This week was a grab bag of headlines in DeFi. Uniswap launched an NFT marketplace, a hacker minted six quadrillion (!) of Ankr’s BNB staking coins, and SBF won’t shut up about what went wrong at FTX.
Amid all the action, Cami Russo spoke with Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs, about the core proposition in cryptocurrencies: upgrading the internet. In The Defiant Podcast, Juan described how his team are developing blockchains into new rails for the internet. Heady stuff!
Big names made big moves in DeFi. Aleks Gilbert interviewed Scott Gray, the founder of Genie and now the head of Uniswap’s newly minted NFT marketplace, about the DEX’s ambition to be the marketplace “for all digital assets.” Owen Fernau covered OpenSea’s push onto the BNB chain, expanding its reach in NFT sales. And Sam Haig reported on decommissioning of Ropsten, the first testnet to support The Merge. The move advances Ethereum’s evolution as a Proof of Stake network.
Our video team covered a couple of different facets of the intensifying regulatory story in crypto on The Defiant’s YouTube channel, from a favorable reception to the European Union’s “light touch approach” to the more onerous crackdown to come next year in the U.S. thanks to the FTX debacle.
Speaking of FTX… ugh. More fallout came this week. Owen reported on a missed $3M payment by Auros Finance and how Compound is reining in risk by capping borrowing levels.
Still, with Ether and Bitcoin and other tokens all posting a little rally this week it looks like the FTX disaster is not proving to be as existential for crypto as many feared. Or at least, SBF’s “F*ck ups” are no match for the Fed, which appears poised to ease up on rate increases as inflation cools.
Enjoy!
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⍺ DeFi Alpha Newsletter
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This Week: Track Your Airdrops, Mints and Governance Votes with Daylight
Podcast
Juan Benet is Working to Upgrade the Heart of The Internet with Blockchains
Upgrading the Internet w/ Blockchains
By Camila Russo
Juan Benet is the founder of Protocol Labs and the inventor of the Inter Planetary File System, a peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data. He’s also the creator of Filecoin, a storage network incentivised by crypto. Both of Juan’s ventures are hugely ambitious as they are in direct competition with the basic rails of the internet, with protocols such as HTTP and data giants like AWS.
Defiant Video
Why won’t SBF shut up?
EU Bureaucrats face off with Crypto Twitter
Regulators are coming to crypto post FTX
BlockFi Files For Bankruptcy
The Defiant Interview
Uniswap Aims To Become Marketplace For ‘All Digital Assets’: NFT Chief
New Aggregator Won’t Compete With Sudoswap On AMM Pools, Plans To Integrate Blur
Aleksandar Gilbert reports on Uniswap’s outsized ambitions in the NFT arena…
When Uniswap debuted its new, NFT marketplace aggregator on Wednesday, it also shuttered Genie, the NFT marketplace aggregator it had acquired in June. “The genie went back in the lamp,” Scott Gray, Genie founder-turned-Uniswap NFT chief, quipped.
Read the full story in The Defiant
Ethereum Report
Layer 1s Fall Back to Earth After Surge in Popularity
Fantom, Avalanche and Other EVM Networks Have Become DeFi Infrastructure Amid Falling Revenue
Samuel Haig delves into the state of play with Ethereum scaling…
When it comes to Layer 1s there’s good news, and bad news. On the one hand these low-cost systems offering Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility have surged in popularity and become an indelible fixture in the architecture of decentralized finance. Yet on the other hand, the activity on many of these chains is now just a fraction of the highs posted during the bull market that ended in May.
Read the fully story in The Defiant
FTX Fallout
Compound Caps Borrowing Levels for 10 Assets to Reduce Risk
COMP Tokenholders Vote to Limit Debt After Aave Freezes Lending Pools
Owen Fernau reports on the push to rein in risk in DeFi protocols in the wake of the FTX debacle…
Another DeFi lending protocol is reducing risk a day after Aave passed a proposal to freeze 17 of its lending pools. Holders of Compound Finance’s COMP token voted unanimously to cap the borrowing level of 10 assets supported by the protocol.
Read the full story in The Defiant
Opinion
Loyalty NFTs Have the Power to Drive the Next Bull Run
Now That NFTs Have Proven Their Utility in a Very Tough Year Comes the Next Phase
Guest writer Huy Nguyen makes the case for NFTs’ true usefulness…
It may not feel like it, but crypto has reached yet another inflection point. The next growth spurt in crypto will come from tokens supporting loyalty programs that motivate community engagement, not from yield-generating protocols. NFTs will serve as the foundation for these loyalty programs, which corporations like Starbucks, Disney, and Adidas have already introduced.
