📈 Russia's Invasion Triggers 6% Premium on BTC-Ukrainian Hryvnia Trade

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• Russia’s Invasion Triggers 6% Premium on BTC-Ukrainian Hryvnia Trade
• Polkadot and Tron Founders Beseech Ukraine to Accept Their Native Tokens as Donations
• Solidex Rockets to $2.18B in TVL Within Days Of Launch
• Electric Capital Plays the Long Game with $1B for Two Funds Targeting Tokens and Equity Stakes

Podcast

🎙Listen to the exclusive interview with Gavin Wood:

Video

• Quick Take: Rouble trading as a shitcoin as sanctions bite
• Quick Take: There’s ZERO chance Russia will bypass SWIFT using crypto

Links

• Russia Could Use Cryptocurrency to Blunt the Force of U.S. Sanctions: The New York Times
• Crypto Exchanges Refuse to Freeze All Russian Accounts: Vice
• Crypto VC Darren Lau says the era of ‘spray and pray’ investing is cooling down: The Block
• Russia’s hidden tool to undermine sanctions: Politico
• To ensure that everyone who wants to donate ERC-20 tokens to the Ukrainian government 🇺🇦 can do so, we built an interface that swaps any token for ETH: Uniswap
• Banks, prime brokers and trading venues shun ruble trades: Risk.net
• GMX Traders did $5 billion in volume in under 2 months directly from their @avalancheavax wallets: Avalanche

Handpicked by The Defiant

• Pussy Riot Helps Newly Formed UkraineDAO Mobilize Support and Raise Funds Via NFTs
• Metaverse Land Sales Hold Steady in Defiance of the Crypto Selloff
• Blockchain Teams in Ukraine Struggle and Galvanize as Russia Invades Their Country

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Crypto Exchange Rates

📈 Russia’s Invasion Triggers 6% Premium on BTC-Ukrainian Hryvnia Trade

DIVERGENT Wildly divergent spreads used to be a staple in Bitcoin trading, with savvy traders raking in profits by playing the arbitrage between the pricing on different exchanges, especially in Asia.

TRADING PAIR Now a 6% premium for BTC has emerged on a trading pair with the Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH), the nation’s currency, as Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor roils the crypto markets and burnishes Bitcoin’s role as a form of digital gold.

PREMIUM The premium exists on WhiteBIT, which is the most popular exchange in Russia, according to bitrawr, which ranks exchanges on a per country basis. More than a third of WhiteBIT’s traffic comes from Russian users and 13% comes from Ukrainian ones, according to similarweb, which tracks website traffic.

STRIFE Converting WhiteBIT’s BTC-UAH price to dollars prices the cryptocurrency at $46,167, while the price shown on CoinGecko at the same time, 8PM New York time, is $43,541. Premiums on digital assets have been known to emerge during times of strife. Ukrainians may be fleeing to BTC and other digital assets, causing the premium to emerge — USDT is trading at $1.12, as opposed to its $1 peg, on Kuna, a Ukrainian exchange.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Ukraine Crypto

🇺🇦 Polkadot and Tron Founders Beseech Ukraine to Accept Their Native Tokens as Donations

DEFENSE It’s getting to be a status thing. This weekend, the official Twitter account of the government of Ukraine tweeted out a bitcoin address and one Ethereum, too, and asked for donations to support the nation’s defense against Russia.

SCIONS Subsequently, blockchain scions like Polkadot’s Gavin Wood and Tron’s Justin Sun petitioned government officials to accept their chain’s respective native tokens. Likewise, fans of other layer-1 blockchains also started urging the government to open additional wallets.

RESISTANCE The tweet was an historic moment for cryptocurrency. A sovereign nation showed that the censorship resistance of blockchain technologies is valuable to a government in crisis. Various news organizations have confirmed that these wallets are legitimate.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Launches

🚀 Solidex Rockets to $2.18B in TVL Within Days Of Launch

NEWS Solidex Finance has attracted $2.18B of assets in just a few days since the project launched on the Fantom blockchain — that’s good for the 22th slot in all of DeFi as of Feb. 28 according to DeFi Llama, which tracks total value locked (TVL).

