🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of May 10
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend. Summing up the past week: What a rollercoaster! The crypto market started the week on fire, especially ETH climbing to a new high of $4,350 and dog-themed meme coins like DOGE and SHIB ripping higher. BTC...
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up the past week: What a rollercoaster! The crypto market started the week on fire, especially ETH climbing to a new high of $4,350 and dog-themed meme coins like DOGE and SHIB ripping higher. BTC was also trading above $55k. We covered the hype in the market at the start of the week by analyzing how many of the top 10 gainers had any real use — it turned out not many did. We also reported that traders were positioning for a pull-back.
And then the first blow to the meme-coin market was delt by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, who sold part of his SHIB stash and donated the proceeds to charity. Next came “Technoking” Elon Musk, who said Tesla was not taking payments in BTC any longer out of concern for the environment. We reported the market stabilized the next day, led by proof-stake chains, which don’t require burning the equivalent amount of energy as entire countries, like BTC does. But crypto has kept slumping.
We also published a three-part series called Red Flag Alert, to provide a framework to evaluate crypto projects, and a report on what drives global women in crypto. We took a first look at Uniswap V3 in our “unboxing” style video series, and looked at yield farming Ethereum push notifications EPNS and how to provide liquidity on Raydium in our tutorials. We dove into the most recent hacks, Rari Capital and xToken, and did a rundown of the past weekend’s exploits. Our podcast this week was with Prysmatic Labs and Cryptex co-founder Preston Van Loon, who said Ethereum proof-of-stake is only six months away.
And there was more! There’s a lot going on, but we’ve got you covered :)
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🙌 Together with:
- 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
- Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
- The DeFi Pulse Index, a capitalization-weighted index that tracks the performance of selected DeFi assets across the market.
Video
📺 Defiant Weekly: The Best of the Defiant Weekly
📺 Quick Take: The Rari Capital Exploit
📺 Tuesday Tutorials: How to swap and provide liquidity on Raydium
📺 First Look: Uniswap V3
Interview
"Ethereum is About Six Months Away from Proof-of-Stake:" Preston Van Loon
In today’s episode, we interview Preston Van Loon. Preston co-founded Prysmatic Labs, one of the main teams building Ethereum 2.0, and has been leading that team for the past three years. On top of that, he recently founded a DeFi project which bundles the entire crypto market cap in one token to allow anyone to easily buy something like a crypto index. Preston talks about the latest in ETH2 —he says Etheruem’s big migration into its proof-of-stake chain is about six months away, give or take two months. He says Ethereum may be at a disadvantage relative to other Layer 1s, which are launching with more scalable technologies. But he also believes it will be hard for other chains to build the community Ethereum has, faster than Ethereum will upgrade.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
📺Watch the Interview Here:
Op-ed
With hacks and exploits breaking every week in DeFi, participants are undoubtedly asking where to look for red flags, how to protect their investments and how to vet projects. This week, we present Red Flag Alert, a three-part series by researcher Eugenio Croitoru @CryptoCoping.
Red Flag Alert Part I: Tokenomics
Red Flag Alert Part II: Team and Backers
Red Flag Alert Part II: Mental Models
📬 Inbox Dump #8
Only for paid subscribers: The Inbox Dump is where we include the updates and announcements that flood our DMs each week and didn’t make it to our content platforms. At The Defiant we cover the most important DeFi-related news and developments but I know many of you are hunting for projects before they are fully developed and before they are newsworthy. The goal with this installment of the newsletter is to help you find them. Look at this as the starting point to DYOR. We also include a compilation of DeFi and crypto funding rounds in the past week so you have these in one handy place.
Tuesday
Tutorials
- Defiant Degens: How to Farm in DeFi’s First Protocol for Push Notifications: EPNS enables push notifications at the protocol level. Opportunity: To distribute the governance token PUSH, EPNS offers liquidity mining rewards currently at a rate of 131% APR for staking PUSH or 221% APR for providing liquidity to the PUSH / ETH LP in Uniswap v2.
Markets
- ETH Hovers Around $4k as Traders Prepare for a Pull-Back: Ethereum’s cryptocurrency has shot up, almost doubling in price in one month and piercing through a record $4,000 on Monday. But some traders are preparing for a pull-back.
Dives
- Global Report on Women, Cryptocurrency and Financial Independence: This report by Marina Spindler and Paulina Rodriguez finds women in crypto are in it for the tech, they want to be paid in crypto, and they hold the majority of their portfolios in digital assets. Read the main findings and quotes from 60 women interviewed from 31 countries.
- $22 Million Was Stolen From Three Defi Platforms Last Weekend: While most of the DeFi community had their eyes glued to the ETH rally over the weekend, hackers took the opportunity to steal mooning assets through several protocol exploits.Links
- You can now buy NFTs on eBay: The Verge
- Sky Mavis raises $7.5 million for NFT-based Axie Infinity game with backers like Mark Cuban: VentureBeat
- Paradigm, 3LAU Back $7.6M Raise for ‘NFT Social Network’ Showtime: CoinDesk
Wednesday
Dives
- Vitalik Whiplashes Holders of SHIB Meme Coin and Sells Tokens for Charity: SHIB, a self-proclaimed DOGE killer, was flying high as the hot new meme coin. The SHIB team had sent half of the supply to Vitalik Buterin betting the Ethereum creator wouldn’t touch the coins, and that had been the case — until today.
Markets
- Crypto’s Top 10 Gainers Show Little Non-Speculative Demand: Of the top 100 coins and tokens by market cap, the 10 biggest gainers of the week are a bit surprising. As of May 11, the list includes four smart contract platforms with difficult to discern adoption and four tokens with equally questionable utility.Links
- 1/ How Christies Fucked Up the Punks Auction: @gmoney.eth
- Gnosis Safe’s Multichain Future
Thursday
Dives
- Crypto Recovers From Elon Dump Led by PoS Coins: Energy-efficient blockchains are leading the crypto rebound after Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, shocked the crypto world yesterday saying the car manufacturer “has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin” because of the fossil fuels needed to run the network.
- Vitalik Says UNI Should Become an Oracle Token: Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin made a proposal for Uniswap’s UNI token to become an oracle price token for ETH/USD so as to allow the DeFi eco-system to ‘mark to market’ its fair value.
Bytes
- AITO Platform Builds Yield-Generating NFT On Top of Aave: Developed by NFT social media network AITO, the NFT is a first on Aave and also a first in that it’ll generate ongoing Aave yield for the artists.
- xToken DeFi Project Hacked For Over $25M: xToken, a project which automates staking and liquidity strategies and wraps them into ERC-20 tokens, has been hacked to the tune of ~$25M.
Links
- Binance Faces Probe by U.S. Money-Laundering and Tax Sleuths: Bloomberg
- The bull market has caused DAO treasuries to balloon over the past year: @masonnystrom
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
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