In this week’s episode, I interview Jaime Rogozinski, founder of Wall Street Bets, the famous Reddit trading group which earlier this year organized to push up the price of heavily shorted stocks like Gamestop and AMC to create a short squeeze, which had the double benefit of amplifying the group’s gains and screwing over big hedge funds. Jaime goes…

Market-making deals are usually sorted out in private, but DeFi might be making headway for transparency. Wintermute proposed a market-making deal with MakerDAO on Friday via the MakerDAO governance forum. It requested a loan of 10,000 MKR ($24M) from the DAO in order to provide market-making services for both DAI and MKR, across all kinds…

DeFi DAOs have made some serious cash in 2021 — but generally only in their native tokens. Now they’re looking to diversify. Fueled by a combination of rising token prices and an explosion in fee revenues as DeFi continues to attract new users, the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that act as a management layer for…

In this week’s episode, I speak with John Crain, the co-founder & CEO of SuperRare, one of the top NFT marketplaces. SuperRare wants to differentiate itself by being the NFT marketplace that best curates art, specifically. John believes the natural evolution for NFT platforms will be to specialize in verticals. For example, the interface for art should…

The first major blockchain conference I attended in person was this July at EthCC 4 in Paris. It was an amazing experience. I met so many people and learned about so many projects and gathered perspectives on where Ethereum is headed. But there was one common theme that concerned me — this notion that DAOs…

A Uniswap governance proposal riled up the DeFi community this week.  The proposal, which has since been canceled, would have used yield generated from $25M in Uniswap treasury assets to pay employees at blockchain analytics platform Flipside Crypto. The payment would have been for Flipside to oversee a bounty program for pulling more users into…

Vitalik Buterin, criticized the state of on-chain governance today on his blog, arguing blockchain projects have become overly reliant on token-based voting as they try to become more decentralized.   Buterin wrote: “The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of…

It didn’t take long for DeFi’s rank-and-file to mobilize after the U.S. Senate ran roughshod over the community’s concerns last week. An array of players in decentralized finance are now marshaling forces to stand up for the industry. On Friday, August 13, the decentralized autonomous organization behind yield maximizer Yearn Finance authorized a transfer of…

DeFi’s latest DAO war is offering an inkling to just how thorny tokenized governance can get. Supporters of the tokenized risk protocol BarnBridge are upset as a proposal to list the project’s BOND token as collateral on lending platform Aave has been met with unexpected resistance from a handful of large token holders in the…

Uniswap is one of the few DeFi protocols that runs fully permissionlessly, without interruptions or possible human intervention. It’s considered to be the gold standard for the space, which is why it was so jarring when management behind the decentralized exchange decided to remove 100 tokens from its interface. Uniswap Labs is the software development…