DeFi Takes Over ICOs, Zilliqa Adds Chainlink Oracles, NBA Token Collectibles

Good morning defiers! This is what’s up in decentralized finance:

• DeFi takes over ICOs
• Zilliqa integrates Chainlink oracles
• NBA and Dapper Labs launching collectibles

DeFi Takes Over ICOs as Ethereum Killer App

Decentralized finance platforms are holding about 4.6 million ETH, about twice as much as the 2.3 million ETH held by ICOs, according to Mythos Capital founder Ryan Sean Adams.

Ether held by ICOs’ has halved from last year, putting pressure on the cryptocurrency’s price as teams sold off their stash. At the same time though, ether held in DeFi soared from about 390,000. Now DeFi has completely made up for ICOs’ ether sell-off, meaning ICO selling pressure on the ether price should have completely faded.

It’s worth noting that much of the ETH locked in DeFi is from the same ICO teams using their holdings as collateral for loans they can use as working capital.

Some ether bulls will point out supply will likely keep shrinking once the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 kicks in (est. Jan 2020) and validators are able to stake their ether in the new proof-of-stake chain.

Sharding Blockchain Zilliqa Integrates Chainlink Oracles

The Zilliqa blockchain yesterday said it’s integrating with decentralized oracle network Chainlink. Zilliqa smart contracts will be able to retrieve and query external data feeds through a custom Chainlink adapter, enabling access to real-time information such as exchange rates, market prices, voting results, weather forecasts, etc., without the need of a third party in charge of manually updating the data.

Smart contracts won’t be of much use if they can’t automatically react to outside events and oracle malfunctions can cause apps to crash, so having a trustworthy, fail-proof systems to connect blockchains to the outside world will be key for decentralized applications to move forward. The fact that big companies like Google and Swift have also partnered with Chainlink, is one indication the network may be a good solution.

Zilliqa is an interesting blockchain to watch, as it’s one of the first to use sharding, which allowed for more than 2,800 transactions per second on its testnet, compared with Etheruem’s ~15. But it launched on mainnet juts five months ago and doesn’t support many dapps yet, so it might take some time to see the results of the Chainlink integration.

Like Baseball Cards, but for Basketball and Tokenized

The NBA and CryptoKitties creator Dapper Labs are launching NBA Top Shot, a digital platform that will allow fans to own tokenized versions of the season’s best moves, acquire players and build rosters. Users actually own these tokens. That means they can be traded and used on games provided on any platforms, not necessarily from Dapper Labs or the NBA.

Unlike other NFTs created by Dapper Labs, like CryptoKitties and Cheeze Wizards, which were more crypto-specific, this effort is aimed at a broader audience. “At more than $6B a year, it is the number three global sport by revenue. And with more than 825M global fans, it is the number seven most popular sport in the world,” wrote venture investor David Pakman on his post about the announcement.

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