Uniswap for NFTs”: Rarible, the community-owned non-fungible-token (NFT) marketplace, announced a $1.75M seed round from investors including 1kx, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Coinfund.
- Foundation Upgrades With Massive NFT Auction: Foundation added 100 new NFTs to auction as its V2 upgrade went live yesterday afternoon. The launch featured 1/1 drops running as 24 hours auctions, most starting at 1 ETH reserves with first edition items like Robbie Tilton’s Fire Sword leading the way at 5 ETH at the time of writing.
Wednesday
Dives
- DeFi Stocks Trading Climbs After Robinhood Fail: Synthetic assets trading in decentralized finance is picking up after stock buyers were locked out of traditional markets last week. Platforms like Mirror, FTX, and Synthetix, which are live, and others still in the works like Injective Protocol, allow investors to gain access to traditional stocks and assets via tokens which replicate their price.
Bytes
- Balancer Unveils Generalized AMM in Upgrade: Balancer unveiled its V2 protocol upgrade, offering a generalized AMM solution for DeFi liquidity. Balancer allows users to create token pools with flexible constituents, weights and trading fees.
- Mark Cuban is DeFi’s First Billionaire Advocate: Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur and investor who stars on Shark Tank and owns the Dallas Mavericks, thinks that blockchain is the future of mainstream finance.
- Ren Project Joins Forces With Alameda Research: Ren Project, an open protocol that facilitates value transfer between blockchains, has joined forces with quantitative trading firm Alameda Research.
Links
- Valuing Ethereum: Grayscale
- Opyn raises $6.7 million Series A led by Paradigm: The Block
- NYDIG Expects to Hold $25B in Bitcoin by Year End: CoinDesk
Tuesday
Dives
- Engineer Becomes His Own Lender in First DeFi Mortgage: The first-ever DeFi mortgage may have just gone through. An engineering lead at a top DeFi protocol, who asked to remain anonymous to keep his personal finances private, on Jan. 22 paid off his mortgage loan with Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and now is paying down his refinanced home loan through DeFi protocol Notional Finance, which provides fixed-rate lending and came out of stealth mode last month.
Bytes
- Goldfinch Says it Has Enabled $1M in Un-Backed Loans: Goldfinch, which launched in December, today said it’s working with PayJoy in Mexico, Aspire in Southeast Asia, and QuickCheck in Nigeria, which have collectively drawn down $1M from the Goldfinch protocol and deployed it to thousands of their end borrowers.
- Hashmasks is The Newest NFT Craze: NFT collectors are flocking to get their hands on Hashmasks - a collection of 16,384 unique digital portraits. The sale window opened with seven price tranches, quickly breaching the 100 ETH threshold and selling out yesterday morning for a total of $14M in ETH.
- NFTs Take on Freelance Writing With $ESSAY: Mirror is a new publishing platform, akin to an open source, DeFi-oriented take on Medium. The platform will allow individual writers to crowdfund their work by minting their essays as NFTs.
- Yearn Holders Vote to Lift YFI Cap: Yearn Finance token holders voted for the protocol to mint 6,666 new tokens, prioritizing the implementation of a funding model for contributors over keeping a hard cap. Holders of 1.66k YFI (83.4%) voted “yes,” compared with 330.5 YFI (16.6%) voting “no,” on the off-chain governance tool Snapshot.
Links
- Secret AMM is Live on Testnet: Secret Network
- Grayscale Reopens Its Ethereum Trust to Investors: CoinDesk
✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories this week were written by Owen Fernau, Daniel Kahan, Cooper Turley, and Christopher Attard, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila and edited by Alp.
