Money Legos Can Help You Get Paid for Zoom Calls

Hello Defiers and happy Friday! Here’s what’s going in in decentralized finance:

• Coinbase launches price oracle
• Decentralized options market maturing with new platform launch
• Perpetual contracts all the rage and traders are jumping in untested platform
• @DeFi_Dad’s tutorial on how to get paid for your Zoom call using 2Key Network’s solution

🙌 Together with Ampleforth, a digital asset protocol for a base money which doesn’t require collateral and is uncorrelated with the rest of crypto.

Coinbase Launches Price Oracle for DeFi

Coinbase launched a price oracle for decentralized finance applications. The price feed for BTC-USD and ETH-USD markets is sourced from Coinbase Pro API, signed by Coinbase’s private key, and updates each minute.

To highlight

• Coinbase is solidifying its position as the most DeFi-friendly centralized exchange. Other DeFi efforts: Support MKR and COMP governance, providing millions of liquidity in its USDC stablecoin for DeFi protocols, integrating DeFi lending platforms to its wallet so users can gain interest.
• Coinbase is one of the most regulatory compliant, liquid and longest-standing cryptocurrency exchanges. Still, its price feed system requires dapps to trust in the accuracy and timeliness of one source of data —hardly a decentralized solution.

Oracles are the way computer programs in blockchain apps communicate with the outside world —they feed these dapps with the information they need to work correctly. Faulty oracles have caused or contributed to most DeFi attacks. Reliable and timely price feeds will be key for DeFi to grow.

Users of Coinbase’s oracle solution can publish prices on-chain and verify the authenticity of the data with Coinbase’s Price Oracle public key. The oracle filters data points that significantly deviate from the expected volatility of each asset. Coinbase’s price feed is designed to be compatible with Open Oracle , which Compound Finance developed to enable different sources of oracle price data to work together.

Hegic Launches Options Market for DeFi

The DeFi hedging market is maturing. Hegic, a non-custodial protocol, which is open to anyone (read: no KYC or email registration required), launched a market for ETH put and calls.

Options contracts help traders protect against or speculate on assets’ volatility. Hegic’s platform launch signals growth in the still small DeFi options market. Opyn, which holds just over $1 million in assets, is the only other decentralized options trading platform.

This is how it works: Users can select any strike price for the contracts, which represents a bet on the future price of ETH. With ETH put options, traders have the option to sell ETH at a fixed price and profit if the price of ETH falls. With call options, traders have the option to buy at a fixed price and profit is the price of ETH rises. It can serve as market-based insurance in risky DeFi trading.

Futureswap Warns Users

Perpetual futures are all the rage now with dYdX launching its BTC/USD contracts this week, and traders jumping on Futureswap, an untested platform offering 20x leverage. Futureswap hasn’t been audited and its code isn’t open source. The platform itself was alarmed by all the attention, and warned users to be careful.

Futureswap Exchange @futureswapx🚨ALERT!🚨 Since launching at 2pm PDT Monday in ALPHA mode, we have seen $13M+ trade volume and $1M+ liquidity. We are blown away by the support! ❤️ BUT: this is an *ALPHA*. PLEASE EXERCISE CAUTION! 🙏9:08 PM ∙ Apr 23, 202074Likes10Retweets

How To: Use Money Legos to Get Paid for Zoom Sessions

By: @DeFi_Dad for The Defiant

In light of the seismic shifts in society brought on by COVID19, an Israeli-based team developing solutions on Ethereum called 2key Network recognized a way that their technology could be used to empower small businesses and entrepreneurs with a launch-ready paywall for Zoom, requiring no code called Zoom SmartSessions.

2key focuses on embedding smart contracts in links for tracking, recording, and rewarding every interaction. Think of them like hyperlinks that work with DeFi money legos!

When I first heard from Head of Business Development, Ben Lakoff about this new product, I immediately thought about my own guitar teacher and about fitness instructors and yoga teachers who are reaching their base during this pandemic using Zoom chats. Many of these entrepreneurs and businesses are desperate to adapt and a big part of that is handling digital payments.

2key Zoom SmartSessions helps guarantee those payments, as it allows businesses and creators to “pre-sell” access to video sessions and automatically process payments in ETH. Stablecoin payments in DAI, USDT, and TUSD are supposedly coming in May!

If you're a small business or an entrepreneur looking to monetize your Zoom sessions, here's a step-by-step guide for how you can set up a Zoom call that includes the payment process and automatically gives access to those who already purchased entry to your live video session, using 2key SmartSessions. You can even incentivize clients to promote your live Zoom sessions with a 2key Refer-a-Friend SmartLink.

