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🩄 Recap: DeFi Week of Feb. 13

Hello Defiers! Happy weekend!

This week, as the markets plunged on war fear and storms lashed the U.S. and the Canadian government clamped down on the financial accounts of protestors, we totally geeked out. Sometimes there’s just nothing better than rolling up your sleeves and diving into the mechanics of DeFi, right?

For starters, check out Camila Russo’s exclusive podcast with Vitalik Buterin, who, lest we forget, wrote the Ethereum white paper when he was just 19. Vitalik shares how Ethereum can “build a base layer for the global economy” without compromising decentralization.

Then check out Brady Dale’s deep dive on the looming demise of Fortress DAO, yet another Olympus fork that’s dissolving due to governance issues. It’s the kind of in-depth feature that The Defiant prides itself on. Sam Haig, meanwhile, continued his spot-on coverage of the Polkadot parachain auctions with a roundup on the latest cohort of winning projects and how they’re poised to build out the DOT ecosystem — an important sleeper story in DeFi. Sam also turned his eye to Hashflow, a DEX that’s offering protection against a little-known but fascinating problem in blockchain manipulation.

Not that we didn’t raise our heads and take note of what else is happening in the world
 Owen Fernau unearthed a very cool market trend in his report on how the Cosmos ecosystem has quietly assumed the No. 2 position in DeFi in terms of TVL. He also penned a scoop on Michael Patryn, aka Sifu, the doxxed QuadrigaCX co-founder, launching the $SIFU token. And Robin Schmidt and his crew produced awesome videos on how to maximize stablecoin yield and the BNB chain and Gearbox Protocol.

Enjoy!

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).

🙌 Together with:

  • $WEB3, by Arch is the best of Web3 in a token. This methodology-first tokenized-index provides broad-market exposure to Web3. Its constituents represent roughly 70% of the ecosystem. Learn more!
  • Eden Rocket RPC, providing the fastest private transactions on Ethereum (90%+ hashrate). Trade better anywhere on Ethereum with Eden Rocket RPC.
  • Zerion Zerion is Mission Control for Web3: an intuitive DeFi portfolio manager, multichain tracking & trading and the best place to show off your NFT collection
  • Synfutures List and trade any futures contracts based on popular cryptocurrencies, altcoins, indices, NFTs and real-world assets — you name it!

âș DeFi Alpha Newsletter

Check out and subscribe to DeFi Alpha, a weekly newsletter by The Defiant and DeFi Dad, packed with tutorials and tips on how to earn yield in DeFi.

This week:

20% Fixed Yield On ETH and BTC Using 88mph + Yield Farming on Metis

📬 Inbox Dump #43

Our Inbox Dump newsletter, which is exclusive to paid subscribers, is where we include the updates and announcements that flood our DMs each week and didn’t make it to The Defiant’s content platforms. Sometimes announcements here didn’t meet the bar to become a news story, sometimes they may have slipped through the cracks, or they came late and we haven’t had a chance to cover. We also include a compilation of DeFi and crypto funding rounds in the past week so you have these in one handy place.

Podcast

🎙 Vitalik Buterin on Building a Base Layer for the Global Economy Without Compromising on Decentralization

Vitalik Buterin wrote the Ethereum white paper when he was just 19. His aim was simple yet comprehensive, to create a ‘world computer’ that was designed to be a flexible base layer for all online applications without the need of any third party. Since its inception in 2015, Ethereum has become the most active and largest smart contracts platform, but has it achieved the ‘world computer’ goal?

Vitalik says yes and no. In this interview, it seemed like almost a given to Vitalik that Ethereum will achieve this goal. The bigger concern is not whether the network becomes a settlement layer and decentralized engine for smart contracts used globally, but how much value and impact applications running on top of it will bring.

The Tube

đŸ“ș The Defiant Weekly: BNB Chain – what were they thinking?

đŸ“ș Real Vision vs. The Defiant: IS NOW THE TIME FOR MASS ADOPTION OF CRYPTO?

đŸ“ș First Look: Leverage just got sexy | Gearbox Protocol

đŸ“ș Tuesday Tutorial: Maximising Stablecoin Yield – Safe or Degen?

đŸ“ș Quick Take: Crypto is a Clown Show

DeFi Saga

đŸ’„ Another Fork Bites the Dust: The Looming Fall of Fortress DAO and the Perils of Off-Chain Governance

Brady Dale goes deep into the travails of Fortress DAO, a small project with outsized implications for DAO governance and the Olympus DAO ecosystem.

Fortress DAO is doomed. The question is how it dies. The crux of the matter is that this particular decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) isn’t really decentralized at all, and its investors are paying the price for getting in on a governance token, FORT, that has power in rhetoric only.

Fortress is an also-ran fork of Olympus DAO running on the Avalanche blockchain with a mere $14M in its treasury (a shadow of the more than $500M+ still backing Olympus’s OHM), but feelings are running very high right now over what should happen with that money.

The problem is that the $14M isn’t really in its treasury anyway. It’s in a separate project, one that was funded by the Fortress DAO treasury, but is now completely in control of its chief technical officer, Avraham Eisenberg, who has shown no interest in giving it back.

Community members that spoke to The Defiant predicted the matter could very well find its way to court. But for now, code is very much law and that particular law is not on the Fortress DAO community’s side.

DeFi Primer

🎼 The Ultimate Beginners Guide To The Axie Infinity Game and Marketplace

In this primer, Kurt Ivy unpacks Axie Infinity’s gameplay, use of NFTs, and tokenomics.

The Axie Infinity game is one of the biggest and most well-known Web 3.0 platforms, built on a blockchain and making use of Non-Fungible Tokens (‘NFTs’). The use of the Axie Infinity ecosystem has skyrocketed in recent times.

The platform actually provided residents of the Philippines with a means of earning an income due to job displacement from the Covid-19 pandemic. They earned so much that the government declared that revenue generated from this platform was subject to income tax. 

With nearly three million daily active players and $3.6 billion traded through its in-house NFT marketplace (as per its official webpage), it’s worth looking into Axie Infinity for the gameplay and the potential return on investment.

Axie Infinity is a Play-To-Earn game, built on a distributed ledger (aka a blockchain), where Axies are represented as NFTs, which are stored on a blockchain. Axies can be sold through the in-house peer-to-peer marketplace. The Axie game is built on the Ethereum blockchain, and the Axies are priced in ETH, the native cryptocurrency for Ethereum.

DeFi How To Guide

🏡 Buying Real World Assets By Leveraging Crypto

In which guest writer Shahar Abrams goes shopping with crypto.

This article was sourced via PubDAO, a decentralized newswire.

A lot of people say crypto has no “real-world use cases”. “What can you buy with it?” someone will ask, at which point the other person will shrug back “JPEGs on the internet?”

The truth is, you can use crypto to buy anything you want in the material world. You can even enjoy the same tax perks used by the wealthy when they buy things, by borrowing against your assets instead of selling them.

In this article, I’m going to show you how you can use all sorts of crypto assets to make real-world purchases while staying invested, minimizing your tax bill and generating cash flow. Does it really work? Yes, it does, and I’ll show you how.

Friday

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Thursday

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Wednesday

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Tuesday

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💜Community Love💜

Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!

đŸ§‘â€đŸ’» ✍ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Sanuel 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.

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built 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.

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