Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:
News
- Lido Floods Layer 2s with Staked ETH After Launching Incentives Program
- Ether Turns Deflationary as Experimental Project Pushes Up Gas Prices
- MakerDAO To Deploy $500M In Treasuries And Corporate Bonds
News Analysis
👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers (📜Scroll to the end!)
Exploits
- Hacker Pockets $677,000 and Free Pass to Settle TransitFinance Exploit
- Seven Bored Apes Worth $700K Stolen
Podcast
🎙️Wintermute’s David Micley Says Institutional Investors Are Here To Stay
Video
DeFi Explainers
Elsewhere
- Has Proof of Stake Made Ethereum More Centralized?: Decrypt
- Crypto Investment Firm Blockwater Technologies Defaults on DeFi Loan: CoinDesk
- Calling all women and NB developers and builders in the Bay Area! Apply now to join us at #Blu3House for a jam-packed 6-day learning and pitching contest at #AvalancheCreates in 2 weeks!: Avalanche
Trending in The Defiant
- Starkware Founders: Ethereum Could Surpass Visa’s Transaction Speeds Within Months
- Sushi Rallies After GoldenTree Discloses $5M Position
- THORChain Breaks Free of Early Troubles With Avalanche Integration
The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($15/mo, $150/yr).
Staked ETH
🌊 Lido Floods Layer 2s with Staked ETH After Launching Incentives Program
Lido Scrambles to Counter Coinbase and Rocket Pool as Staked ETH Market Heats Up
INTEGRATION Lido is flooding Arbitrum and Optimism, Ethereum’s most popular scaling protocols, with its staked ETH tokens. And it’s set aside half a million dollars in incentives to do so. Less than a week after Lido announced its integration with Arbitrum and Optimism, the Layer 2 blockchains have received a combined $9M in wstETH.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Post-Merge ETH
⛽️ Ether Turns Deflationary as Experimental Project Pushes Up Gas Prices
XEN Accounts For More Than 40% Of Gas Used On Ethereum In The Past Day
By Owen Fernau
SUPPLY Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a month since The Merge, ETH supply has dropped by more than 2,000 digital tokens, according to ultrasound.money.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Sponsored Post
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Crypto Doxing
😡 Mad about the Celsius Customer Dox? Pray Your CeFi App Doesn’t Go Bankrupt
Bankruptcy Court’s Ruling Clashes With Crypto Privacy in Bellwether Case
INFURIATING At least they didn’t include home addresses. Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius disclosed the names and transaction histories of its customers in a court filing Wednesday, infuriating the privacy-obsessed crypto community, but drawing a shrug from experts who say that kind of disclosure is common in bankruptcy proceedings.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DAO Strategy
💰MakerDAO To Deploy $500M In Treasuries And Corporate Bonds
Move Comes Despite Founder’s Reservations About Real-World Assets
By Owen Fernau
INVEST The largest DeFi lender will soon invest up to $500M of USDC into U.S. treasuries and corporate bonds. A $1M test transaction has already been initiated with the full amount to follow shortly.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Exploit Bounties
🪲 Hacker Pockets $677,000 and Free Pass to Settle TransitFinance Exploit
Smart Contract Bug Opened Up Swap Aggregator to $29M Hack
DEAL In a deal that demonstrates the mounting influence of bounties in crypto exploits. TransitFinance, a cross-chain swap aggregator, announced on Oct. 10 it had reached an agreement with a hacker behind the $29M exploit of the protocol last week.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
NFT Exploits
🦹🏻♂️ Seven Bored Apes Worth $700K Stolen
Observers Suspects a Serial Scammer
By Owen Fernau
SCAM Yet another holder of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs has fallen prey to a phishing scam. The latest theft resulted in the loss of seven of the NFTs, each worth over $100,000 at current floor prices.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Defiant Video
📺 Quick Take: CZ says crypto is about “security” but BSC gets hacked anyway
Podcast Video
🎙📺 Institutions Still Lining Up to Trade Crypto During the Bear
Shoutout
Anthony Hopkins The Eternal NFT Collection
Orange Comet is proud to announce its distinguished partnership with Sir Anthony Hopkins and the launch of his first NFT series, The Eternal Collection
The NFT series will feature an exclusive once-in-a-lifetime IRL event for collectors, giving them access to engage with one of Hollywood’s greatest icons.
DeFi Explainers
🌌 What Is Aurora?
A Step-by-Step Guide to the Ethereum Compatibility Network
CHALLENGE More than half the traffic in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem runs is on Ethereum. This includes lending dApps, exchanges, blockchain games, and NFT marketplaces. So, how does a competitive blockchain challenge such a powerful first-mover advantage?
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Elsewhere
🔗 Has Proof of Stake Made Ethereum More Centralized?: Decrypt
Has the move to proof of stake made Ethereum more centralized and censorship-prone?
