🖥 The Defiant Terminal is Coming: Join the Waitlist

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,

News

• Exclusive: DeFi Alliance Announces New Hires as Web3 Continues to Attract Talent
• Rune Christensen Makes Rallying Cry for MakerDAO to Help Fix Climate Change
• Wintermute Wants to Become MKR Market-Maker Via Governance Vote

Defiant Announcement

• The Defiant Terminal is Coming: Join the Waitlist

Tutorial

• Defiant Degens: Killing 2 Birds with 1 Farm: How to LP and Earn a Possible Future Arbitrum or Hop Token

Research

• Looking for a Bullish Signal? Fidelity and HSBC Shrug Off Crypto Angst and Scale DeFi Offerings

Video

• The Defiant Guide to Pak - [ Part I ]
• Quick Take: Compound's $160M Drip Bug

Podcast

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

Links

• SEC Subpoenas USDC Stablecoin Backer Circle: CoinDesk
• Tweet mocking how little value NFTs have... is turned into $5K NFT: CoinTelegraph
• Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet: Cloudflare
• Credit Suisse Creates Ethereum-Based Shares in Swiss Sports Resort: CoinDesk
• Financial Advisers Pitch Bitcoin to Investors to Offset Portfolio Losses: Wall Street Journal
• THEY ARE HERE. @aavegotchi Polygon to Ethereum bridge is now open!: Rarible
• Basic Steps & Tips to Building a Coalition: EFF

🧑‍💻 🦄 🌈 NYC DeFi Hub: The Defiant has just launched Colony, a co-working space in Dumbo for teams building DeFi and Web3 to join and find a community. There are 20 desks in an open floor plan at a reformed factory building. Fill out this form if you’re interested in working there or sponsoring the space.

The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

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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.
• The DeFi Pulse Index, by Index Coop - DPI is the easiest way to capture the upside of DeFi with the benefit of diversification. Buy DPI today on your favorite DEX.

Defiant Scoop

🤝 Exclusive: DeFi Alliance Announces New Hires as Web3 Continues to Attract Talent

MAGNET Web3’s growing market cap continues to serve as a magnet to bring talent into the blockchain-enabled space. DeFi Alliance, the startup accelerator akin to Y Combinator but for DeFi, has poached three superstars who hail from Blackrock, Facebook and Lambda School.

TALENT “Web3 has sparked the intellectual curiosity of talented people all across the globe,” Imran Khan of DeFi Alliance told The Defiant.

SKILLSET The accelerator is bringing on the former chief compliance officer at the investment management corporation Blackrock, Shah Hafizi, as general counsel and partner. Hafizi was also the special counsel at the SEC and has already counseled dozens of DeFi projects in his private practice. He will bring this skillset to the DeFi Alliance.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Climate Alpha

📢 Rune Christensen Makes Rallying Cry for MakerDAO to Help Fix Climate Change

CHALLENGE Climate change is the unifying challenge of the era and the biggest problem humanity is running out of time to solve — and MakerDAO can help.

VISION That’s the case Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, makes in a long essay he released today called “The Case for Clean Money,” where he articulates a vision for how the issuance of its DAI stablecoin could be used to drive investment in clean energy sources at a global scale.

SMARTEST BET Not only would using decentralized finance (DeFi) to intentionally drive investment into confronting climate change be a social good, Christensen also argues that it’s one of the smartest possible bets for investors with a long view:

CLIMATE ALPHA “Grasping climate alpha early is likely the largest economic opportunity that will exist over the next decades because of how bad things are getting – like discovering bitcoin in 2010 but at the macro level.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

DeFi Democracy

🗳 Wintermute Wants to Become MKR Market-Maker Via Governance Vote

TLDR Market-making deals are usually sorted out in private, but DeFi might be making headway for transparency.

LOAN Wintermute proposed a market-making deal with MakerDAO on Friday via the MakerDAO governance forum. It requested a loan of 10,000 MKR ($24M) from the DAO in order to provide market-making services for both DAI and MKR, across all kinds of exchanges, for one year.

REALLY POSITIVE “Typically these proposals are usually done in more of a private manner,” David Utrobin, MakerDAO’s facilitator of governance communications told The Defiant in a phone call. “It’s a really positive thing in our eyes.”

TRADING VOLUME Wintermute is one of the most significant market-making companies in crypto, working on both centralized and decentralized exchanges, and over-the-counter. According to Wintermute’s website, it has done $767B in cumulative trading volume. MakerDAO is the third-largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol listed on Defillama, with $12.7B in assets locked in its smart contracts, and it has long been viewed as the grandfather of the industry.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Defiant Announcement

🖥 The Defiant Terminal is Coming: Join the Waitlist

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.

The Defiant is devoted to being the most trusted information source for decentralized finance. In our view, information is composed of content and data. An information company is fully delivering on its promise when it can offer both. For the past two years, we’ve been delivering on the content side. We’ll start delivering on the data side very soon.

The Defiant Terminal aims to be all-encompassing, customizable, and easy to use.

It is a platform where traders, investors and researchers can find all of the DeFi data they could dream of, and all the tools to gain valuable insights from that data.

You’ll be able to create charts and tables that include any and all of the assets in the terminal with their relevant metrics: MakerDAO value locked against MKR price, Dai lending rates on Compound for the past year, Uniswap versus Sushiswap users since the launch of V3, token prices for the top smart contracts platforms in the past two weeks — any combination of assets and metrics, across any time frame.

You’ll also be able to arrange these charts and tables to create specific dashboards and save those views to easily track the themes you’re most interested in, from lending and DEXs, to yield farming and Layer 2s.

