🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of Nov. 7

Hello Defiers! Happy weekend!

This week we stirred quite a stew of stories and research in DeFi. We saw some familiar faces bubble to the surface; Joe Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, made quite a splash with his tweet-tease that MetaMask may token up. Gavin Wood popped up, too, in Sam Haig’s story on Polkadot’s parachain auctions. The Curve Wars made some noise again — yyctrader reported a wild tale on Mochi and how Curve pulled its rewards program after outcry about its tactics.

Ethereum itself also made headlines, or more precisely, Ethereum Name Service. No sooner had ENS airdropped its governance token than it surged past $1B in market value, as Owen Fernau reported. Meantime, Metis planted a $100M marker in the Layer 2 game with a new fund, and Brady Dale reported on how social media threesome Discord, Reddit, and Twitter are buzzing about a deeper integration with crypto.

On the NFT front, Camila Russo’s podcast with Zeneca, an NFT investor and content creator, delved into how he turned into a full-time NFT trader from a professional poker player. He talked about the promise and peril of trading NFTs. Robin Schmidt returned to the happy hunting grounds of Axie Infinity with a fresh primer on the blockbuster blockchain game. Robin also took aim at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and its fear of stablecoins. That’s been a sleeper issue this year and in Robin’s capable hands its importance finally gets the spotlight it deserves.

For those Defiers who want to take a deep dive into the infrastructure of the Ethereum blockchain be sure to read Alex Shipps’ research piece on Zero knowledge proofs and scalability. It’s high-level stuff, which is what we love at The Defiant!

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🙌 Together with:

• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at this link.
• 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.
• Fintech Meetup, join fintech’s largest online meetings event —30,000+ online speed date meetings. Learn More and Get Ticket

We’re excited. We’re getting ready to launch The Defiant Terminal, a platform for investors and analysts to track all DeFi data in one place. Join the waitlist today to be notified as soon as it’s live. You’ll want to be the first to get your eyes on that alpha.

Podcast

In this week’s podcast, Camila Russo talks to Zeneca, an NFT investor and content creator who grew his collection of non-fungible tokens from 0 to about 3,000 pieces worth millions in less than a year. He comes on the podcast to talk about how he went from professional poker player to full-time NFT trader, and what lessons from poker he has brought over to crypto. We discuss the importance of teams and communities when investing in NFT projects, and the key signals he looks for when buying NFTs. Zeneca talks about the difficult balance of using incentives to bootstrap community, while also providing value beyond those incentives, otherwise projects become unsustainable.

Zeneca believes the NFT market has hit a downturn amid rising crypto prices because it has become saturated with the same types of projects. He believes avatars will take a back seat to projects where NFTs have utility beyond displaying the art itself and being part of a community. That’s why gaming is setting up to be the next big movement in NFTs, he says. Still, he doesn’t believe we’ve seen a true bull and bear market yet — that will come when NFTs better integrate with DeFi and leverage comes into play.

🎙 Zeneca: "The Market is Fed Up With the Same Sorts of Projects and There's a Flight to Gaming NFTs"

📬 Inbox Dump #32

Hello Defiers! Welcome to Inbox Dump where we include the updates and announcements that flood our DMs each week and didn’t make it to The Defiant’s content platforms. Sometimes announcements here didn’t meet the bar to become a news story, sometimes they may have slipped through the cracks, or they came late and we haven’t had a chance to cover.

At The Defiant we cover the most important DeFi-related news and developments but we know many of you are hunting for projects before they are fully developed and before they are newsworthy. Our 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.

Keep in mind these have been unedited. With that —here we go!

[This post is exclusive to subscribers]

The Tube

📺 The Defiant Weekly: The Defiant Guide to Play to Earn - GameFi

📺 First Look: Unboxing Jeff Staple x RTFKT Studios Meta-Pigeon

📺 Tuesday Tutorial: A Defiant Beginner's guide to Axie Infinity, play to earn and the Katana Dex ($SLP $AXS)

📺 Quick Take: Rugged by the government? NFTs are now cash!?

📺 The Defiant Weekly: The US Treasury is Terrified of Stablecoins

The Defiant Interview

🏞 The Metaverse is So Hot Right Now: Here’s How Top Investors are Separating Opportunity from Hype

Owen Fernau caught up with three influential investors who were way early on metaverse. They shared their thinking on the hype, and the angles they;re pursuing as the space evolves.