1. First, go here and click Create a Zoom SmartSession Now.

2. Sign up with your email or an account below.

3. Click the confirmation in your email.

4. You should see a screen like this. Click Create my Wallet.

5. I would recommend connecting MetaMask unless you prefer to create a new 2key wallet, which means managing a seed phrase for a new Web3 wallet.

6. After 2-3 signatures in MetaMask, you arrive at your wallet connected to the 2key interface.

7. If you click Page in the top left header, you'll see this. Click Create your Page.

8. Fill in the simple information below. Think of it like you're creating a Facebook business page but instead on 2key.

9. Now you can customize your Page. I simply uploaded my profile pic and background cover photo. Check out mine!

10. You are ready to Start a Campaign (aka create a SmartSession). Find in the left hamburger menu. It's a button in multiple places on your Page.

11. Before you link your Zoom account and click the green button below, 2key just reiterates the most important facts:

• We're going to create a SmartLink that automates payments to my Zoom SmartSessions
• It will give access to those who already purchased entry.
• It requires no coding or upfront fee, but 2key does deduct a 2% fee automatically from all payments, ie $0.20 if you charge $10/session.
• Lastly, they have this clever concept of 2key Refer-A-Friend SmartLink, which incentivizes clients to promote your live sessions.

12. Sign into your Zoom account or make a Zoom account for free so you can approve Zoom working with your 2key Campaigns (aka ZoomSession SmartLinks).

13. Then when you return to 2key, you may have to reconnect your wallet if you used MetaMask like me vs 2key wallet for your Page. All the page funds and tokens will be received and managed in this connected Web3 wallet within 2key. It'll require 2 signatures in MetaMask.

14. Now, you can create your SmartSession information page, including a text editor as well as convenient social media links/icons, plus website links to promote your business/session. See my example below "DeFi Dad Daily DeFi Dojo" and then linked below that my Twitter account.

15. Next, choose your session start time (ie Apr 24 at 12:00 pm), the length (ie 40 mins), and when the sale of your session should start (ie Apr 24).

16. There's a very clever referral mechanism built in called 2key Refer-a-Friend.

• You can grant up to 20% of your own SmartSession fee to your clients who refer a friend.
• You can dictate whether the client earning the referral reward keeps the whole reward or forwards a portion of it to their friend attending.

17. Before submitting your SmartSession (aka deploying a smart contract on Ethereum), carefully review the details of your SmartSession. Keep in mind, once you click “Deploy Contract,” it's impossible to modify the contract and your campaign name, title, and category, and all your campaign parameters are recorded on the smart contract and deployed on the blockchain and can never be modified. See my own SmartSession below!

18. Lastly, click Deploy Contract!

• 2key will tell you almost exactly how much ETH you require. My SmartSession was a little over 0.04 ETH at $185 ETH price today.
• 2key will remind you if you're in need of ETH to deploy the smart contract, which is why my button below for Deploy Contract is gray.
• You can either send ETH to your wallet address using the convenient hyperlink below from 2key or use the 2key platform to buy ETH with your credit card using the link circled in red below.

19. Once you click Deploy Contract, you need to keep your window open during this time to sign about 4 signatures in MetaMask, then a transaction (in my case around 0.04 ETH), a 5th signature, and then another small gas fee with 0 ETH.

• Be patient and whatever you do, do not leave or abandon this window until it shows you a published SmartSession page.
• Pay special attention to your MetaMask extension as you'll have multiple transactions show up in a row.

20. After about 3-5 mins, you are automatically taken to this this screen when you're all done. Congratulations! You can Edit some of your SmartSession copy if needed and then click the big green button to Publish SmartSession!

21. Aside from your Zoom SmartSession link, 2key has provided every possible way to share your SmartSession. See my own Share your Zoom SmartSession page below.

If you'd like to check out mine, I created an example SmartSession to happen Friday April 24th at 12 pm PST. Please comment on Twitter @DeFi_Dad, @benlakoff (Head of BD), and @2keynetwork if you have troubles or questions.

22. Viewers pay by clicking onto this registration page in advance. Basically, they've enabled Zoom to have a component with a paywall to pay in ETH. You can use your credit card on 2key but you're just topping up your wallet with ETH (using Simplex) and then paying in ETH, which is a pretty big adoption obstacle. However, they're implementing stablecoins soon.

If you click Register you should be able to pay for $5USD of ETH.

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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.

About the author: I’m Camila Russo, a financial journalist writing a book on Ethereum with Harper Collins. (Pre-order The Infinite Machine here). I was previously at Bloomberg News in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires covering markets. I’ve extensively covered crypto and finance, and now I’m diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.