You’ll be able to share these insights over chat, gain the needed context with a real-time news feed, and be alerted when any of the assets you’re tracking breaks some key threshold.

There is no technical knowledge needed. Anyone will soon have some of the most sophisticated charts in DeFi at their fingertips.

Sign up now to be notified when we go live and be one of the first users. We’ll be looking for your feedback!

Information is power — The Defiant helps you seize it.

Research

📈 Looking for a Bullish Signal? Fidelity and HSBC Shrug Off Crypto Angst and Scale DeFi Offerings

The latest installment of GDF’s research focuses on one of the team favorite topics — institutional embrace of DeFi. Lots of good nuggets here!

TLDR In 2017, the ICO boom helped propel crypto assets to record levels only to fall almost as precipitously. With that history it is perhaps only natural that 2020-21’s extraordinary increase in activity has been greeted by mainstream attention, albeit with some hesitancy from media commentators who are yet to be convinced that the crypto-sphere is anything more than hype.

KEY THEME However, asThe Economist’s recent cover story analysis of DeFi shows us, the tide is turning on this narrative, perhaps reflecting the sustained interest from institutional players, which has become a key theme for Digital Assets in 2021.

CONVERGENCE Fidelity Digital Assets released research this month showing that US and European interest in digital asset investment products had increased by 12 percentage points year on year. In the US, the survey revealed that investors prefer accessing products through traditional financial firms, reflecting the current convergence between institutions and crypto.

PORTFOLIOS “The interest expressed in both owning digital assets directly or through a variety of investment products is yet another indicator of the maturation of digital asset markets, the diversity of participants and progress in how these investors are viewing digital assets’ role in portfolios,” said Tom Jessop, president of Fidelity Digital Assets.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

DeFi Primer

👨🏻‍🏫 Defiant Degens: Killing 2 Birds with 1 Farm: How to LP and Earn a Possible Future Arbitrum or Hop Token

This is a weekly tutorial on the most compelling opportunities in yield farming, written by our friend DeFi Dad, an advisor to The Defiant and Head of Portfolio Support at Fourth Revolution Capital (4RC).

AIRDROP One of the biggest windfalls in DeFi portfolios is an airdrop. It’s “Uptober” and aside from green candles, we’re seeing Ethereum L2s just beginning to take off with the recent anticipated Arbitrum launch in September. With L2s, we also see a demand for fast and reliable bridges. Hop Protocol has been one of the few new leaders to step up in this surge of DeFi interoperability.

AVOID HIGH FEES Hop provides a scalable rollup-to-rollup general token bridge, allowing users to send tokens from one rollup (ie Optimism, Arbitrum) or sidechain to another almost immediately without having to wait for the network’s challenge period. Why’s that such a big deal? Because the average DeFi user is not going to wait 7 days to withdraw assets from Optimism or 4.5 hours from Arbitrum to get back to Ethereum L1. Even more promising is Hop’s bridge between L2s, which shows us a future where we avoid the congestion and high fees on Ethereum L1.

NATIVE TOKEN In order for Hop to work, the protocol requires market makers, called Bonders, who front the liquidity at the destination chain in exchange for a small fee. This credit is extended by the Bonder in the form of hTokens, which are then swapped for their corresponding native token in an AMM.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

Video

📺 The Defiant Guide to Pak - [ Part I ]

📺 Quick Take: Compound's $160M Drip Bug

Links

🔗 SEC Subpoenas USDC Stablecoin Backer Circle: CoinDesk

Circle Financial is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC), the payments company disclosed Monday.

🔗 Tweet mocking how little value NFTs have... is turned into $5K NFT: CoinTelegraph

Twitter user Lauren Walker tweeted a message claiming she was “stealing” nonfungible tokens (NFT), only to have Crypto Twitter turn around and mint her words into a token listing for thousands of dollars.

🔗 Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet: Cloudflare

“Facebook can't be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second. Today at 15:51 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

🔗 Credit Suisse Creates Ethereum-Based Shares in Swiss Sports Resort: CoinDesk

Credit Suisse is taking part in the tokenization of a Swiss resort using the Ethereum blockchain. Announced Tuesday via a partnership with Switzerland-based cryptocurrency custody and trading firm Taurus, Credit Suisse has tokenized shares in adventure sports company Alaïa SA, which owns chalets and a hotel in the Crans-Montana Alpine region.

🔗 Financial Advisers Pitch Bitcoin to Investors to Offset Portfolio Losses: Wall Street Journal

Some financial advisers have a new sales pitch for investors: You win when bitcoin goes up, and you can win when it goes down.

Rarible @raribleTHEY ARE HERE. @aavegotchi Polygon to Ethereum bridge is now open! Get yourself a cute playable NFT ghost or a portal to summon one. Cuddly, gentle, zen, scary and many more – choose yours and earn x3 $RARI rewards 💛 rarible.com/collection/0x1…2:18 PM ∙ Oct 4, 2021163Likes55Retweets

EFF @EFFBuilding local coalitions can be difficult, but the results are powerful. Our Electronic Frontier Alliance toolkit offers a simple road map to help amplify our voices, together.

eff.orgBasic Steps & Tips to Building a CoalitionCoalitions are powerful. A coalition is a network of organizations (and sometimes just regular people) that work together to achieve a greater goal. Here are just a few of the major perks of a strong coalition: More people and groups help to broaden the promotion of events and push messages. A...8:47 AM ∙ Oct 4, 202121Likes13Retweets

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• Full transcript of the weekly podcast interview
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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Bailey Reutzel, DeFiDad and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, Bailey Reutzel, 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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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.