It’s happened. The metaverse is rapidly entering the hypiest part of the hype cycle. It’s all over the place, and it isn’t just Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranding of Facebook’s corporate name to Meta that’s cranked up the buzz. Metaverse was huge long before the embattled Big Tech chieftain signed on.

There’s been a flurry of blockbuster deals aimed at developing metaverse projects. An investment firm called Sfermion recently raised $100M from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon. A Google Trends search shows worldwide queries for the “metaverse” skyrocketing during the week that Facebook rebranded to Meta in late October.

Google searches for metaverse skyrocketed in recent weeks.

While some version of the metaverse appears inevitable, how it develops is up for grabs. Where will value in the metaverse accrue? And what changes are coming as the race to build the metaverse heats up? To get insight on these questions, The Defiant interviewed three of the most influential investors in the space.

Research

0️⃣ How Zero-Knowledge Proofs Became Ethereum’s Magic Bullets

In this research piece, Alex Shipp describes how Zk-proofs are a key source of innovation and a solution for deficiencies in blockchain tech.

This year, Zero knowledge proofs (zk-proofs) are making their mark as the most potent cryptographic instruments powering innovation in decentralized ecosystems.

Zk-proofs were first conceived by computer science researchers Shari Goldwassser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff in their 1985 paper, The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems. Developers, system architects, and researchers in the Ethereum community — blockchain’s leading smart contract ecosystem — have spent the better part of the last three years straining their creative faculties to develop solutions — and more often, temporary workarounds.

Their goal is to remedy the blockchain’s two glaring deficiencies: the capacity to operate efficiently at scale, and to safeguard user privacy unequivocally. On both prerogatives, Ethereum’s best and brightest minds have converged on zero knowledge protocols and their ever-versatile implementations to build the next iteration of turing-complete blockchain infrastructure.

Opinion

👀 How DAOs are Challenging VCs in the Race to Fund Web3 Projects

In this guest column, Lukas Schor writes how DAOs present an unprecedented to challenge to venture capitalists when it comes to backing Web 3 projects.

Investment in crypto and blockchain startups rose significantly in 2021 and changed how venture capital funding is received in Web3 projects. Now with the emergence of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), traditional VCs are facing competition. They have to rethink how they help companies raise money.

Despite a rocky start in 2016, DAOs have adapted and changed. Some early examples include dxDAO, DAOStack’s Genesis DAO, or MolochDAO, which have paved the way for more recent projects. Following on from surging interest in decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), DAOs are one of the most interesting topics in crypto right now.

Crypto communities springing up as DAOs are pooling their funds in DAO treasuries and enabling members to vote and decide how the project should be managed. VCs are no longer monopolizing the funding scene, and they’ll have to change how they operate, how they invest in projects, and what value, if any, they bring to the table, particularly as Web3 grows.

Friday

News

• Polkadot’s Parachain Auctions Aim to Fulfill Promise of ScalabilityWith much of the Polkadot community locking up DOT amid the ecosystem’s first batch of parachain lease auctions, many participants are looking to contribute via projects offering innovative liquid staking products.
• Markets Roundup: Ethereum Burn Rate Surges as DeFi Tokens Post Mixed PerformanceDeFi assets saw a mixed performance this week, with roughly half of the sector’s leading protocols suffering drawdowns by both TVL and token. Still, sector-wide TVL and market cap have continued trending into previously uncharted territory.

Links

• Why Web3?: ConsenSys
• The Curve Emergency DAO has killed the USDM gauge: Curve
• How Hashflow used Project Galaxy to turbo-charge to $600M of trading volume: Mirror
• Sotheby’s to Allow Live Bidding in Ether for Works by Banksy: CoinDesk
• Miami to Give ‘Bitcoin Yield’ From MiamiCoin to Its Citizens: CoinDesk
• Universal Forms Metaverse Band Based on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs: Decrypt
• The average daily transfer volume of #stablecoins on #TRON network reached $11,073,065,553 this week!: TRONSCAN
• Goodbye #BreakpointLisbon! Thank you for a great final day (and night): Solana

