Filecoin Early Investors Closer to Cashing Out
Also, Rally's RLY token launch, Lido enters ETH2 staking party, Polymarket goes to L2.
Hello Defiers! Here’s what’s happening,
- Filecoin token launches at many times the 2017 presale price
- Rally is the latest player in the creator coins space with RLY launch
- Lido wants to make ETH2 staking easier
- Polymarket moving to Layer 2 as volume climbs
- Vesper is latest platform aiming to simplify DeFi investing
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[AN EARLIER VERSION OF THE STORY WAS CORRECTED to reflect early investors have lockup periods and that Filecoin raised $205M in 2017.]
Clock Starts Ticking for Filecoin Investors to Cash Out
Filecoin had a record-breaking $205M token sale in the 2017 boom days, promising to bring decentralized file sharing to the world, but all investors had to show for it in the three years since, was FIL token IOUs as the project repeatedly delayed its launch.
The day finally came yesterday, and for many, it was probably worth the wait.
FIL jumped to as high as $114 in the hours after it was listed, according to Coingecko. That’s about 100 times higher than what early VCs and accredited investors were able to buy three years ago. On Thursday the clock for the day to cash out started ticking, as early investors have 6-month to 3-year vesting periods.
Filecoin’s token has more than halved from its peak and is now trading at around $46. With a circulating supply of ~15M, its market cap is at almost $800M, already within the 30 most valuable coins in crypto. Its max supply of 2B puts its fully diluted valuation at a whopping $100B.
Andreessen & Sequoia
The project had raised venture capital from around 150 investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Winklevoss Capital, who were able to buy the token at $0.75, and another ~$200M at an ICO limited only to accredited investors, who were able to buy the token for between $1 and $6.
FIL is used to incentivize a distributed network which provides file sharing and storage, and aims to become a cheap and censorship-resistant way of storing data.
Filecoin is the latest of major ICOs to finally deliver (others this year include Polkadot and OMG), chipping away at the narrative that token sales of the boom days were all scams.
🌱 Sign Up for Seed Club Hackathon!
Seed Club Hackathon (from @seedclubhq) is a two-week hackathon for developers to build tools for creators and their social token based projects. There are Over $10k in bounties/prizes - register here https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/seed-club-hacks/onboard
Rally Launches RLY Token with Delegated Vault Mining
Rally has released its native governance token RLY to become a backbone for creators to issue their own tokens.
As a platform home to a number of rising Twitch streamers and professional athletes dipping their toes into the world of web3, Rally offers easy access to social token creation using bonding curves for price discovery and fiat on-ramps for onboarding.
All creator coins issued on the platform are bonded with RLY tokens, meaning a creator must bond more RLY to their token to issue, and subsequently distribute additional tokens. RLY governance will be used to decide which new creators are onboarded, the first of many use cases unveiled with yesterday's launch.
In its first day of trading RLY is priced at $0.15 on Uniswap, with just ~$3k of liquidity on the RLY-ETH pair.
In the spirit of DeFi, users who deposit supported stablecoins and LP tokens - the tokens traders get in exchange for depositing liquidity into Yearn Finance - into Rally Yield Delegated Vaults are eligible to earn RLY in an ongoing rewards program set to distribute 3.3% of the total supply.
“For Rally's community to have long term success, we wanted to design a community treasury that could grow over time and serve as an endowment to the mission.” Rally founder Kevin Chou told The Defiant. “YFI vaults enabled us to distribute $RLY to early community members and establish the endowment balancing risk, return and security.”
Interest earned from lending tokens accrues to a community treasury, used to seed capital for future protocol usage.The first use case will be to bond new creator tokens with RLY. $5M has been deposited into the Vaults since its launch yesterday morning.
Kevin Chou @KevinChou1/2 Almost $5M deposited into @iearnfinance vaults since 9am PST today via Rally's Yield Delegating Vaults! A lot of $RLY is being earned by the crypto community Liquidity mining on Balancer and Uniswap will go live tomorrow at ~9am PST. 38 $RLY a block will be emitted11:00 PM ∙ Oct 15, 202022Likes4Retweets
While it's still early for the rising social token issuer, the commitment to transparency, decentralization and web3 treasury management goes to show this project is really leaning into many of the valuable primitives that have come to light in recent months.
