⛲️ Vitalik Tweet Spurs Flurry Of Meme Coins

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

News

• Vitalik Tweet Spurs Flurry Of Meme Coins
• Digital Platform Sells House as an NFT on OpenSea
• Startup Adapts Credit Default Swap Model to Unsecured Crypto Loans
• Aave Releases Technical Details Of GHO Stablecoin

👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers (📜Scroll to the end!)

• Shortage of Goerli Testnet Ether Puts the Squeeze on Devs

DeFi Research

• Polygon’s Embrace of ZK Testnet May Usher in Vibrant Season for Crypto

Podcast

Video

• Quick Take: Sad Milestone – More than Half of Ethereum is Being Censored

DeFi Explainers

• What Is Cryptocurrency?

Elsewhere

• Do Kwon of Terra: ‘It Was Never Really About Money or Fame or Success’ – Ep. 408: Unchained
• Jack Dorsey unveils decentralized social with algo choice and portable accounts: CoinTelegraph
• A quick note on upgrading from KZG to STARKs in danksharding. Probably the right thing to do in ~3-6 years when the tech becomes more mature!: Vitalik Buterin

Trending in The Defiant

• Lido Co-Founder’s Comments Spark Debate Over Decentralization of Ethereum
• MakerDAO Poised to Break Up Into ‘MetaDAOs’ in Historic Shakeup
• Governance Project Uses ‘Contests’ to Help DAOs Improve Decisionmaking

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).

Meme Coins

⛲️ Vitalik Tweet Spurs Flurry Of Meme Coins

Nearly 200,000 Trades Were Conducted On Uniswap In the Past Day, Highest Since June 2021

By yyctrader

SHILL On Oct. 14, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mused that a project called “THE Protocol” would be really easy to shill, as its supporters could say “Look, so and so mentioned THE!” when referring to pretty much anything.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

NFTs

🏡 Digital Platform Sells House as an NFT on OpenSea

Sale of $175,000 House Settled with USDC Stablecoins

By Samuel Haig

SOLD In the latest sign that the property industry is finding NFTs a new sales tool, Roofstock, a digital real estate platform, sold a single-family home in South Carolina for $175,000 via OpenSea.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Sponsored Post

One thing J-Pow can’t print? More Picassos.

Enough with the doom and gloom. You know the score. The market is in a meltdown. Crypto has entered a new Ice Age. Meanwhile, the Fed is flipping back and forth like a stoner staring at a 20-page Denny’s menu.

Don’t just stand around waiting for J-Pow’s next “pivot.” Take your financial future into your own hands. Here’s how:

While the media was distracted by celebrities shilling crypto and NFTs, the big money continued to pour into traditional fine art. In fact, fine art sales exceeded digital art sales by more than 26x in 2021.

Why? Just re-read the headline. Plus, contemporary art prices have outpaced the S&P 500 by a whopping 131% over the last 26 years.

Now, with the invest platform Masterworks, over 550,000 people are getting access to investments in multi-million dollar art, for just a fraction of the price of the entire work. And they’re realizing serious results. Masterworks’ last exit realized a net annualized return of 33.1%.*

The Defiant readers can skip the waitlist with this exclusive referral link.

* Reflects annualized return on investment, net of all fees and expenses. Past performance is not indicative of future results. See important Regulation A disclosures.

Crypto Lending

👀 Startup Adapts Credit Default Swap Model to Unsecured Crypto Loans

Carapace Raises $2.5M in Round Led by NFX

By Owen Fernau

LORE Credit default swaps are the stuff of financial lore. These complex instruments played a role in the subprime mortgage crash of 2008 and featured in the celebrated account of that cataclysm, “The Big Short.”

