📉 OpenSea Volume Sinks to 13-Month Low

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:

News

• OpenSea Volume Sinks to 13-Month Low

• ‘Real Yield’ Emerges As A New DeFi Trend

• Jump Crypto To Overhaul Solana

• Aave May Shun Post-Merge PoW Ethereum Forks

Video

• Tutorial: Earn and Learn with Vitalik’s favorite stablecoin: RAI

Elsewhere

• Is the Merge Priced In? with Hal Press & Ryan Berckmans: Bankless

• US Fed Opens Pathway for Crypto Banks to Tap Central Banking System: Coindesk

• Celsius approved to access mined bitcoin to meet operational expenses: The Block

• The first deployment of Compound III is a USDC market on Ethereum. The contracts are on mainnet, and can be activated by Compound Governance: Compound Labs

Trending in The Defiant

• Growing List Of DeFi Apps Ban Tornado Cash Users

• Royalty-Free Sudoswap Is Finding Favor With NFT Traders

• Dev Pinpoints Exact Minute The Merge Goes Live

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NFT Market

📉 OpenSea Volume Sinks to 13-Month Low

Dismal Numbers at OpenSea May Augur Long Winter for NFT Market

By Samuel Haig

NEWS In a sign the NFT market is enduring a brutal winter, OpenSea’s trading volume plunged to its lowest level in 13 months on Tuesday. OpenSea, the No. 1 NFT marketplace, handled $6.5M worth of trades, a fraction of the $204M executed at its peak in February, according to data from DappRadar. 

WAY DOWN The number of transactions on the site has also plunged by two-thirds in the last six months. As for active players, that, too, is way down with 15,220 traders on the marketplace, a 70% dive from the heady days of February. 

HUMOR OpenSea is not the only platform in the dumps. Volume on NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs’ NFT sports series, is down 87.4% from its high of $3.17M on April 29. There’s plenty of gallows humor in the NFT space.

ART “I’m here for the art,” Twitter user apebayc tweeted sarcastically after watching the value of their NFT portfolio slump from $1M to $300,000 in the last 12 months. Bubz0088 replied that their portfolio was worth just $10 after investing $30,000 into NFTs.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

DeFi Revenue

👀 ‘Real Yield’ Emerges As A New DeFi Trend

Protocols Like Redacted, Umami and GMX Share Revenue In ETH and Stablecoins

By:Owen Fernau

YIELD Whether it’s DeFi 2.0 or ultrasound money, crypto loves its narratives. The latest one is “real yield,” which, like the DeFi trends before it, is being touted in both substantive and vaporous ways. 

STAKING Real yield is a share of a protocol’s revenue, denominated in a mainstream asset like ETH or USDC, which holders of a protocol’s governance tokens can access by staking or locking them. If this sounds like a dividend, you’re not far off. For many DeFi users left holding governance tokens down 80% or more off all-time highs, cash flow in ETH or stablecoins is a welcome change. 

FUELED The concept of real yield contrasts with the ponzi-esque APYs of 2021, when people barely batted an eye at four-digit yields. Those returns were broadly fueled by projects’ native tokens, which would be distributed at unsustainable rates in order to attract users’ deposits. 

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

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Blockchain Engineering

🛠 Jump Crypto To Overhaul Solana

A New Open-Source Validator Client Is Planned

By Claire Gu

SPEED Jump Crypto will work with the Solana Foundation to develop a new open-source validator client for Solana in an effort to boost the speed and reliability of the network.

CRUCIAL Validators are responsible for verifying transactions on a blockchain and thus are crucial to a blockchain’s efficiency and security. This ambitious plan is called Firedancer and is set to take up to 24 months to complete, with a goal of “drastically increasing Solana’s networking throughput, resiliency and efficiency”, according to the statement from Jump Crypto. Solana has suffered multiple outages in the past year.

STOLEN The crypto arm of proprietary trading firm Jump Trading was launched in September 2021 and has been a key supporter of the Solana project. It stepped in to reimburse over $300M worth of crypto assets stolen when the Wormhole bridge was exploited earlier this year.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Merge

😒 Aave May Shun Post-Merge PoW Ethereum Forks

Aave DAO Weighs Proposal to Commit To Proof-of-Stake Ethereum

By Jason Levin

SHIFT Aave may shift exclusively to the Proof-of-Stake version of Ethereum that will be rolled out after completion of The Merge on Sept. 14.

FORKED According to a proposal floated Tuesday by members of the DAO governing the DeFi money market, the organization will consider whether to commit to the new version of the Ethereum mainnet and shun any forked versions that continue to use the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism that has maintained the blockchain since it went live in 2015.

LENDING In other words, if passed, the Aave protocol will be shut down on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) Ethereum chain. With $7.45B in total value locked (TVL), Aave is the third-largest DeFi app in the world. Headquartered in London, it runs a decentralized non-custodial lending protocol where users can participate by borrowing or depositing assets. It was founded by Stani Kulechov and launched initially as ETHLend in a 2017 ICO, but rebranded to Aave in September 2018.

👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈

The Tube

📺 Tutorial: Earn and Learn with Vitalik’s favorite stablecoin: RAI

Elsewhere

🔗 Is the Merge Priced In? with Hal Press & Ryan Berckmans: Bankless

Video discussion of The Merge’s impact on ETH.

🔗 US Fed Opens Pathway for Crypto Banks to Tap Central Banking System: Coindesk

The U.S. Federal Reserve said Monday it is publishing its final guidance for novel financial institutions to access its “master accounts,” something these firms need to participate in the global payment system.

🔗 Celsius approved to access mined bitcoin to meet operational expenses: The Block

A bankruptcy court judge approved Celsius’s plans to sell bitcoin it’s mined to fund its operations, despite considerable opposition from the US Trustee appointed to the case.

https://twitter.com/compoundfinance/status/1559316506978172929?s=20&t=NFwfDLQJPZ8glzId9BVOoA

Trending in The Defiant

• Growing List Of DeFi Apps Ban Tornado Cash Users Several dapps on Ethereum have started to ban users in the wake of sanctions levied on Tornado Cash. Major protocols currently include Circle, dYdX, Aave, Uniswap, and Balancer.

• Royalty-Free Sudoswap Is Finding Favor With NFT Traders With all the regulatory news threatening fundamental tenets of DeFi, it’s easy to forget about NFTs. Not everyone has forgotten, however, as NFT traders pushed cumulative trading volume on sudoAMM, a recently launched NFT marketplace, over $10M on Aug. 11.

• Dev Pinpoints Exact Minute The Merge Goes Live First it was the third quarter. Then it was sometime in September. Next it was around Sept. 15. Now we know the precise minute The Merge, the most sweeping upgrade in Ethereum’s history, will take place: 20:57:34 U.K. time, on Sept. 14.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s beinglt on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access, while free signups get only part of the content.Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr.