Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:
News
- New PoW Ethereum Fork Plunges 75% Amid Flurry of Problems
- Exchanges Resume ETH Transfers After Successful Merge
Markets
👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers (📜Scroll to the end!)
NFT Roundup
Podcast
Video
DeFi Explainers
Elsewhere
- Post-Merge Question From The SEC: Is ETH Under Proof-Of-Stake A Security?: Bitcoinist
- Yuga Labs hopes to make $50M with new Mecha Apes collection: Protos
- It’s hurts, make the pain go away!: Arthur Hayes
Trending in The Defiant
- The Merge Goes Live in Historic Upgrade for Ethereum
- Miners Pile Into Ethereum Classic Minutes After Merge as Hashrate Spikes 71%
- What The Merge Means For Proof-of-Work Miners
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Post-Merge Action
📉 New PoW Ethereum Fork Plunges 75% Amid Flurry of Problems
ETHPoW Leaves Miners Fuming in Post-Merge Debut
By Samuel Haig
TROUBLED START The Merge may have launched without a hitch but ETHPoW, the Proof of Work fork of Ethereum aimed at die-hard miners, is off to a troubled start. In its first 24 hours, its ETHW coin has lost three-quarters of its value and users are complaining they cannot access the network using the information provided by the ETHPoW team, according to reports on Twitter.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Market Action
😬 ETH Plummets Post-Merge as DeFi Chugs Along
Ether Is Down Nearly 10% In The Past 24 Hours
By Owen Fernau
DROP Maybe the Merge was a sell-the-news event after all. ETH has fallen just under 10% in the past 24 hours, while Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has only dropped 2%. The DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), the largest index focused on DeFi, is down 6%.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Sponsored Post
Trailing Stop now available to MakerDAO and Liquity users
Fans of Maker and Liquity protocols can now rely on the advanced trailing stop strategy for managing their DeFi positions using DeFi Saver, an all-in-one dashboard for sophisticated DeFi management.
A trailing stop is a dynamic type strategy that allows users to configure a percentage drop from peak market value that would trigger the full closing of a position once reached. While with a standard Stop loss, a position would get closed at a fixed price, a Trailing stop actively follows any upward market movements by the set percentage, instead continuously increasing the stop price.
The new strategy is another in the series of automated trading strategies introduced to MakerDAO and Liquity by DeFi Saver, following Stop loss and Take Profit. Setting up is straightforward. Existing Maker and Liquity users need to visit DeFi Saver and switch to the Automate tab in the dedicated protocol dashboard. Users just need to input the percentage that they want the stop price to be below the reached market peak and to select the asset to which they want their position to be closed (e.g. collateral asset or debt asset).
A trailing stop is a great method to reduce losses or lock in profits. For example, when one is using these lending protocols to go long on ETH. It’s recommended to combine a trailing stop with a standard stop loss to further minimize potential losses in case of a market downturn. Users can find both of these options available in the dedicated protocol dashboards within the DeFi Saver app.
Check out the new Trailing Stop automation for Maker and Liquity by DeFi Saver.
CeFi
🧮 Exchanges Resume ETH Transfers After Successful Merge
Deposits And Withdrawals Of ETH and ERC-20 Tokens Have Been Restarted
RELATED TOKENS Centralized crypto exchanges have re-enabled withdrawals and deposits of Ether and related tokens on Thursday, after a brief pause due to uncertainty surrounding the Merge, Ethereum’s biggest upgrade in its seven-year history.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
NFT Roundup
🏆 NFT Collector Spends $50,000 To Immortalize Ethereum’s Last PoW Block
Starbucks Makes Web3 Move on Polygon
By yyctrader
MEMENTO Yesterday, as crypto enthusiasts watched Ethereum transition to Proof of Stake consensus without skipping a beat, one investor decided that the occasion merited a serious memento.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Podcast
🎙 Robert Lauko: Building The Forefront of Decentralization
Defiant Video
📺 The Defiant Weekly: Hours After The Merge — What Happened?
DeFi Explainers
🎁 What Is Wrapped Bitcoin?
A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Bitcoin on the Ethereum Network
TRANSFERRED Incompatibility is inevitable when you have dozens of blockchain networks with their own smart contract formatting. This is why Bitcoin cannot simply be transferred to Ethereum in its original state. Bitcoins can be wrapped as Ethereum-compatible ERC-20 tokens, making that into Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC).
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Elsewhere
🔗 Post-Merge Question From The SEC: Is ETH Under Proof-Of-Stake A Security?: Bitcoinist
We’re in a post-merge world. And the SEC is looking at Ethereum once again after the substantial changes it recently went through.
🔗 Yuga Labs hopes to make $50M with new Mecha Apes collection: Protos
According to a leaked document seen by Protos, Yuga Labs intends to launch a new collection of NFTs by the end of this year called Mecha Apes with the intention of raising another $50 million and 100,000 metaverse land pieces.