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Stablecoins

⚙️ Aave Releases Technical Details Of GHO Stablecoin

Audit Finds No Critical Bugs

By Tarang Khaitan

AUDIT Aave Companies, the centralized entity that oversees DeFi’s leading lending protocol, hasreleased a technical paper on Aave’s upcoming GHO stablecoin, along with the results of its first security audit.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Defiant Video

📺 Quick Take: Sad Milestone – More than Half of Ethereum is Being Censored

DeFi Research

🧐 Polygon’s Embrace of ZK Testnet May Usher in Vibrant Season for Crypto

ZKSync’s Coming Mainnet Launch Underscores Mounting Activity for the Technology

By IntoTheBlock

On-Chain Markets Report by Gabriel Halm, IntoTheBlock

DAPPS: Polygon announced their zkEVM testnet with a bang on Oct 10th. Both Aave and Uniswap are deploying their dApps alongside Lens protocol and the gaming studio Midnight Society.

VOLUME Spotlighting influential DeFi protocols such as Aave and Uniswap help to convey that Polygon intends to be a serious contender in the zk-chain space. This news could also show why there was a surge in transaction volume for Polygon’s MATIC token the same day the testnet was announced.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Shoutout

Hey Anon, Yuga Labs is coming to Benzinga’s Future of Crypto conference. Are you?

Use codeDEFIANT30 to get 30% off tickets.

DeFi Explainers

🤔 What Is Cryptocurrency?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Blockchain-based Money

By Rahul Nambiampurath

FEATURES The 21st century arguably changed course with the advent of blockchain technology. One of its key features, of course, is cryptocurrency, the digital money powered by blockchain’s peer-to-peer (P2P) mechanics.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

Elsewhere

🔗 Do Kwon of Terra: ‘It Was Never Really About Money or Fame or Success’ – Ep. 408: Unchained

Do Kwon, cofounder of Terraform Labs, discusses the charges against him, gives a message to Terra victims, answers allegations about potential fraud and non-transparent business practices, and much more.

🔗 Jack Dorsey unveils decentralized social with algo choice and portable accounts: CoinTelegraph

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey have lifted the curtain on the latest iteration of its social protocol and a new Bluesky Social app — as part of its decentralized answer to Twitter.

A quick note on upgrading from KZG to STARKs in danksharding. Probably the right thing to do in ~3-6 years when the tech becomes more mature!https://t.co/yAgiUjEit8 pic.twitter.com/qkUFPMTN5I



— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 18, 2022

Trending in The Defiant

• Lido Co-Founder’s Comments Spark Debate Over Decentralization of EthereumLiquid staking giant Lido has come under fire after co-founder and chief technology officer Vasiliy Shapovalov said the hardware used to secure Ethereum should be professionally managed, infuriating an army of enthusiasts who operate such hardware at home, as well as several prominent Ethereum influencers.
• MakerDAO Poised to Break Up Into ‘MetaDAOs’ in Historic ShakeupIs MakerDAO, the No. 1 DeFi protocol, about to be broken up? That’s what is at stake in a flurry of votes taking place this week in the collateralized debt platform.
• Governance Project Uses ‘Contests’ to Help DAOs Improve DecisionmakingManaging DAOs may be one of the most serious issues in decentralized finance. Yet an outfit called jokedao is betting its unorthodox approach, and a dash of humor, may be just the trick.

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

Free subscribers to the newsletter get:

• Daily news briefings
• Sunday Weekly recap
• General chat on The Defiant’s Discord server

👑Prime defiers get:

• Full transcript of exclusive podcast interviews
• DeFi Alpha weekly newsletter on how to put your money to work in DeFi by yyctrader and DeFi Dad
• Weekly live DeFi Alpha call with yyctrader
• Inbox Dump edition of The Defiant newsletter every Saturday with all the PR that didn’t make it to our content channels
• Exclusive community calls with the team
• Subscriber-only chats on The Defiant Discord server
• Full access to The Defiant’s content archive

Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).

You can start a prime membership for free right now with this link. You’ll get full access for 7 days. It’s 100% risk-free.

👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers

🚰 Shortage of Goerli Testnet Ether Puts the Squeeze on Devs

With Ethereum Testnets Closing After The Merge Faucets Are Running Dry

By Samuel Haig

SHORTAGE Developers are hoarding Goerli testnet Ether, resulting in a widespread shortage of the coin, according to data from websites that distribute tokens.

