🌪 CloneX NFTs Sell Out in Auction Roiled by Attacks and Controversy
Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,
News
Opinion
Podcast
🎙Listen to this week’s podcast with Nick Johnson of ENS here:
Video
Links
Decentralized Ethereum 2.0 Staking with Rocket Pool: Bankless
'Coin Signals' trader pleads guilty to commodities fraud, faces up to 10 years: The Block
Crypto.com to Acquire Nadex, Small Exchange to Expand US Presence: CoinDesk
Trending in The Defiant
Tutorial: The Degen Savings Portfolio Featuring Abracadabra, Curve and Convex
Zero-Knowledge Pioneer StarkWare Launches Layer 2 Rollup Network
A Big Test for DAOs: Honing New Compensation and Contribution Practices
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Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at this link.
Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
Aave, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
Fintech Meetup, is fintech’s next big event--30,000+ online meetings for 3,000+ DeFi & TradFi participants! Online Mar.22-24. Learn More
NFT Auctions
🌪 CloneX NFTs Sell Out in Auction Roiled by Attacks and Controversy
TOO MANY ATTACKS On Nov. 29, RTFKT Studios was all set to begin the public sale of its CloneX avatars. Then the attacks on its website started. At just after midnight on Nov. 30, the metaverse-first design outfit hit the pause button. “Minting will start tomorrow,” the firm tweeted. “Apologies for this fck up, we had way too many attacks.”
MYSTERY The sale resumed as promised and quickly sold out, according to a message in the team’s Discord. Yet some users are skeptical that an attack ever occurred. Such is life in the wildlands of NFT auctions these days — under digital assault one minute, selling out a hot avatar the next, then mystery around whether an attack occurred at all.
HYPE With the metaverse entering a phase where activity must match the hype, investors are eyeballing sales like RTFKT’s for such strangeness. And the money involved is massive.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Markets
🚀 Surging Ether Hits 42-month High Against BTC
THREE DAYS Ethereum has made another leg up against Bitcoin, with the ETH/BTC chart tagging its highest level since May 2018. On Dec. 1, ETH traded for 0.0837 BTC after rallying 12% over three days to test prices not seen since May 2018. The move coincides with combined total value locked (TVL) of the DeFi sector posting a new record high of $277.6B, according to DeFi Llama.
BULL MARKET However, Ether is still down 52.4% from its June 2017 high of 0.176 BTC. Ether also posted a secondary top at nearly 0.123 BTC when the bull market ended in January 2018. The current bull cycle has seen Ethereum steadily gain 423% over Bitcoin since hitting a local low of 0.016 BTC in early September 2019. Ethereum has recently been range-bound between roughly 0.058 BTC and 0.083 BTC since quickly rallying by 174% during April of this year.
BURN Compared to the previous cycle, commentators, including Anthony Sassano, the host of The Daily Gwei, have argued that the Ethereum market exhibits much stronger fundamentals owing EIP-1559’s introduction of a burn mechanism to Ether’s fee market, plus surging on-chain activity from the DeFi and NFT sectors.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Opinion
🤔 DAOs as a Solution to the Problem of Aggregation in Culture
The problem of aggregation, where rational actions at the individual level lead to an irrational outcome at the collective level, is prevalent in macroeconomics and financial markets. A bank run is a classic example.
The solution in TradFi is often centralized agency in the form of (government) institutions, powered by a countervailing incentive structure. In regards to the example of a bank run, individuals are rationally motivated to withdraw their deposits in a mad dash for the exit, despite having this action exacerbating the effects at the collective level.
As a response to this problem of aggregation – the FDIC was instituted as a countervailing agency, incentivized by the need to provide stability to the banking system. Similarly, in the spring of 2020, the Federal Reserve was a neutralizing force against the rational behaviour of investors fleeing the market. The Fed’s agency is motivated by its mandate for macroeconomic stability.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
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The Tube
📺 Tutorial: Snipe UNDERPRICED NFT's with NFT Bank
Links
🔗 Perpetual Protocol v2 Launch on Optimism Mainnet!: Medium
It is with great excitement that we announce the launch of Perpetual Protocol v2, dubbed ‘Curie’, to Optimism mainnet! While this release marks the culmination of months of hard work from our team, we’re just getting started and we’ve got a lot of exciting developments planned for the future.
🔗 Decentralized Ethereum 2.0 Staking with Rocket Pool: Bankless
Rocket Pool is live on mainnet! Slowly rolling out its staking pools, Rocket Pool is opening up its decentralized ETH staking product to the world. Core team members Darren Langley and Dave Rugendyke join to talk about the past, present, and future of the protocol.
🔗 'Coin Signals' trader pleads guilty to commodities fraud, faces up to 10 years: The Block
On November 30, the Department of Justice announced that Jeremy Spence pleaded guilty to commodities fraud in operating "cryptocurrency funds" that were, authorities say, Ponzi schemes that lost investors a total of $5 million.
🔗 Crypto.com to Acquire Nadex, Small Exchange to Expand US Presence: CoinDesk
Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com agreed to buy North American Derivatives Exchange (Nadex) and Small Exchange Inc. to expand its presence in the U.S.
Trending on The Defiant
Tutorial: The Degen Savings Portfolio Featuring Abracadabra, Curve and Convex Curve is now the largest DeFi protocol with $22B in Total Value Locked across seven blockchains.
Zero-Knowledge Pioneer StarkWare Launches Layer 2 Rollup Network StarkWare, the team that pioneered zero-knowledge-based rollups in 2018, has launched the mainnet alpha of StarkNet — the team’s much anticipated Layer 2, zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup network.
A Big Test for DAOs: Honing New Compensation and Contribution Practices As we usher in a new era of work via DAOs, many projects face a similar challenge of determining a scalable formula for compensating their contributors. What works when there are only five core contributors may not work as the community grows, and the best way to measure and reward contributions in one DAO may not be right for another.
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🧑💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Brady Dale, Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, DeFiDad, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader, and Camila Russo. Videos are produced by Robin Schmidt, Alp Gasimov and Daniel Flynn. Podcast is 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).