Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:
News
- Record $760M Stolen in Exploits During ‘Hacktober’
- Aave Rolls Up its Sleeves With Only 5% of Goals Met
- HUSD Stablecoin Delisted After Losing its Dollar Peg
- Sushi To Set Up Shop In the Cayman Islands and Panama
Regulation Debate
- Vitalik Urges DeFi to Slow Down Integration with Traditional Finance
- SBF Defends Regulation Proposals in Two-Hour Debate
👀 Defiant Premium Story for Paid Subscribers (📜Scroll to the end!)
Markets
Opinion
Podcast
Video
- Daily Defiant: Binance Stablecoin (BUSD) is Taking on the Top Dogs
- Weekly Recap: zkSync Goes Live, Multichain Questioned, MakerDAO Roadmap, Apple NFT Rules, SBF Responds
DeFi Explainers
Elsewhere
- Surging Popularity of Ethereum Staking Keeps Lid on Yields: CoinDesk
- Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification: The Verge
- Today we’re kicking off an audit contest with @code4rena. Contests and bounties are an important part of helping to secure the network: zkSync
Trending in The Defiant
- Arbitrum Co-Founder Says Ability to Process Transactions is Finite
- Multichain Questioned About Management of Millions in User Funds
- zkSync to Launch ‘Baby Alpha’ V2 as Skeptics Decry Marketing Hype
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Exploits
🦹🏻♂️ Record $760M Stolen in Exploits During ‘Hacktober’
Bad Month for DeFi Security Highlights Pitfalls of Freewheeling Practices
By Owen Fernau
NEWS Call it Hacktober.The crypto market suffered a record $760M in exploits in October, according to PeckShield, a blockchain security company which lists MakerDAO, DeFi’s largest protocol, as a customer.
VALUE Despite an exploiter’s move to return $50M to users last month, the total value of stolen funds in 2022 surged to almost $3B. That’s nearly double the $1.5B hackers took in 2021 and nearly 12 times the 2020 total.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Strategy
🏋🏻♂️ Aave Rolls Up its Sleeves With Only 5% of Goals Met
V3 Deployment on Ethereum, a Stablecoin, and a Debit Card in the Works
By Samuel Haig
WORK TO DO A v3 deployment on Ethereum, a stablecoin, and a debit card. Aave, the trailblazing DeFi lending protocol, has a lot of work to do. The No. 4 DeFi protocol with $5.4B in total value locked has only completed one-twentieth of the work in its long-term strategic plan, according to Marc Zeller, the lead of Aave’s integrations team.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Sponsored Post
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Goldfinch’s global network of Investors have already loaned over $100M USDC, reaching over 1M people and businesses via the protocol’s Borrowers across 20+ countries, to earn yields uncorrelated to DeFi’s volatility. Goldfinch Membership is a new opportunity to further align Goldfinch’s Investors with the protocol’s long-term growth.
Upgrade your participation for enhanced yields from Member Rewards, and own the new global credit paradigm. Sign up for the waitlist today
Stablecoins
💥 HUSD Stablecoin Delisted After Losing its Dollar Peg
Huobi Exchange Boots HUSD After Stablecoin Tumbles to 33 Cents
By Samuel Haig
FLASHBACK In a flashback to the dark days of May, HUSD, a stablecoin with a $62M market cap, lost its peg to the U.S. dollar and was delisted from the Huobi exchange on Oct. 28. The stablecoin slipped its peg and skidded to 33 cents from 99 cents.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Regulation Debate
🏦 Vitalik Urges DeFi to Slow Down Integration with Traditional Finance
Ethereum Co-Founder Says Pursuit of Institutional Capital May Bring Onerous Regulation
By Samuel Haig
MATURE After weeks of keeping his own counsel amid regulatory action in crypto, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and chief scientist, finally shared his thoughts on the subject over the weekend. His message: Buterin believes crypto isn’t ready to be integrated into mainstream finance and should take its time to mature.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Regulation Debate
🙋🏻♂️ SBF Defends Regulation Proposals in Two-Hour Debate
“If DeFi Front-ends Catering To Americans Need To Be Licensed, DeFi in America Dies,” says Erik Voorhees
LIVE DEBATE Regulation is coming, and before it does, the crypto industry must know what it’s willing to sacrifice, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) argued in a live debate with ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees Friday.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Domiciles
🏝 Sushi To Set Up Shop In the Cayman Islands and Panama
Restructuring Plan Receives Overwhelming Support
PROPOSAL On Oct.26, the Sushi DAO approved a restructuring plan which will see the formation of three entities in the Cayman Islands and Panama, with each overseeing a core function of the protocol. The proposal garnered near-unanimous support from SUSHI holders, as more than 11M votes were cast in its favor, with a mere 178 votes against.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Market Action
📈 Crypto Markets Look To Finish Strong After Sideways October
Ether Is Up 22% In Seven Days
By Owen Fernau
BEST WEEK After trading sideways through much of October, crypto markets had their best week since August with the top three digital assets leading the way — Bitcoin is up 8.9%, Ether is up 22.1%, and Binance’s BNB is up 12.5% in the past week, according to The Defiant Terminal.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Opinion
🤨 SBF’s Industry Standards Would Be Onerous for DeFi
DeFi Startups Don’t Have the Resources to Meet Proposed Norms
Guest writer Sameep Singhania rebuts Bankman-Fried’s proposals in response to regulatory pressure.