PREMIUM As a result, developers must pay a premium to access what are intended to be freely distributed coins. Without Goerli ETH, devs cannot experiment on the test network, posing a threat to innovation on the Ethereum blockchain.

To read the full story subscribe to The Defiant newsletter.

Testnets are the cornerstone of healthy developer ecosystems. They allow devs to experiment before deploying their projects to the mainnet. Following The Merge, Goerli is one of only two testnets actively maintained by the Ethereum Foundation.

Just like on mainnet, testnet transactions incur fees that must be paid in the network’s native coin. Testnet ETH is distributed freely via faucets, which are websites that issue coins without charge to users.

Bot Operators

But opportunistic bot operators appear to be exhausting the supply of Goerli ETH. Moreover, the current shortage of Goerli ETH is probably being worsened by the impending expiration of many of Ethereum’s other testnets following The Merge.

The faucet maintained by Polygon’s Mudit Gupta is currently empty. Goerli Faucet has implemented identity checks to combat spam attacks and limits coin issuance to just 0.1 Goerli ETH daily — but many developers claim 0.1 ETH is not nearly enough to experiment with.

Stark Shortage

Facing a stark shortage of free testnet coins, many developers are coughing up funds to purchase Goerli ETH from opportunistic scalpers.

On Oct. 19, Dennison Bertram, a contributor to Tally, tweeted that Ether Goerli ETH is trading for $0.10 each. “The new testnet is a failure,” he said. “All the faucets are dry. You have to buy testnet ETH.”

Hilmarxo of the Gelato Network shared screenshots of direct messages from a Twitter user offering to sell 700 Goerli ETH at a whopping price of $0.5 each.

By contrast, Ethereum’s initial coin offering sold mainnet ETH for just $0.31 in 2014.

Airdrop Coins

Nnnnicholas of crowdfunding protocol Juicebox suggested that a large Goerli ETH holder should airdrop coins to developers that deployed on mainnet prior to The Merge in a bid to remedy the situation.

“Would at least put [Goerli ETH] in hands of existing devs,” they said.

“If someone can put together a credible list, I can find the funds,” replied Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation.

Beiko took the idea and ran with it. He created a Twitter poll asking if the community would prefer to reset wallet balances on Goerli to distribute a large balance to every address on the testnet, or to keep balances as they are at present.

Resetting Balances

More than half of respondents support resetting balances, with 22.5% opposing the proposal and 26% of participants abstaining.

Arboraeth expressed qualms with the plan though, stating “there’s a lot of deployed state for long-running tests on Goerli that would suck to lose.”

This isn’t the first time that Goerli ETH faucets have run dry. In February, Gupta tweeted that his Goerli faucet was running dry after receiving more than 1M requests in a single day, attributing the surge in demand to a mysterious Chinese whale reportedly accumulating the testnet coins.

100,000 Goerli ETH

“Apparently some Chinese billionaire believes Goerli ETH will become ETH2 so everyone’s trying to get Goerli ETH to sell it to him,” Gupta tweeted.

Ben Edgington of Consensys replied, sharing a screenshot of a message from someone asking to purchase 100,000 Goerli ETH for $3,000 at the time.

The shortage strikes as Ethereum shutters many other testnets in the wake of The Merge.

In June, the Ethereum Foundation announced that Ropsten, Ethereum’s longest-running Proof-of-Work testnet, would be shut down in the last quarter of 2022. The testnet also migrated to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum’s first testnet merge in June.

Migrate

Rinkeby, another popular testnet, is also scheduled to be closed in late 2023. However, the testnet did not transition to Proof of Stake and is no longer a suitable testing environment for Ethereum following The Merge last month. Kiln, a network dedicated to testing The Merge, was also shut down in September.

The Ethereum Foundation urged developers to migrate onto Goerli and Sepolia, stating it will continue to maintain and upgrade the networks to reflect changes to the Ethereum network for the foreseeable future.