Welcome to the first Global Digital Finance x The Defiant column, bringing you the stories and discussions that have caught our eye this month.  From market infrastructure to institutional investors to the digitalization of private markets, we’ll look at how decentralization is reshaping traditional finance. .  ETPs showing that Digital assets are ‘here to stay’ Bitcoin-indexed…

Lots of laser eyes….but little actual legislation, at least for now.  El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender this week has captured the imagination of lawmakers across Latin America. That’s no surprise considering the region, long plagued by underdevelopment and volatile politics, has struggled to enfranchise its citizens in the global financial system, with…

Ever since El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele activated his laser eyes and made Bitcoin the nation’s legal tender this week, crypto communities have been gushing about this latest milestone. But in his bid to provide his citizens with more financial freedom, did Bukele pick the wrong token?   Stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that peg their value to…

They just couldn’t resist.  Many Bitcoin diehards disdain other digital tokens but when it comes to capturing yields it’s hard not to embrace Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. With wrapped Bitcoin’s total supply at 187,610, the leading form of Bitcoin on Ethereum constitutes over 1% of BTC’s overall supply which stands at 18.729M at the time of…

This is a weekly tutorial on the most compelling opportunities to consider yield farming, written by our friend DeFi Dad, an advisor to the Defiant and member of the core team at Zapper. The goal is to expose more Defiant readers to new DeFi applications and their associated liquidity mining programs. Background on Protocol: For…

What were they thinking? When billionaires Elon Musk and Michael Saylor met behind closed doors with some of North America’s biggest Bitcoin miners on May 24 they were asking for trouble. The two Bitcoin champions were certainly confronting a big problem: In recent weeks the long simmering concerns about the soaring amount of power consumed…

After 14 days of mayhem in the crypto markets, DeFi investors have stopped hyperventilating.   Yes, it’s true that Ether lost more than half its value in the last two weeks, hitting $1,853 on May 23. That’s a pretty heavy drop even in the wild and woolly world of crypto. Then it jumped 40% to $2,591…

It’s been a rough week for the crypto market̶ and it appears to be at the hands of “n00bs.”  Ethereum’s ETH is down 15% from its all-time high of $4,356 on May 12, trading just above $3,300 at the time of writing. And Bitcoin has been hit especially hard with a 25% loss over the…

The so-called “Kimchi Premium,” the difference between Bitcoin’s price on South Korean exchanges versus the international price spiked to 23% before dropping to roughly 14% at the time of writing. This meant that BTC traded for almost $70K on Apr. 5 in South Korea, while the price was around $58K internationally. The 23% peak is…

The highest amount of Bitcoin options ever is set to expire this Friday, which might put some temporary selling pressure on the largest cryptocurrency. $5.5B in options contracts come due tomorrow, according to derivatives data platform Bybt. Options are investment contracts which give traders the right but not the obligation to sell or buy a…