🦄 Recap: DeFi Week of Oct. 25

Hello Defiers! Happy weekend!

After an apparent break from exploits and hacks, blockchain attackers were back at it last week with a $130M attack on Cream, a $60M exploit on OlympusDAO fork Anubis, which Brady Dale and yyctrader wrote about, and a potential exploit uncovered on Aave, which devs quickly worked to patch. Speaking of OlympusDAO forks, Owen Fernau wrote about the proliferation of such copycats.

While the past couple of weeks have been all about the new Bitcoin ETF, the first Uniswap ETP (exchange traded product) quietly launched in Europe. Our flaming new writer Samuel Haig dove into the new fund, and gave a rundown of all other DeFi focused products available.

Ethereum had a smashing week, climbing to a new record of $4,467, according to CoinGecko. DeFi tokens also rallied, with their combined capitalization pushing above its May all-time high of $150B, as Sam wrote.

As always there are new DeFi projects popping up and attracting yield-hugry traders, with Tokemak amassing $1B in assets, while Abracadabra founder said users will soon be able to earn high yields from their stablecoins thanks to a new cross-chain, leveraged yield farming protocol. Camila Russo spoke with Scoopy Trooples, the founder of Alchemix, which is leading the new wave of DeFi 2.0 projects.

And of course, Facebook wants to join the fun — to start, it’s rebranding itself to “Meta.” It looks like investors in actual metaverse projects don’t feel threatened though, as the Metaversal Index surged on the news.

In video land, we unveiled a new weekly show in partnership with Real Vision, while Robin Schmidt covered Worldcoin creepyness, Do Kwon fighting back against the SEC, implications of FATF guidelines, provided a guide on “How to Win at DeFi,” and ended the week with The Defiant’s guide to DAOs.

So sit back and enjoy the rest of the weekend catching up on the DeFi content you missed ☕️

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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.

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 episode I speak with Scoopy Trooples, co-founder of Alchemix, a protocol that offers self-paying loans without the risk of liquidations. Think about that; here’s a DeFi application that promises to automatically pay users’ collateralized loans, and on top of that, guarantee they won’t be liquidated.

Scoopy explains how something like that can work and it’s all about plugging into other money legos like Yearn Finance to earn yield off collateral and use that yield to pay off loans. We talk about how DeFi’s composability is key for protocols like Alchemix, which simply wouldn't be possible in Tradfi. But we also talk about the risks of having so many applications relying on each other.

🎙 Scoopy Trooples of Alchemix: "Liquidity Mining is Like a Drug; You Have to Wean Yourself Off it Over Time"

📬 Inbox Dump #30

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]

Video

📺 SuperMassive NFT Show: Is it time for PFP's to grow up?

📺 Keepin it real with Raoul Pal - ETFs, Stablecoins and Regulatory Headwinds

📺 Eyeballs for cash - Worldcoin's ambition plan to onboard humanity

📺 How to WIN at DeFi in 13 EASY STEPS (COMPLETE GUIDE!!!)

📺 Legals, FATF's back and Do Kwon's fightback

📺 Braintrust's Adam Jackson: “Nike is in Crypto Now and They May Not be Fully Aware”

📺 The Defiant’s Guide to DAOs

Friday

News

• Tokemak Decentralized AMM Hits $1B TVL — And It’s Not Even Fully Launched YetTokemak, a project that bills itself as a decentralized market making protocol, has hit $1B in total value locked, less than two months after unveiling what it calls “reactors.” Hitting the $1B mark is a major sign of momentum for a project that hasn’t fully launched all its functionality yet.
• Anubis DAO Descends Into the Underworld After $60M ExploitAnubis DAO, a recently launched fork of Olympus DAO, is engulfed in chaos after 13.6K ETH ($60M) was drained from the protocol today.
• First Uniswap ETP Goes Live as Institutional DeFi Products ProliferateInstitutional investors appear to be flocking into DeFi assets, with a flurry of institutional investment products offering exposure to the decentralized finance sector being launched by major asset managers this year.
• Aave Set to Disable Borrowing on xSushi and DPI Citing Potential Exploit Aave token holders are voting to patch a vulnerability to DeFi’s biggest protocol by assets locked. The vulnerability was raised earlier this week by Aave community members and involved using xSUSHI as collateral, according to a tweet by Aave, which hasn’t disclosed further details.
• Metaverse Tokens Rise as Facebook Rebrands to “Meta”The race for the metaverse is heating up as Facebook has officially rebranded to become “Meta,” but judging from token prices, metaverse OGs don’t feel threatened.
• Markets Round-Up: Top 100 DeFi Tokens Climb to Record Market CapWhile many crypto analysts spent the week focused on Bitcoin’s pull-back to below $60,000, top DeFi assets quietly saw significant gains to drive the sector’s combined market cap in uncharted territory.