🔗 Crypto Investment Firm Blockwater Technologies Defaults on DeFi Loan: CoinDesk
South Korean blockchain investment firm Blockwater Technologies defaulted on a loan from TrueFi, a decentralized lending protocol, TrueFi said in a statement Sunday.
📣 Calling all women and NB developers and builders in the Bay Area! Apply now to join us at #Blu3House 🦋 for a jam-packed 6-day learning and pitching contest at #AvalancheCreates in 2 weeks!
This is gonna be so lit!🔥😎https://t.co/SOjdSmfOSc pic.twitter.com/Ev6ao2iQ99
— Blu3 DAO 🦋 #FlyWithBlu3 (@blu3dao) October 8, 2022
Trending in The Defiant
- Starkware Founders: Ethereum Could Surpass Visa’s Transaction Speeds Within Months Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson are the co-founders of Starkware, one of the leading scaling solutions for Ethereum.
- Sushi Rallies After GoldenTree Discloses $5M Position GoldenTree, a privately-held firm with $50B in assets under management, has bought and staked $5.2M worth of SUSHI tokens. The American asset manager disclosed its position on Oct. 5 in Sushi’s governance forum.
- THORChain Breaks Free of Early Troubles With Avalanche Integration Despite a rough start that would have killed many young companies, THORChain continues to build and raise capital, buoyed by its unique place in the crypto ecosystem.
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Samuel Haig, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.
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👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers
😳 SushiSwap’s Grey Hit By Wild Allegations of Impropriety
DEX’s New Head Chef Rejects ‘Untrue’ Accusations of Ripoffs and Bestiality
By Samuel Haig
TURMOIL Less than a week after SushiSwap sought to end a period of turmoil with the election of Jared Grey as head chef, the decentralized exchange was engulfed in controversy yet again as a series of extraordinary allegations were leveled at its new hire.
SCAMS On Oct. 11, a self-styled “ETH and DeFi enthusiast” called YannickCrypto accused Grey of being involved with multiple crypto scams. Then Twitter lit up with bizarre allegations that Grey had engaged in bestiality with a horse.
To read the full story subscribe to The Defiant newsletter.
In a thread, Grey denied the accusations. “I have always operated with integrity in this space,” he said. “I’ve had business failures, which [crypto Twitter] likes to scrutinize… However, baseless accusations are caustic and wrong.”
Grey did not respond to requests for comment from The Defiant.
Viral Marketing
SushiSwap appeared to make light of the bestiality accustion by posting an emoji of a horse on social media. “This all just viral marketing for the new Sushi stable coin and we fell for it,” tweeted Cobie, a crypto influencer with 742,000 Twitter followers.
Grey replied to Cobie, stating “It’s true; stable pools are coming this week.” SushiSwap retweeted the post.
Viral or not, this latest episode of finger pointing demonstrates that SushiSwap remains one of the most contentious projects in crypto. And it couldn’t come at a worse time. This year SushiSwap’s TVL has slid 87%, to $495M, compared to a 39% drop at its archrival, Uniswap.
On-Chain Vote
The Sushi community elected Grey to serve as its new head chef on Oct. 3, with the candidate receiving almost 84% of votes cast in an on-chain vote that was months in the making.
Grey won the vote by securing support from a handful of large SUSHI whales, with five wallets accounting for 95% of the votes supporting his hiring. The top wallet that participated in the vote, linked to the $47B wealth manager, Golden Tree, contributed 37% of the votes supporting Grey and almost a third of the total vote.
From 2018 to January, Grey was the CEO of Bitfineon, a centralized exchange that is now defunct. Grey also led EONS, a “decentralized ecosystem for financial services” from April 2020 to this May, according to Grey’s LinkedIn profile.
Payment Network
Prior to 2020, EONS operated under the name ALQO, and was billed as a payment network built on the proprietary Falqon blockchain.
ALQO has a troubled history. According to blog posts and tweets, Grey’s accuser YannickCrypto was an ALQO community member and said he knows Grey. In the Oct. 11 tweets, YannickCrypto alleged that Grey introduced a “Web Wallet” for ALQO that was used to steal 70% of the total token supply of ALQO users.
In addition, YannickCrypto said Bitfineon charged crypto founders 1 BTC to list their tokens on the exchange but pocketed the funds without listing the assets.
False Allegations
YannickCrypto also said that in 2021 Grey “scammed some people” and infringed copyrights through a company called MultiPlex PC.
Grey summarily rejected all of YannickCrypto’s allegations as false. “Let me be clear: the accusations towards me are 100% untrue,” he tweeted.
Grey said his business partner stole funds from the ALQO and Bitfineon community while he was raising money from investors to launch the Bitfineon exchange.
He shared a link to a 2019 Liberio blog post that said user balances had been compromised in its wallet and blamed ALQO’s and Bitfineon’s lead developer, Kevin Collmer, for “the loss of user funds.”
Collmer, who appears to be off of social media, could not be reached for comment.
For its part, SushiSwap did not make any statements on the allegations.