Thursday

News

• Curve Turns Off Mochi’s Rewards After ‘Amazingly Scammy’ Tactics Trigger OutcryA fresh salvo has been fired in the Curve War and the Establishment isn’t happy.
• The Web3 Three: Discord, Reddit and Twitter Tease Crypto IntegrationThe big-but-not-Facebook-big companies of the social web, Discord, Reddit and Twitter, are giving crypto’s technology a much more serious look. That could mean the blockchain party will be much larger, soon.
• Ethereum Name Service Jumps to $1B Market Cap After Airdrop of ENS TokenENS, the governance token of Ethereum Name Service, hit a market capitalization of $1.15B in early morning trading EST. That’s equal to about 10% of the value of GoDaddy, the 24-year-old internet domain registrar and web hosting company.

Links

• How to value Cryptoassets? - With Su Zhu and Hasu: Uncommon Core
• Rocket Pool Eth2 staking service launches, hits stage two cap in 45 seconds: CoinTelegraph
• SEC Stops Wyoming-Based DAO From Registering 2 Digital Tokens: CoinDesk
• Idle is officially live on Polygon!: Idle
• Mark your calendars for this week’s AMA!: Celsius
• #dHEDGE is super excited to announce the first protocol built and integrated directly via the dHEDGE SDK: Polygon

Wednesday

News

• Metis Joins Ethereum Layer 2 Race With $100M Ecosystem FundThe competition to become the dominant Optimistic Rollup Layer 2 solution just got a new player and a $100M fund boosts its chances. Metis is joining the fray, where Arbitrum and Optimism have so far ruled.
• Trailblazer THORChain Accidentally Front-runs THORSwap Community in Latest WoeDrama continues to hang over the trailblazing cross-chain decentralized exchange protocol THORChain, with the protocol’s treasury accidentally front-running the highly anticipated token offering of its platform, THORSwap.

Links

• Reddit co-founder to invest $100 million in social media on Solana: The Block
• Neon Labs, developer of Ethereum virtual machine on Solana, raises $40 million: The Block
• Tim Cook has invested in cryptocurrency personally, but Apple has no plans to do so: New York Times
• OpenSea: The Reasonable Revolutionary: The Generalist
• Binance Will List Ethereum Name Service (ENS): Binance
• To celebrate our 1 year anniversary Art Blocks is donating 1 million dollars to charity: Art Blocks
• The main thing we noticed about building on Fantom is that teams in the space are always open to talking and collaborating with each other: Fantom

Tuesday

News

• ConsenSys Founder Joe Lubin Teases MetaMask Token $MASKOne of web3’s most essential tools may be getting a token. Joseph Lubin, founder of Ethereum incubator ConsenSys, set off speculation a token for the non-custodial wallet MetaMask is imminent after tweeting, “Wen $MASK? Stay tuned.”
• EXCLUSIVE: New NFT Discovery Platform Raises $2M From Spartan and SequoiaNFTs are crypto’s most visual offering, but exploring them is still largely driven by text searches. A project coming out of stealth this week aims to change that.
• Axie Infinity’s Katana Breaks $1B in TVL After Launch of Governance TokenKatana, the new automated market maker for Axie Infinity’s side chain Ronin, has attracted more than $1.2B in total value locked since launching on Nov. 4, as users load in liquidity in order to farm the sidechain’s new governance token, RON.
• DOT Holders Have Pledged $800M Ahead Of First Polkadot Parachain AuctionPolkadot, the eighth largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $55B, kicks off its first parachain auction on Nov. 11, and investors are lining up.

Links

• Raoul Pal: Expect the ‘path of most pain’ around December: CoinTelegraph
• Coinbase’s Q3 Crypto Trading Volumes to Be Key for Investors, Analysts Say: CoinDesk
• The Rise of Bitcoin Influencers: Evangelizing and Moving Markets: Decrypt
• Jet Announces $6.8 Million Follow-on Round with Paradigm, Reciprocal Ventures, Solana Ventures and more: Medium
• Brave partners with Solana to integrate it into the browser and make it the default for DApp support: Brave
• The just-launched Decade of Change 2021 collection spotlights 23 artists: OpenSea
• @BabylonFinance is on for a @SushiSwap #Nakama AMA to discuss their upcoming NFT Drop & IDO!: SushiSwap

