🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of March 15

Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.

Summing up: The week started out (again) with hacks. Social token platform Roll had its private keys compromised and an attacker was able to make off with tokens from over 400 creators. PancakeSwap and Cream Finance suffered a Domain Name Service attack which modified their websites to request users’ seed phrase. The latest NFT craze taking crypto by storm was MoonCats, digital animals pre-dating CryptoKitties. Elon Musk put up for sale a tweet about NFTs, as an NFT, and it was fetching more than $1M.

Aave launched a lending market for AMM liquidity provider tokens and Tyler Winklevoss proposed adding GUSD as collateral on Aave. Anchor Protocol is a new protocol which will be targeting a 20% fixed annual yield on stablecoins. Gnosis merged with Snapshot to facilitate on-chain governance, 1inch aims to reduce gas fees on its V3 update, and MetaMask introduced swaps to its mobile app.

dYdX founder Antonio Juliano came on the podcast to talk about the exchange’s move to Layer 2, and Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki wrote an opinion piece on the stare of decentralized identity.

And there was more! There’s a lot going on, but we’ve got you covered :)

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🙌 Together with:

• Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance
• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!
• Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
• Casper, an enterprise-focused blockchain which aims to introduce unprecedented security, speed and scale for businesses

Video

📺 Defiant Weekly: The Greatest NFT Film Ever Made

📺 Tuesday Tutorials: How to find Beeple in the Metaverse

📺 Quick Take: $69 Million for 5000 Days: Beeple by Numbers

Interview

"People Are Seeing The Writing on The Wall; DEXs Will Rule Crypto:" dYdX's Antonio Juliano

In this week’s episode we speak with Antonio Juliano, founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, focusing on derivatives. dYdX recently made news by being one of the first major DeFi projects to move to Layer 2.

One of the main goals for his team this year will be to further decentralize dYdX, Juliano said, from the order book to the control of their smart contracts. So yes, for those reading between the lines, that means decentralized governance, and Juliano isn’t ruling out a dYdX token. Juliano believes derivatives are going to be the biggest products in crypto and so his long-term goal is for dYdX to become one of the biggest crypto exchanges, period. He knows DEXes are just 5% of total crypto volume, but that’s up from 0% two years ago. He says, a lot of people are seeing the writing on the wall.

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

📺 Or watch:

Op-ed

Decentralized Reputation Will Unlock the Internet Of Value

DeFi is criticized, and rightly so, for being a playground for speculators without much connection to the real economy. This is a direct consequence of the lack of a reputation mechanism. It’s such a hard piece to crack because the very core of decentralized finance is that it’s open to everyone and that usually means there’s no KYC, usernames and passwords. Your identity is your wallet.

In this week’s opinion column we’re talking about the holy grail of DeFi and web3. The one piece that’s necessary to open up so many essential use cases, yet hasn’t been cracked just yet: Decentralized identity. Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki writes about this key primitive, the value it could potentially unlock, and the teams building to get us there.

Thursday

Dives

• Streaming Content Refuses to Take Off (Even With Crypto): If we pay per song or video we stream or download, why not do the same with written content? Some are hailing crypto as a potential solution, but no platform has been able to become the Spotify or Netflix equivalent for print.
• ETH in Whales’ Wallets Is Barely Budging: ETH in whales’ wallets isn’t budging while smaller holders take their tokens to DeFi. The number of wallets with 100 to 10K Ether have dropped by 7.2% since the cryptocurrency hit an all-time high four weeks ago.

Bytes

• Tyler Winklevoss Makes GUSD Proposal on Aave: “Bitcoin billionaire” Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini submitted a governance proposal on a community forum for GUSD to be used as stablecoin collateral for loans on AAVE. Currently, GUSD can only be borrowed.
• MetaMask Mobile Users Get Single Swipe Trading: Ethereum wallet MetaMask introduced Swaps to their mobile app yesterday. The feature allows users to trade cryptocurrencies with a single swipe.
• 1Inch Aims to Reduce Gas Fees With V3: Version 3 of the 1Inch DEX Aggregation Protocol is launching with a focus on facilitating lower gas fees. 1Inch v3 has aimed to optimize its assembly code to reduce gas fees applying to swaps using Uniswap v2 and its forks.
• Gnosis Merges With Snapshot for On-Chain Governance: Gnosis’ newly launched DAO governance tool, SafeSnap, aims to allow users to execute decentralized governance decisions without incurring expensive gas fees on-chain.