Lido Enters the ETH2 Staking Conversation
Lido wants to make it easier to stake ETH during the initial phase of Ethereum’s biggest-ever overhaul.
Developers are planning to release Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0, which will allow ETH holders to deposit their tokens in the new proof of stake network in exchange for yield in the form of block rewards. But there are two main problems Lido is aiming to solve: ETH will be locked until further phases of the transition, and it can only be staked in multiples of 32.
Lido @lidofinanceIntroducing Lido 🏝️ medium.com/lido-finance/i…
medium.comIntroducing LidoIn the next few weeks, Ethereum is expected to launch ETH 2.0 and begin the transition to proof of stake (PoS) as discussed in the original Ethereum whitepaper. PoS networks are not new. Although…3:17 PM ∙ Oct 15, 2020594Likes99Retweets
Lido plans to offer a means to stake ETH and receive a transferable asset called bETH that collects staking rewards and is freely transferable in the DeFi ecosystem. It will also allow holders to pool their ETH with others to hit the 32 ETH mark.
“(bETH) effectively acts as a bridge bringing ETH 2.0’s staking rewards to ETH 1.0.” states the blog post.
Given the project is backed by the infamous Twitter persona Crypto Cobaine, Lido has naturally gained a lot of attention despite limited insight into the protocol’s inner workings.
Alongside Lido are projects like Rocket Pool, a community owned staking pool currently undergoing its Medalla beta today. With the recent introduction of RPIP3 and incentives for validators and stakers through RPL rewards, it’ll be interesting to watch where Lido’s savvy marketing sits in the growing landscape of solutions to participate in ETH2 staking with as little one gwei.
Prediction Markets Platform Polymarket Joins Layer 2
Rising prediction market Polymarket has taken their talents to Layer 2 to offer free trades with instant execution, credit card support and email logins.
The prediction market allows users to purchase binary options (Yes or No, Long or Short) using USDC. The outcome of a given market is determined by buyers’ participation on a specific outcome.
“Everyone talks about the potential of Layer 2, but the new version of the Polymarket Beta lets anyone actually experience it for themselves.” Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan told The Defiant. “The sign ups and unique active traders the first day blew us away and drained our relayers multiple times.”
Despite being a new contender on the block, Polymarket’s Stage 2 upgrade seems to have found product market fit with a growing crypto-adjacent audience, best illustrated by markets around the presidential election.ty
Polymarket @PolymarketHQthe Trump Election market on Polymarket shot past $100k volume tonight, with Trump "Yes" shares rising early, then falling to 45% god bless America #Debates2020 https://t.co/tZi3yDXQv73:39 AM ∙ Sep 30, 202038Likes8Retweets
What's unique is that Polymarket’s active markets largely do not have anything to do with crypto, with the exception of a market on DeFi Pulse’s TVL at the end of 2020. This strategy emphasizes that Polymarket is not meant to only be for crypto users, rather it showcases a crypto product that offers a superior non-custodial prediction market experience for users of all demographics.
While prediction markets have historically struggled to aggregate volume, it's worth giving credence to Polymarket for having found it even without yield farming incentives or a native governance token.
Ex Bitcoin Dev Jeff Garzik Builds DeFi Investment Platform
DeFi trading strategies are growing increasingly more complex. Bloq co-founder and former Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik is launching Vesper to provide an easier gateway into open finance investing.
The first products within the Vesper ecosystem are “Holding Pools,” which allow users to select the asset and the pool that meets their objectives. Assets are pooled and automatically deployed to other DeFi protocols based on the selected trategy. Interest earned is used to buy back more of the underlying asset.
The first pools, which the project plans to launch mid November, are for ETH, WBTC, and USDC. The code has been audited by two independent auditors.
Vesper users are rewarded with VSPR governance tokens, by participating in Holding Pools, providing liquidity to VSPR trading pairs and staking in the vVSPR governance pool.
There’s an AMM versus order book debate going on in crypto Twitter. Here’s one of the most interesting threads.
SBF @SBF_Alameda1) Can you fix AMMs?7:25 PM ∙ Oct 15, 2020184Likes35Retweets
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 at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.
About the founder and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.
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