Read the full story in The Defiant
Friday
News
- Hacker Makes Off With Millions After Minting Six Quadrillion of Ankr’s BNB Staking Tokens Ankr, a web3 infrastructure project on BNB Chain, has suffered a major exploit with an attacker minting and dumping millions worth of its wrapped BNB token, aBNBc. On Dec. 2, Nansen, an on-chain analytics provider, flagged that six quadrillion aBNBc had been abruptly minted.
- Sam Bankman-Fried Reveals FTX Was Selling Assets That Did Not Exist In a live Twitter Space Thursday, Sam Bankman-Fried said FTX was selling Bitcoin to clients that did not exist. During the conversation, Ran Neuner, the host of the Crypto Banter podcast, asked Bankman-Fried to explain why FTX’s spot exchange customers’ assets were missing when the exchange filed for bankruptcy.
- Apple Blocks Coinbase Wallet’s iOS App After updating its App Store Review Guidelines last month to mention NFTs for the first time, the world’s most valuable company is flexing its muscles. Apple has blocked Coinbase Wallet’s latest release of its iOS app, reportedly claiming that the transaction fees required to transfer NFTs need to go through the iPhone maker’s In-App Purchase system.
Defiant Interview
- Uniswap Aims To Become Marketplace For ‘All Digital Assets’: NFT Chief When Uniswap debuted its new, NFT marketplace aggregator on Wednesday, it also shuttered Genie, the NFT marketplace aggregator it had acquired in June. “The genie went back in the lamp,” Scott Gray, Genie founder-turned-Uniswap NFT chief, quipped.
Thursday
News
- Auros Misses $3.1M Loan Payment on Maple Finance Auros, a crypto trading firm which claims on its LinkedIn profile to account for a “significant proportion of global cryptocurrency volume,” has missed a loan payment of 2,400 wrapped Ether (wETH), worth $3.1M as of Nov. 30.
- First Merge Testnet to Shut Down as Ethereum Moves Ahead on PoS Ropsten, the first public testnet to support Ethereum’s transition to a Proof of Stake system, will be shut down this month, the Ethereum Foundation announced Tuesday.
- SBF Says He ‘Did Not Commit Fraud’ in Latest Public Comments The swift collapse of FTX was a “massive failure of oversight, of risk management,” disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried said in a live interview Wednesday evening.
- DeFi Explainers
- What are ZK-Rollups? Thanks to their distributed structure, blockchains tend to be slow. If a single transaction has to be verified across thousands of Ethereum’s nodes, this also makes the network expensive to use.
DeFi Explainers
- What are ZK-Rollups? Thanks to their distributed structure, blockchains tend to be slow. If a single transaction has to be verified across thousands of Ethereum’s nodes, this also makes the network expensive to use.
Wednesday
News
- Layer 1s Fall Back to Earth After Surge in Popularity When it comes to Layer 1s there’s good news, and bad news. On the one hand these low-cost systems offering Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility have surged in popularity and become an indelible fixture in the architecture of decentralized finance.
- OpenSea Launches On BNB Chain As the nascent NFT field struggles with low trading volumes, the leading marketplace is expanding onto new blockchains.
- Cronje Explains Why Fantom is Poised to Run 30 Years — DeFi Decentralized finance saved the foundation behind Fantom, the Layer 1 blockchain, from a slow march to financial ruin, according to crypto entrepreneur Andre Cronje, one of the project’s most notable contributors.
DeFi Explainers
- What is Liquity? Liquity is a decentralized application for borrowing crypto money without paying an interest rate on the ETH collateral. You may wonder, doesn’t this defeat the purpose of lending?
Tuesday
News
- Compound Caps Borrowing Levels for 10 Assets to Reduce Risk Another DeFi lending protocol is reducing risk a day after Aave passed a proposal to freeze 17 of its lending pools. Holders of Compound Finance’s COMP token voted unanimously to cap the borrowing level of 10 assets supported by the protocol.
- Aave Decommissions Low Liquidity Asset Pools To Protect Against Attacks Aave, the leading DeFi money market protocol with over $5B in total value locked, has frozen multiple low-liquidity asset pools in a bid to protect against attacks like the one targeting Aave’s CRV pool that caused the protocol to incur $1.6M worth of bad debt last week.
- BlockFi Files For Bankruptcy The collapse of FTX has felled another crypto business, with centralized lender BlockFi filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday. The move comes two weeks after BlockFi suspended withdrawals due to “the lack of clarity on the status of FTX.com, FTX US, and Alameda.”
- Abracadabra Calls On Sushi For Emergency Assistance As Faulty Oracle Places $10M At Risk The community of Abracadabra, a crypto lending protocol and issuer of the MIM stablecoin, has called on SushiSwap to make changes to two of its Bento vaults holding $10M worth of Abacadbra users’ assets that could be at risk.
Community Love
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!