💜Community Love💜

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

KΞSS @kesselRunner6Been thinking about this since I learned about DAOs. There's a great article from @DefiantNews on this subject: thedefiant.io/the-problem-wi…

h0rus.eth 💎🤚 @h0rus_ethUnpopular opinion: DAOs structures suck unless the majority of holders know about product and scalability, which is unlikely to happen10:28 AM ∙ Nov 12, 20215Likes1Retweet

Ronald @ronald_probitGreat write-up by @DefiantNews on the Curve Wars https://t.co/gawzgWCoXN

The Defiant @DefiantNews👑@CurveFinance is now the biggest #DeFi protocol with $19.8B in TVL. The Curve DAO is discussing dropping its SC whitelist, allowing any protocol to get boosted $CRV yields. @ConvexFinance won the war, but was it all for nothing? @BradyDale dives in👇 https://t.co/u5ArcJA7uk https://t.co/NrDtOYVZLC12:34 PM ∙ Nov 12, 20215Likes2Retweets

Emily Leibert @by_emilyleibertgm! feeling eternally grateful to have profiled @CamiRusso and @DefiantNews with help from @DeFi_Dad @MarinaSpindler @La__Cuen and @AlexisGauba

insidehook.comCamila Russo Refuses to Be Crypto’s Diversity CheckboxThe Defiant founder is at the forefront of the emerging DeFi media landscape, and she has no plans of stopping there3:18 PM ∙ Nov 9, 202182Likes17Retweets

Suna Said @suna_saidThere are new players in the #NFT market: NFT-backed loans. Many platforms, providing millions in loans backed by some of the most valuable NFTs, are starting to gain widespread popularity. Read more about how the loans work from @DefiantNews!

thedefiant.ioNFT-backed Lending Market Surges with $1M-Plus Loans and 20% Interest Rates - The DefiantThe NFT-backed loan market is off the hook. The latest sign? A $1.42M loan secured by Autoglyph #488, an NFT produced by CryptoPunks’ creators, Larva Labs, was approved on Oct. 28.5:48 PM ∙ Nov 8, 202115Likes7Retweets

DeFiCon 🗽 @DeFi_Conferencefor essential DeFi news and alpha, we’re reading the @DefiantNews by @CamiRusso ⚡️ we recommend subscribing for daily DeFi briefings, interviews & recaps👇🏽 newsletter.thedefiant.io

newsletter.thedefiant.ioThe DefiantThe essential content platform about decentralized finance.10:12 PM ∙ Nov 6, 202113Likes5Retweets

shΞinix @sheinix📆 Mañana a las 17:00hs ARG estaremos charlando en VIVO con @CamiRusso por Youtube! Los invitamos a unirse y participar de esta conversación acerca de DeFi, NFTs, Metaverso y mas con Camila!! 💪 youtube.com/watch?v=CD5mtR…

youtube.comDeFi, NFTs, Metaverso y mas con Camila Russo! (Charla en VIVO)Estaremos charlando en VIVO con Camila Russo, fundadora de The Defiant medio especializado en noticias y analisis Cripto, y autora del libro “The Infinite Ma...7:37 PM ∙ Nov 7, 202171Likes11Retweets

DAppaDan.eth is open to Web3 DevRel Roles @DAppaDanDev"When did it all click for you..." for Web3 will be the "Where were you when..." for other historical events. It all clicked for me after reading The Infinite Machine by @CamiRusso3:00 PM ∙ Nov 6, 202110Likes2Retweets

DeFiDave.eth (🍦,🍧) @davesaidthat_Very proud to be repping @ink_dao and having the opportunity to write what it means to be apart of it for @DefiantNews 🖋️ Over the past few weeks, I had the chance to meet several members for the first time and hear what Ink DAO means to them 🧵 thedefiant.io/ink-dao-tattoo…

thedefiant.ioThe Story of Ink DAO, a Group Bound by ERC-721 Tattoos and the Collective Hope for a Better World - The DefiantInk DAO members are literally branding themselves with a tattoo to show their devotion to NFTs, and to each other.6:31 PM ∙ Nov 5, 202143Likes13Retweets

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Sanuel Haig, Bailey Reutzel, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, Bailey Reutzel, and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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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 ($15/mo, $150/yr.