NFT Lending Resurgence: DeFi Week of May 21

Happy weekend Defiers! Here’s what we covered this week!

Blend, the new NFT lending protocol from upstart OpenSea competitor Blur, is driving a renaissance in the financialization of NFTs.

Despite launching at the start of the month, Blend accounts for 82% of the total NFT lending volume for May so far with more than $308M. Blend’s lending markets accounted for close to half of Blur’s total volume for the week, indicating investors are eager to do more with their NFT collections than just trade and hold them.

The MakerDAO community is considering a proposal to increase the DAI Savings Rate to 3.3% from 1%, a move that could influence rates across DeFi.

The Bitcoin-based Space Pepes is the top NFT collection by trade volume this week, beating out blue-chip Ethereum collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks. The popularity of Space Pepes follows the emergence of a booming market for both NFTs and fungible tokens on Bitcoin using the Ordinals coding method.

Prominent web3 teams are racing to find applications for artificial intelligence following the dramatic success of ChatGPT. Solana moved to cash in the technology this week with the launch of a ChatGPT plugin specializing in providing information on the Solana ecosystem. Solana also increased the funding available through its AI grants program from $1M to $10M.

The governance token of Multichain, the fifth-largest cross-chain bridge, plummeted by more than 50% this week as its bridge fails to process transactions. A lack of communication from the team has ignited rumors that Multichain’s founders may have been arrested, or, worse, be in the process of executing a massive rug-pull. More than $1.5B worth of crypto is currently held in Multichain’s smart contracts.

Sales of Trezor hardware wallets spiked 900% week-over-week as crypto holders were unnerved by Ledger’s controversial Recover feature.

And in this week’s podcast, Redstone co-founders, Jacob and Marcin, discuss the state of play for web3 oracles.

Enjoy!

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