Links

• Morgan Stanley to Offer Rich Clients Access to Bitcoin Funds: Bloomberg
• Jack Dorsey's Cash App is Allowing Users to Send and Receive Bitcoin Without Any Transaction Fees: Business Insider

Wednesday

Dives

• Aave AMM Market Enables Lending Against LP Tokens: Aave launched a market yesterday which will allow users to deposit liquidity provider (LP) tokens from automated market makers (AMM) and use them as collateral for borrowing.

Bytes

• Elon Musk's NFT Tweet is Selling for Over $1M: The NFT of an Elon Musk tweet about making a song about NFTs to sell as an NFT is selling for over $1M USD —Yeah, that’s a mouthful.
• Anchor Targets 20% Fixed Stablecoin Yield: Anchor Protocol will be targeting a 20% fixed annual yield on stablecoins—the highest fixed stablecoin rate to-date.
• Flexible Leverage Index Aims to Help Avoid Liquidations: Leverage is difficult to monitor in DeFi’s current state, but it may have found a friend in a new product called the Flexible Leverage Index (FLI).

Links

• Hong Kong Listed Company Meitu buys another $50 Million of Ethereum and Bitcoin: @DocumentEther
• $UST from @terra_money suddenly becomes the most popular stablecoin: @CurveFinance
• We won't see another Ethereum Classic-like fork: @petejkim

Tuesday

Dives

• Tale of Lost MoonCats NFTs Spurs Buying Frenzy: Long, long ago, four billion MoonCats were lost in space. The digital cats were doomed to languish in the wasteland of forgotten blockchain projects —until now.
• Social Tokens Get Rolled On: Social money issuer Roll was hacked for nearly $5.7M of creator tokens held in hot wallets on the platform over the weekend.

Bytes

• Pancakeswap & Cream Finance Suffer DNS Attacks: Hackers compromised PancakeSwap’s and Cream Finance’s websites yesterday.
• Ethereum Proposal to Raise Block Reward Draws Criticism: A new Ethereum proposal, EIP-3368, meant to increase miner rewards, has generated major pushback from the cryptocurrency’s community members.

Links

• Hackers Reportedly Target NFT Marketplace Nifty Gateway Users: Decrypt
• Kraken Considering a Stock Market Debut in Next Year: CoinDesk
• Showtime is live! Discover and show off your NFTs: @AlexMasmej

💜Community Love💜

Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!

DefiDrifter @DefiDrifterGod Damn! bullish as hell @novogratz @DefiantNews

youtube.com“I Don’t Think We’re in a Bubble. We Had a Bubble in ’17; Now We’re in a Movement:” Mike NovogratzIn this week’s episode we speak with Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital. He started his career at Goldman Sachs and then led a macro hedge fund at For...3:48 PM ∙ Mar 20, 20217Likes2Retweets

Kevin Simback @KSimback@DirSchmidt I can’t get enough of @DirSchmidt and @DefiantNews videos. If the effort that goes into the research is a fraction of the quality of production these guys put out, it would still be among the top 1% of #DeFi content.3:57 PM ∙ Mar 20, 2021

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uncommoncore.coUncommon CoreAn independent perspective on money and crypto.7:54 PM ∙ Mar 19, 2021

88mph 🛹 @88mphappTo wrap up this week, The Defiant is taking a deep dive into fixed-interest rate and structured products, with of course (spoiler alert🚨), a nice overview of 88mph protocol youtu.be/iWq4JEsDvcg

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bit.lyDeFi Needs a Safety Net to Make Banking Dinosaurs ExtinctFor many people, banks and not smart contracts still feel like the safest place to put their money.9:35 AM ∙ Mar 19, 202116Likes4Retweets

Chris Cable @mrchriscableVery pleased to contribute to the @DefiantNews in regards to $ETH movement across wallet sizes My title as 'NFT purveyor' for the @FLAMINGODAO has a nice ring to it... 😉 thedefiant.io/eth-in-whales-…

thedefiant.ioETH in Whales’ Wallets Is Barely Budging - The Defiant - DeFi NewsETH in whales’ wallets isn’t budging while smaller holders take their tokens to DeFi.11:02 PM ∙ Mar 18, 202114Likes1Retweet

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thedefiant.substack.com✊The Defiant’s Definitive Guide to DeFiAt The Defiant, we are convinced finance will become increasingly decentralized and open. It just makes sense; our current financial system is running on infrastructure that was built in the 1970s; messaging networks like SWIFT and ACH that simply aren’t made to transact value.3:46 AM ∙ Mar 2, 202114Likes2Retweets

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