It’s hurts, make the pain go away! 😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳😳🤷🏿♀️🤷🏿♀️ pic.twitter.com/Q82scJ5iZL
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) September 16, 2022
Trending in The Defiant
- The Merge Goes Live in Historic Upgrade for Ethereum It’s done. The Merge was activated at 6:43 AM UTC time. The long-awaited upgrade to Ethereum occurred at block height 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000, unifying the Proof of Stake, ‘Eth2’ Beacon Chain consensus layer with the Proof of Work mainnet and execution layer.
- Miners Pile Into Ethereum Classic Minutes After Merge as Hashrate Spikes 71% It only took minutes for Proof of Work miners to flock to Ethereum Classic after The Merge activated at 6:43 UTC on Thursday morning. With Ethereum no longer reliant on mining as it changed to the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, the hash rate of the Ethereum Classic network is at a record 106 terahashes per second (TH/s).
- What The Merge Means For Proof-of-Work Miners Ethereum is not the only chain changing this week. Rival Proof-of-Work (PoW) chains are also being disrupted by The Merge. The upgrade boots PoW miners off the Ethereum network in favor of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validators, displacing an estimated $5B worth of mining hardware.
🧑💻 ✍️ 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 Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.
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Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers
🔒 Coinbase One of Five Platforms to Lock Up Half of Staked ETH
Rapid Consolidation of Tokens May be Blow to Decentralization
By Samuel Haig
CENTRALIZATION? The Merge was supposed to be a great leap forward in the drive toward decentralization. But one day after the historic upgrade took place, five ventures controlled more than half of the ETH locked up for Ethereum staking. To many, that may look an awful lot like centralization.
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On Sep. 15, Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake consensus from Proof of Work. By replacing miners with validators, holders of Ether who may now stake their tokens to maintain the Ethereum blockchain, the move dropped the network’s energy consumption by 99.8%. The Merge also reduced new Ether issuance by more than 87%.
Control
But Ethereum’s mission of decentralization may have suffered a setback, at least in the short term, with control of the ETH needed to tend the blockchain in the hands of five powerful players.
Lido, the leading liquid staking provider, controls 30.4% of staked Ether, followed by centralized U.S. exchanges Coinbase and Kraken with 12.7% and 8.6% respectively, according to data from Rated Network.
Centralized
Looked at another way, four centralized exchanges — Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Bitcoin Suisse — have amassed 28.6% of staked Ether.
They effectively control Ethereum’s governance, tweeted Chris Remus, the founder of staking provider Chainflow.
Staked Ether distribution. Source: Rated Network
That’s a sobering reality check for a project that just pulled off one of the most challenging technological transformations without the command-and-control hierarchy used by corporations.
1,000 Blocks
The centralization of staked Ether is already impacting block production. “Out of the last 1,000 blocks, 420 have been built by just Lido and Coinbase,” flagged Martin Koppelmann, a co-founder of Gnosis.
In a recent appearance on The Defiant Podcast, Hasu, a strategic advisor to Lido, emphasized that Lido comprises 29 independent node operators and does not act as a single entity. He argued that without Lido, the staking sector would be more at risk of being dominated by centralized exchanges.
Node Operators
“What you would have is much more [staked ETH] custodied by exchanges, you would have a much more concentrated node operator set,” Hasu said. “In the Lido whitepaper, it says that the main motivation for Lido is to make it so that large exchanges don’t win liquid staking for Ethereum.”
Hasu also asserted that Lido’s dominance over the liquid staking token market cap benefits Ethereum’s DeFi sector. He said that without Lido, the liquid staking sector would span a plethora of different tokens and suffer from liquidity fragmentation.
Best Thing
During a Sep. 15 stream hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, Superphiz, the co-founder of the EthStaker community, implored ETH holders not to stake with centralized providers.
“I think the best thing for the protocol is to avoid… concentrated liquid staking derivatives… that tend to centralize a lot of ETH in a very narrowly controlled environment,” he said. “We don’t need a network where all of the coins are in one place or in the hands of a few people — that’s false decentralization.”
Liquid Staking
While Superphiz praised liquid staking protocols for making it easier for users to get involved with staking, he warned that the community must support staking providers that “are being good stewards of the network.”
“What we need is more staking protocols that operate in a permissionless way to allow node operators to come online and further decentralize the staking,” Superphiz continued. “Right now, there is one provider that is the standard. I really look forward to seeing five or six of these providers, because we need several different versions of this liquidity token to continue decentralization.”
Security and Health
He rebuked arguments in favor of Lido’s dominance enabling robust DeFi composability. “The goal of staking is not to promote DeFi, the goal of staking is to promote the security and the health of the Ethereum network,” he said. “You’ve got to keep those two goals separate.”
Superphiz threw his support behind Rocket Pool, emphasizing that the platform acts as a decentralized pool hosting 14,000 node operators. “It’s a permissionless system, anyone who wants to run a rocket pool node can run the same as if they were running a solo node,” he said.
He added that the community should endeavor to promote solo-staking as much as possible, stating “the more stakers we can get in homes, the decentralized and robust we are as a network.”