📈 The Merge Drives Value of ETH Options Past Bitcoin

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

News

• New Aave Stablecoin Clears First Hurdle
• CryptoPunk Holders Unfazed By Meebits’ Move To Add Royalties
• Nomad Bridge Hacked With $45M Stolen

Markets

• The Merge Drives Value of ETH Options Past Bitcoin

Podcast

🎙Listen to the Exclusive Interview with UMA’s Hart Lambur in this Week’s Podcast:

Video

• Quick Take: Yuga adds royalties to Meebits, what's next?
• The Defiant Weekly: Ben Mauro spent 10 years bringing Huxley to life. WORTH IT. (with Steven Ilous -Feature)

Elsewhere

• Why DeFi Giants Aave, Curve May Want Their Own Stablecoins: CoinDesk
• CryptoPunk Ethereum NFT Sales Jump 248% After Tiffany Launch: Decrypt
• Open Source Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Explorer: Beaconchain
• Thanks to everyone at @lollapalooza for another great weekend: Solana

Trending in The Defiant

• SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ May Pocket a Third of All Tokens Paid to Staff
• The Merge Draws Ever Closer as Ethereum Passes Another Critical Test
• Defiant Data Dive: Airdrops are Mostly Fool’s Gold…But They Have Their Uses

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).

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

🙌 Together with:

Nexo’s fundamentals-first model helps you secure your assets and grow your wealth. The company now provides an increased insurance on custodial assets of $775 million. Learn More!

Zetachain is the first public L1 blockchain that natively connects with any chain and layer including Bitcoin and Dogecoin without wrapping or bridging assets. Dive into the docs to start building the future of multichain.

Thirdweb: Build web3 apps easily, for free, with easy smart contract deployment, powerful SDKs and UI components from thirdweb. Create NFT drops, marketplaces, social tokens, DAOs and more on Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and Optimism.

Bring your NFT product to market in hours with NFTPort's APIs. Mint NFTs as scale, deploy fully owned contracts & access high quality NFT data - all with simple REST APIs every developer knows. It's time to build.

Market Action

📈 The Merge Drives Value of ETH Options Past Bitcoin

By Owen Fernau

RALLY If investors needed any more evidence The Merge is driving a rally in Ethereum here’s one more compelling datapoint: Open interest on ETH options just leapfrogged Bitcoin. On July 28, the total amount of put and call contracts on ETH surpassed BTC for the first time, according to data provider Glassnode.

Source: Glassnode

VALUE Open interest is the notional value of the puts and calls of a given asset that haven’t been settled yet. Puts are usually a bet a security will decline in value, and calls a wager the value will increase. The put/call ratio on ETH options is 0.26, according to the trader who goes by Chang, a partner of the Derebit options platform. This indicates a heavy weighting toward people looking to go long on Ethereum’s token.

OVERHAUL With developers expecting Ethereum to merge its Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake blockchains on Sept. 19, ETH has soared more than 47% in the last 30 days, according to CoinGecko. The Merge marks the most significant overhaul of Ethereum. The switch is expected to dramatically reduce gas fees and improve efficiency for the leading system of smart contracts and dApps.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Stablecoins

🏃🏻‍♀️ New Aave Stablecoin Clears First Hurdle

By Samuel Haig

VOTES In a move that may disrupt the stablecoin market, Aave, the leading money market protocol, is poised to create a fully collateralized stable token called GHO. On July 31, more than 99.9% of Aave’s community members voted to launch the coin. It was the first of three governance votes that will take place over coming weeks to determine the design and roadmap for the token.

DISCOUNT RATE Aave will now engage a security firm to audit the code for GHO. Its community will next vote on a proposed starting interest rate GHO and discount rate for AAVE stakers that mint GHO.

LOANS Aave is the third-largest DeFi protocol by cross-chain total value locked (TVL) with $6.55B, according to DeFi Llama. Users can earn a yield on assets deposited into the protocol, and also use their deposits to back self-managed, overcollateralized loans on the platform.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

The Right Place for Your Crypto

Those running full steam ahead today are bound to thrive tomorrow. Nexo is a security-first platform built for the long run with everything you need for your crypto.

Buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more than 30 other altcoins with a debit or credit card, easily in a few clicks. On the Nexo Exchange, you can swap 300+ pairs in a simple way at real-time prices. Every purchase or swap gets you up to 0.5% back in crypto, with rewards being added straight to your portfolio.

Borrowing cash or stablecoins against your crypto can get as low as 0% APR, and you get approved instantly.

The right place puts you first and plays the long game with you. Get started at nexo.io and bring your friends. For every successful referral, you get $25 in Bitcoin plus a chance to win rewards from a $50,000 prize pool.

Exploits

🦹🏻‍♂️ Nomad Bridge Hacked With $45M Stolen

By Aleksandar Gilbert

HACKED Nomad, a protocol allowing users to move digital assets between different blockchains, is being actively hacked on Monday evening. As of 7:15 p.m. New York time, attacker(s) have drained $45M in wrapped Bitcoin, Ether and various stablecoins from the protocol, and more than $100M in cryptocurrency remains at risk.

ISSUE The Nomad team is looking into the issue.

HEAVYWEIGHTS The Moonbeam network has been essentially paused while the team investigates. The hack comes just days after Nomad unveiled the full list of investors who participated in its $22M seed round, with heavyweights Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, 1kx and Polychain Capital.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFTs

💰CryptoPunk Holders Unfazed By Meebits’ Move To Add Royalties

By Owen Fernau

SHOCKWAVES Yuga Labs doesn’t appear to be printing money the same way they were in 2021. Meebits, a popular NFT project, sent shockwaves through the NFT space when it activated a 5% royalty fee on secondary sales of its NFTs on July 28. The fee change leaves Meebits’ sister project, CryptoPunks, as the only major NFT collection that doesn’t collect a slice of resales..

FEES Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, acquiintellectual property (IP) rights to both Meebits and CryptoPunks in March. The addition of royalty fees represents the most significant change to Meebits since the acquisition.

DISGRUNTLED Some collectors were disgruntled at what they felt was a lack of activity on Yuga’s part before enacting the fees. “Sounds like we are getting a lot of promises of things to come but are getting a 5% royalty as of now,” tweeted VonMises, a major NFT collector.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Quick Take: Yuga adds royalties to Meebits, what's next?

📺 The Defiant Weekly: Ben Mauro spent 10 years bringing Huxley to life. WORTH IT. (with Steven Ilous -Feature)

Elsewhere

🔗 Why DeFi Giants Aave, Curve May Want Their Own Stablecoins: CoinDesk

Stablecoins could drive users and revenue to platforms in a similar way that governance tokens did during the “DeFi Summer” of 2020.

🔗 CryptoPunk Ethereum NFT Sales Jump 248% After Tiffany Launch: Decrypt

The sales volume of the CryptoPunks NFT collection has spiked over 248% in the last 24 hours, sparked by an exclusive offer from iconic luxury jewelry and specialty retailer Tiffany & Co. for CryptoPunks NFT holders, according to data from CryptoSlam.

🔗 Open Source Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Explorer: Beaconchain

The Ethereum Beacon Chain is currently undergoing genesis. Please prepare your validators and send your deposits.

Solana @solanaThanks to everyone at @lollapalooza for another great weekend.🙏 It was special to see thousands of festival goers interacting for the first time with NFTs during the Dopamine Treasure Hunt!🤳 Another step towards bringing NFTs & crypto to the masses. solana.com/lolla1:20 PM ∙ Aug 1, 2022379Likes71Retweets

Trending in The Defiant

• SushiSwap ‘Head Chef’ May Pocket a Third of All Tokens Paid to StaffThe proposed new “head chef” of SushiSwap could pocket more than a third of the crypto exchange’s total SUSHI coins allocated to staff over the next four years, according to an analysis of the compensation package by The Defiant.
• The Merge Draws Ever Closer as Ethereum Passes Another Critical TestPassing the latest in a series of critical tests ahead of The Merge, Ethereum completed the tenth mainnet shadow fork on July 27. The result: It went off without a hitch.
• Defiant Data Dive: Airdrops are Mostly Fool’s Gold…But They Have Their UsesWho doesn’t love free money? Airdrops have become one of the most popular features of crypto. By giving away free tokens to investors, they epitomized the easy money to be made in the blockchain world. Airdrops also became a potent way to draw users and build critical mass on platforms.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

Subscribe now

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.