THREAT Sam Bankman-Fried’s proposal to set crypto industry standards undermines DeFi’s entrepreneurial spirit and presents an existential threat to the space’s leading DeFi teams and platforms.
BLUEPRINT On October 19, Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of crypto exchange juggernaut FTX, delivered one of the most provocative and controversial documents to hit the industry: a detailed blueprint for regulatory oversight and industry standards in the digital asset space.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Defiant Video
📺 Daily Defiant: Binance Stablecoin (BUSD) is Taking on the Top Dogs
📺 Weekly Recap: zkSync Goes Live, Multichain Questioned, MakerDAO Roadmap, Apple NFT Rules,, SBF Responds
Podcast Video
📺🎙 100% of DeFi Could Become Illegal
DeFi Explainers
⛈ What Was Terra?
The $60B Fall of Terra Worsened the Bear Market and Undermined DeFi
CONTENDER Terra was one of the blockchains based on the scalable and open-source Cosmos framework. Because Cosmos architecture allows far greater transaction speed and scalability than Ethereum, Terra became a top contender as an “Ethereum killer”.
FAILURE This all ended one of Terra’s key products, the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin, depegged during rough market conditions in May 2022. Terra’s collapse, which vaporized about $60B worth of crypto market capitalization, made the project the byword for crypto failure during the 2022 bear market.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Elsewhere
🔗 Surging Popularity of Ethereum Staking Keeps Lid on Yields: CoinDesk
Ethereum staking appears to be the new favorite way for crypto traders to capture yield – so popular, in fact, that it’s driving the yields lower.
🔗 Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification: The Verge
Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.
Today we're kicking off an audit contest with @code4rena. Contests and bounties are an important part of helping to secure the network, and we look forward to the community's contributions to make zkSync 2.0 the #1 choice for developers.
Contest link: https://t.co/zeb1PPGWGs pic.twitter.com/I7YmHy1dPC
— zkSync (@zksync) October 28, 2022
Trending in The Defiant
- Arbitrum Co-Founder Says Ability to Process Transactions is Finite With its Nitro upgrade in the rearview mirror, Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Arbitrum is now turning its focus to research and development in hopes of solving its own major challenges long before they appear.
- Multichain Questioned About Management of Millions in User Funds The vast majority of crypto lost to hacks this year was stolen from bridges, the technology that allows users to transfer digital assets between blockchains.
- zkSync to Launch ‘Baby Alpha’ V2 as Skeptics Decry Marketing Hype Matter Labs is poised deployed zkSync 2.0 to the mainnet on Friday but skeptics questioned whether the iteration was ready for prime time.
🧑💻 ✍️ 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
🚀 Art Gobblers Spikes to 5,000 ETH in Volume as NFT Collectors Pile In
Collection By Rick and Morty Co-creator Second-most Sold in Last Week
HOT That didn’t take long. Art Gobblers, an NFT project from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, began minting on Monday and immediately became one of the hottest collections of the month.
VOLUME By early Tuesday morning, the collection already accounted for 5,000 ETH in trading volume — worth about $8M — making it the second most-sold in the preceding seven days, according to data from Nansen.
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The floor price of the collection shot up to more than 14 ETH, or $22,000, according to NFT marketplace OpenSea.
“With doses of PFP project, NFT gallery, on-chain game, and 1/1 NFTs, Art Gobblers aims to become a complex ecosystem for hand-drawn NFTs incentivizing the creation and curation of 1/1 art,” WarDaddyCapital, a pseudonymous NFT analyst at Proof, wrote on Twitter.
Experimental Art Factory
The initial supply of 2,000 “Gobblers” will increase to 10,000 over 10 years, WarDaddyCapital added.
The collection, a collaboration between Roiland and Paradigm, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, is described on its website as an “experimental decentralized art factory.” Holders can use a digital drawing tool and a Gobbler to create one-off NFTs.
Rick and Morty, Roiland’s critically-acclaimed series, is among the most popular animated television series for adults; Roiland voices the eponymous characters.
Art Gobblers is not Roiland’s first foray into NFTs. The artist “has a track record of big-time 1/1[NFT] sales w/ his most notable going for $290K,” WarDaddyCapital noted.
According to NFTstatistics.eth, the director of research at Proof, NFT marketplaces had one of their busiest days since early August on Monday despite coming out of the slowest weekend of the year — a surge driven, in part, by Art Gobblers.