🍒 Beeple's $69M Token + The Greatest NFT Film Ever Made

Hello Defiers, here’s what we’re covering today:

• We present to you: The Greatest NFT Film Ever Made

• Beeple sold an NFT for $69M at Christie’s

• Coinbase $100B rumored valuation fuels DEX tokens

💗 The Defiant Gitcoin Grant

Also, please consider contributing to our Gitcoin grant! This time, we’re using everything raised on this round towards gifting Defiant subscriptions. You can nominate whoever you think would benefit the most from full access to the best DeFi information and journalism out there —including yourself!

💗 Des Femmes Gitcoin Grant

Check out Des Femmes, a magazine for women in tech and finance. We need $30k to get the first issue shipped and it would be amazing if you can help make it happen by contributing to its Gitcoin grant. Defiant founder Camila is one of the women behind the project, together with Leigh Cuen and Rosalie Lessard.

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🙌 Together with: 

• Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance

• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!

• Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi

• Casper, an enterprise-focused blockchain which aims to introduce unprecedented security, speed and scale for businesses

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📺 Watch: The Greatest NFT Film Ever Made

It’s official. NFTs have exploded. Prompting a wild free-for-all on one side with numbers you can scarcely believe and deep and justified skepticism on the other. We hope that if you do make it to the end of this utter beast of a film you come out properly armed to dismiss or embrace them. So get comfortable as we shine a massive megawatt light on the maddest, baddest tokens in crypto.

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Beeple NFT Sells for $69M in Christie’s Auction

TLDR A 21,069 x 21,069 pixels jpg file attached to an Ethereum token sold today for $69M in ETH at Christie’s, the world’s oldest fine art auctioneer.

Of course, we’re talking about Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.”

RECORD-BREAKING The sale was not only a record for an NFT; it was also the third-most expensive work from a living artist ever sold at auction, behind $90.3M for a David Hockney painting and $91.1M for Jeff Koons’ stainless-steel Rabbit.

SO WHAT It marks a turning point in both art and blockchain history alike: it’s the first time a digital token has been sold at a major auction house. It also proves that, at least today, it’s undeniable the market is assigning real value to provable digital ownership — and no, nobody cares that anyone else can take its screenshot. 

beeple @beeple

holy fuck.

EVERYDAYS For over 13 years, Beeple has been creating a new piece of digital art every day and posting it online. “EVERYDAYS” is a single NFT collage functioning as the culmination of the past 5,000 days of Beeple’s work and artistic growth. During this period, Beeple has become one of the most recognizable artists of the digital era.

PREVIOUS RECORD The previous record for most expensive NFT initial offering sale was set just last week when DJ 3LAU’s Ultraviolet collection sold for a total of $11.7M, with the highest-priced individual NFT netting $3.6M.

RED HOT SPACE Almost $200M of NFTs have been sold in total, according to Nonfungible.com. The space has become red hot in the past few weeks, amid a booming cryptocurrency market and an increasing number of artists and celebrities (like Lindsay Lohan) using unique tokens to monetize their work and riding the trend.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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On-Chain Markets Update by Lucas Outumuro, IntoTheBlock

Coinbase Rumored $100B Valuation Boosts DEX Tokens

TLDR UNI and BNT both hit new all-time highs this week, while SUSHI came within 2% of its $20.50 high. SUSHI’s recent price action came following its recent listing in Coinbase. While UNI and BNT had already been listed in the centralized exchange, their increasing price action has certainly been influenced by Coinbase’s rumored $100 billion pre-IPO valuation.

VALUATIONS Over the past week, Coinbase has traded on average $2.61 billion per day. In contrast, Uniswap has settled approximately $955 million per day, but at a significantly cheaper valuation of $16 billion.  

As of March 10, 2021 using IntoTheBlock’s Uniswap Protocol Metrics

To put the comparison clearly, Coinbase is currently trading at 38.31 times its daily trading volume, while Uniswap is valued at 16.75 times its volume. If UNI closes this gap versus Coinbase’s valuation it could expect an increase of over 2.2x in price all else being equal, while SUSHI and BNT could grow even further to close this gap. 

STIMULUS CHECKS Asides from the Coinbase IPO, stimulus checks coming within the next two weeks may further add to the risk-on momentum. As stocks recover from the recent correction, the risk-on sentiment appears to still be present as evidenced by Roblox’s recent IPO, with its $37 billion valuation pricing it over 40 times price-to-sales (P/S). In comparison, Uniswap, Bancor and SushiSwap are being priced at 25, 16 and 8 P/S ratios respectively. With the stimulus checks approaching, it would be surprising for these multiples not to expand.

NETFLOWS Netflows, which measure the amount of tokens being deposited into exchanges minus those being withdrawn, have reached a new low of $82 million in a day for UNI. In other words $82 million more UNI were withdrawn than deposited into centralized exchanges on March 8. 

WHALES Large transactions volume for UNI recently took off to a new all-time high of over $5 billion. The increase in institutional activity coincided with a 10% increase in price, suggesting a high likelihood of large players buying the token. 

As of March 10, 2021 using IntoTheBlock’s UNI financial indicators

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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Introducing Defender Sentinels – Smart Contract Monitoring & Emergency Response: OpenZeppelin

“Today we are announcing the release of a new app, called Sentinels, to help prevent ongoing attacks and exploits in the DeFi space. Sentinels is part of the OpenZeppelin Defender platform, a security operations suite for Ethereum already being used by leading DeFi and NFT teams such as Opyn, Synthetix, TheGraph, PoolTogether, Yearn.Finance, Foundation Labs, and dYdX,” OpenZeppelin said in a blog post. “The DeFi space, and recently the NFT space, have continued to see a variety of exploits and even insider attacks resulting in vault losses, unexpected liquidations, and fraudulent token mints. With the latest release, OpenZeppelin Defender can now help teams detect these types of attacks and abnormal behavior and automatically respond to quickly mitigate the attack.”

Digital Currency Group to Buy Up to $250M of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Shares: CoinDesk

“Digital Currency Group, the parent of Grayscale, said it’s authorized the purchase of up to $250 million worth of the lagging shares of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (OTCQX: GBTC), its subsidiary’s flagship product,” CoinDesk reported. “The purchase comes as the price of GBTC shares has fallen from an all-time high. In addition, the shares, which had long traded at a premium to to the price of bitcoin held in the trust, recently started trading at a discount.”

On a Roll: Making Ethereum Accessible to All: Argent

“We'll first release our upgraded L1 wallet. Then, this summer, we'll launch an L2 wallet that harnesses zk rollups. For each launch we'll share lots more information closer to the time,” Argent said in a blog post. “Our upgraded Layer 1 (L1) wallet will be the default choice for advanced users with the most rigorous security requirements. For those needing to protect $50K-$1m plus while enjoying easy access to DeFi.”

“Our choice came down to the fact that zkSync has been live on mainnet for months, has lower transaction costs and fast finality. ZkSync also does not have a one week delay on withdrawals, although we know the Optimism team is working on this.”

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✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Owen Fernau and Dan Kahan, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov.

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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 ($10/mo, $100/yr).