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
Camila Russo @CamiRussoSuch a contrarian take by @saturnial in today's @DefiantNews op-ed: Dapps should be "unabashedly crypto-native" Let users interact with these projects in all their awkward weirdness :) signing txs, paying for gas, storing private keys etc. What do think?12:07 AM ∙ Feb 2, 202152Likes5Retweets
Camila Russo @CamiRussoWe produce a lot of great DeFi content at @DefiantNews –like, A LOT *deep breath* newsletter, features, tutorials, podcast, interviews, breaking news, quick-take videos, in-depth videos, op-eds : phew! 🔈Don't miss out; Join our announcements channel: https://t.co/uI0cVXLGVH4:09 PM ∙ Feb 1, 20215Likes2Retweets
The Defiant @DefiantNews📺 Hello #DeFiers, Want to listen & WATCH today's @DefiantNews podcast? Click below & catch these gems from our guest @ErikVoorhees, long-time crypto advocate & founder/CEO of @ShapeShift_io8:16 AM ∙ Feb 1, 20215Likes1Retweet
Trustology @TrustologyIOAccording to the @DefiantNews "It’s buy everything season in #DeFi land. But while everything blows up, actual users are climbing at a slower pace." Full article here. bit.ly/3tuPDqY
DeFi en español 🧉🌮 @en_defi@DeFi_Dad @DefiantNews @CamiRusso @DirSchmidt @alpgasimov Lo que hacen es simplemente maravilloso, son nuestra guía a seguir felicidades.4:37 AM ∙ Feb 5, 2021
thedefiant.ioBattle of the DeFi Lending Giants: Aave Closing in on Compound - The Defiant - DeFi NewsCompound has reigned supreme as DeFi’s most popular lending protocol since its inception in 2018, but according to recent data trends, Aave has a fighting chance to take its crown. Price-wise, AAVE has massively outperformed COMP since the beginning of 2021. COMP started the year around $145 while …1:30 PM ∙ Feb 5, 20216Likes3Retweets
The Defiant @DefiantNewsIt's sometime in the near future. We're on the 🌜, in a Lambo. Yes, we made it. But now what? 🤔 Are we going to cash out into fiat or cling onto another bear market? Or maybe there's another way, something more sensible... #DeFIRE 🔥 Watch now👇🏽10:21 PM ∙ Feb 4, 2021
Moving Forward #PTSD @AChildsDemons@DeFi_Dad @DefiantNews @CamiRusso @DirSchmidt @alpgasimov Great website! Very clean and laid out well. I am continuing through your content. It is all very informative and I appreciate the time and sharing the knowledge. Thank you #DeFi #Ethereum2:03 PM ∙ Feb 4, 2021
3:15 AM ∙ Feb 4, 202164Likes12Retweets
The Defiant @DefiantNews🤔Did #Robinhood freeze your account? 🤔Do you want to buy stocks but you can't? #DeFi is permissionless, it's trustless & no one can freeze your account here. On this week's episode of #TuesdayTwoMinTut, we talk buying stocks using Mirror Protocol. 💥You don't want to miss:8:19 PM ∙ Feb 3, 2021
chris.mirror.xyzCrypto and Blockchain Governance ResourcesThis is my running list of crypto and blockchain governance resources here. I’ll annotate them as well, as I find the time and attention to review them.5:05 PM ∙ Feb 3, 202111Likes7Retweets
The Defiant @DefiantNews🤔Did #Robinhood freeze your account? 🤔Do you want to buy stocks but you can't? #DeFi is permissionless, it's trustless & no one can freeze your account here. On this week's episode of #TuesdayTwoMinTut, we talk buying stocks using Mirror Protocol. 💥You don't want to miss:4:16 AM ∙ Feb 3, 2021
Notional @NotionalFinanceProud to originate the first #DeFiMortgage!
The Defiant @DefiantNewsThe 1st ever #DeFiMortgage may have just gone through. 🙌🏾 An engineering lead at a top DeFi protocol, paid off his mortgage loan and now is paying down his refinanced home loan through #DeFiProtocol @NotionalFinance. Click & learn more 🏄♀️1:50 AM ∙ Feb 3, 202130Likes8Retweets
The Defiant @DefiantNews#YearnFinance token holders voted for the protocol to mint 6,666 new tokens, prioritizing the implementation of a funding model for contributors over keeping a hard cap. Read more info in the link below:1:27 AM ∙ Feb 3, 202116Likes2Retweets
Coopahtroopa 🔥_🔥 @CooopahtroopaWondering what all this talk of @TheHashmasks is about? Here's everything you need to know about the latest #NFT craze on @DefiantNews 🎭 thedefiant.io/hashmasks-is-n…
thedefiant.ioHashmasks is Newest NFT Craze - The Defiant - DeFi NewsNFT collectors are flocking to get their hands on Hashmasks - a collection of 16,384 unique digital portraits.12:02 AM ∙ Feb 3, 202137Likes16Retweets
Zoe "Nihilistic Euphoria" Dolan @zjdolana fucking MORTGAGE?! already?!
The Defiant @DefiantNews🔊Hello Defiers! LOTS today, Potentially the 1st #DeFi-enabled mortgage #Goldfinch says its enabled $1M of un-collateralized DeFi loans @TheHashmasks is the latest #NFT craze NFTs try to fix freelance writing w/ $Essay @iearnfinance holders vote to mint more YFI & more 👇10:51 PM ∙ Feb 2, 2021
thedefiant.ioEngineer Becomes His Own Lender in First DeFi Mortgage - The Defiant - DeFi NewsThe rise of fixed-rate lending protocols in DeFi may attract users seeking stability in longer-term investments and loans, such as mortgages.9:21 PM ∙ Feb 2, 202117Likes2Retweets
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 ($10/mo, $100/yr).
Free newsletters
Good reporting. Delivered.
Choose your coverage: crypto and DeFi, the future of finance, or both.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