TVL At its current TVL, Solidex is ahead of hot projects like Osmosis, and DeFi mainstays like Synthetix.

OPTIMIZE So what’s attracting the capital? Unsurprisingly, it’s the token rewards that users are raking in from the platform. Solidex bills itself as “a protocol to optimize yield, voting power, and liquidity provisioning on Solidly,” according to the project’s documentation. In a nutshell, the project is built on top of Solidly, a decentralized exchange deployed on Fantom. Andre Cronje, who is the founder of Yearn Finance, is the project’s lead.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Venture Capital

💰 Electric Capital Plays the Long Game with $1B for Two Funds Targeting Tokens and Equity Stakes

VE-TOKENS Everyone is getting into ve-tokens, including venture capital firms that make investments with long time horizons. In its latest round of funding, Electric Capital has raised $1B for two new funds that it will use to purchase tokens and equity in cryptocurrency projects that deepen blockchain communities, decentralize web3 infrastructure, and further democratize finance, the firm said in a statement today.

INVESTORS The firm declined to disclose the backers of this new fund, noting that it’s almost entirely university endowments, large non-profit organizations, and foundations. “Founders in Web3 need crypto-native investors who understand the unique support that protocols and Web3 companies need through the inevitable crypto cycles,” said Avichal Garg, cofounder of the firm, in a statement.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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The Tube

📺 Quick Take: Rouble trading as a shitcoin as sanctions bite

📺 Quick Take: There’s ZERO chance Russia will bypass SWIFT using crypto

Links

🔗 Russia Could Use Cryptocurrency to Blunt the Force of U.S. Sanctions: The New York Times

When the United States barred Americans from doing business with Russian banks, oil and gas developers and other companies in 2014, after the country’s invasion of Crimea, the hit to Russia’s economy was swift and immense.

🔗 Crypto Exchanges Refuse to Freeze All Russian Accounts: Vice

Faced with a request by Ukrainian leadership to freeze the accounts of all people in Russia and Belarus, major crypto exchanges are steadfastly refusing, saying the tactic would unfairly harm civilians and “fly in the face” of the crypto community’s libertarian ideology.

🔗 Crypto VC Darren Lau says the era of ‘spray and pray’ investing is cooling down: The Block

Episode 14 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Darren Lau of The Daily Ape and Not3Lau Capital.

🔗 Russia’s hidden tool to undermine sanctions: Politico

There’s a crypto-sized hole in U.S. sanctions targeting Russian financial institutions and oligarchs.

1/ To ensure that everyone who wants to donate ERC-20 tokens to the Ukrainian government 🇺🇦 can do so, we built an interface that swaps any token for ETH and then sends it directly to the Ukrainian government in a single transaction.https://t.co/3zuJLpmWNQ https://t.co/Fg3HSdbNSF

— Uniswap Labs 🦄 (@Uniswap) March 1, 2022

Handpicked by The Defiant

• Pussy Riot Helps Newly Formed UkraineDAO Mobilize Support and Raise Funds Via NFTsPussy Riot, the famed feminist punk protest group, helped form a DAO on Thursday to assist Ukrainians as they cope with the Russian invasion of their country.
• Metaverse Land Sales Hold Steady in Defiance of the Crypto Selloff It’s a stark reality. The cryptocurrency market has lost 40% of its value since peaking in November, and even web3 supporters have accepted that a bear market has arrived with no end in sight.
• Blockchain Teams in Ukraine Struggle and Galvanize as Russia Invades Their CountryCrypto has always been global, but the crisis created by Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine this week has dramatized just how global it has truly become.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, DeFiDad, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader, and Camila Russo. Videos are produced by Robin Schmidt, Alp Gasimov and Daniel Flynn. Podcast is led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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