Links

• BSN Architect Red Date to Launch NFT Infrastructure in China: CoinDesk
• Facebook Changes Company Name to Meta, Plans NFT Support: CryptoBriefing
• Floki Inu Pumps 223% as the Dogecoin and SHIB Rival Plasters Ads Across London: Decrypt
• MicroStrategy added 9,000 BTC last quarter, its stash is now worth $7 billion: Cointelegraph
• ‘AWS for blockchain’ Alchemy boosts valuation to $3.5B with $250M raise: Tech Crunch

Thursday

News

• CREAM Finance Exploited for $130M in DeFi’s Third-Largest HackDeFi lending protocol CREAM Finance has been exploited for $130M, CREAM said in a tweet. The attack would be the third-largest in DeFi according to Rekt. It may be the latest example of hackers using flash loans (loans that are executed without the need of collateral as long as they’re paid back in one blockchain block) to exploit every last loophole they can find in the open source code across decentralized finance.
• Paradigm Bets on a Cross-Chain Future With $21M Round for Cosmos’ Osmosis DEXCross-blockchain interoperability will require exchanges that don’t care what chain a token is on or what chain it’s going to. Osmosis, a decentralized exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem, today announced a $21M sale of tokens from the Osmosis Foundation treasury, in a round led by Paradigm.

Links

• Disney to launch NFT digital collectibles with VeVe: Ledger Insights
• Ethereum 2.0 Altair Upgrade Successful, But ETH Tumbles to $4K: Crypto Potato
• El Salvador buys a smokin' hot 420 more Bitcoin: Cointelegraph
• Solana-Based Yield Aggregator Tulip Raises $5M: CoinDesk
• Crypto trade associations saw lobbying boom amid Congressional infrastructure fight: The Block

Wednesday

News

• OlympusDAO’s Success Inspires Dozens of ForksThey say imitation is the highest form of flattery. In crypto, this manifests as forks, or copies of a project’s codebase. In that sense, OlympusDAO must be feeling pretty flattered. A slew of forks (over 30, according to DeFi influencer mewnyfish) of the OlympusDAO codebase have emerged.
• Terra’s Shade-Filled SEC Lawsuit Signals Crypto is Now Ready to Fight BackDo Kwon, founder of Terraform Labs (TFL) , the maker of the Terra blockchain and Mirror protocol, received a subpoena from the SEC during Messari’s Mainnet conference in September. But Kwon is pushing back, and on Oct. 22 filed a new lawsuit against the agency.
• Abracadabra To Offer Supercharged Stablecoin Yields By Leveraging Terra’s Anchor ProtocolThe Abracadabra founder said today on Twitter that a protocol which connects Ethereum with the Terra blockchain to yield farm with leverage has been tested and deployed. The recently announced partnership with Terra is already taking shape with the imminent launch of Terra’s UST stablecoin as collateral on the platform.

Links

• BSN Architect Red Date to Launch NFT Infrastructure in China: CoinDesk
• Immunefi raises $5.5M to squash Web 3.0 crypto bugs which might cost billions: TechCrunch
• Redditors cheer as GameStop assembles team of NFT experts: Cointelegraph
• 29 Blockchain Gaming Companies Pen Open Letter to Valve: ‘Don’t Ban Web3 Games’ - Coindesk
• First tokenized lawsuit fund goes live on Republic, will distribute on Avalanche: The Block

Tuesday

News

• Team Behind Hummingbot Gives Away Its Code Via Foundation CoinAlpha is a company that runs on software it created called Hummingbot, a software client that automates market making. It has already made Hummingbot open source, but today it’s taking that one step further: turning the software over to a foundation to manage its ongoing development.
• Lisbon Surfaced The Evolution of DAOs, Solarpunks vs. Lunarpunks and Web3 Social MediaAs people from all over the world gathered in Lisbon, “gm’s” turned to “bd’s” and the metaverse met in meatspace for a week of events and fanfare kicking off with LISCON. Leaders from all over the Ethereum community and beyond came together to bring attention to developments happening with DAOs, DeFi and NFTs, and most importantly, communicate the narratives and memes shaping the direction of the space as a whole.

Links

• Mastercard says any bank or merchant on its vast network can soon offer crypto services: CNBC
• BlockFi partners with Neuberger Berman to launch crypto ETFs: Cointelegraph
• Crypto Fund Inflows Hit Record $1.5B as Bitcoin Futures ETFs Go Live: CoinDesk
• Tesla hints it may soon resume support for crypto payments: Cointelegraph
• Nigeria becomes first African nation to roll out digital currency: Al Jazeera

🧑‍💻 ✍️ 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).