🗳 Lido Voters Reject Limiting Growth In Key Move For Eth2
Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:
News
Solana Labs Has About 10 People Working on Its Saga Mobile Phone
DEX Lets Customers Make $100,000 Transfers with No Identity Check
Markets
DeFi Dustups
Video
Quick Take: Harmony hacked, Yuga strikes, BlockFi on the rocks
The Defiant Weekly: NFT.NYC is over but what have we learned?
Elsewhere
Dissecting the DAO: Web3 Ownership is Surprisingly Concentrated: Chainalysis
Tether CTO refutes stablecoin FUD as short-sellers circle: CoinTelegraph
More Hedge Funds Are Betting Against Tether as Crypto Melts Down: The Wall Street Journal
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DeFi Governance
🗳 Lido Voters Reject Limiting Growth In Key Move For Eth2
NEWS After four days of voting, Lido, the largest liquid staking protocol on the Ethereum network, appears poised to reject calls to limit its own growth.
GROWTH Less than one half of one percent of the votes cast were in favor of Lido limiting its stake on Ethereum. Of the participants, those holding more than 99% of Lido’s governance tokens, LDO, voted for the protocol to not hold back on its growth.
PROPOSAL The governance proposal, titled “Should Lido consider self-limiting?” was authored by Vasiliy Shapovalov, CTP at P2P, a non-custodial staking service for professional investors.
STAKE FLOW Posted on the protocol’s portal on June 24, a successful vote would have bound the protocol to “decreasing inbound stake flow in any shape, form or severity,” with the specifics to be determined in a second round of voting.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Crypto Exchanges
🐋 CoinFLEX Sets $47M Token Sale to Save Itself From Sinking Whale
By Samuel Haig
LIQUIDATE When a whale went went sideways on a massive position in CoinFLEX, the centralized crypto exchange should have been able to automatically liquidate the investor’s holdings and protect the platform from further damage.
NON-RECOURSE But it couldn’t because of a novel feature — the whale has a “non-liquidation recourse account.” Translation: The exchange agreed not to close out the whale in return for “stringent personal guarantees.” So now CoinFLEX, a centralized crypto exchange with a 24-hour trading volume of $1.1B, is taking a radical step to offset the massive exposure — it’s rolling out a new token.
NEGATIVE EQUITY CoinFLEX will issue the “Recovery Value USD” (rvUSD) token in a bid to offset the losses from the investor whose account fell into negative equity, according to a white paper released on June 27.
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Three Arrows
😡 Creditor Says Three Arrows Defaults on $700M Loan
NEWS Three Arrows Capital, the troubled $10B crypto hedge fund, has defaulted on a nearly $700M loan from Canadian crypto exchange Voyager Digital, the latter announced Monday.
$350M In an extraordinary statement last week, Voyager said Three Arrows owed it 15,250 Bitcoins and $350M in the USDC stablecoin and gave the hedge fund until June 27 to repay the loan. Bitcoin was trading at $20,783 midday New York time Monday.
DEFAULT Voyager issued a notice of default Monday, and said it intends to pursue recovery and is discussing its options with lawyers. Three Arrows did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
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Mobile Web3
🤳🏽 Solana Labs Has About 10 People Working on Its Saga Mobile Phone
Solana said last week it plans to unveil a mobile phone
By Owen Fernau
TEAM Solana Labs is dedicating a large part of its team to building its mobile effort, according to an exclusive interview with the company’s head of communications.
10 PEOPLE Solana Labs has “about” 10 people working on its Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) initiative, according to Austin Federa. The company, which develops the Solana blockchain, had 71 full-time employees as of April, Fortune reported.
SAGA The head of communications declined to make public the capital expenditure earmarked for SMS. Solana said last week it plans to unveil a mobile phone called Saga, with unique hardware and software, which would make it easier for users to access web3. “It’s time for crypto to go mobile,” the company posted on its website. Most web3 applications are currently accessed via desktop.
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Hackathons
🖼 Ethereum Developers Were All About NFTs at ETHNewYork
The top five finalists for ETHNewYork were all NFT-focused projects.
By Jason Levin
NFTs Ethereum developers are all about NFTs now, at least if the latest ETHNewYork is a good indication.
FOCUS Ethereum developer platform ETHGlobal hosted its first Ethereum hackathon in New York City since May 2019, this past weekend. The focus leaned heavily on non-fungible tokens, as opposed to decentralized finance in the previous event.
BUILDERS Some of Ethereum’s most successful dapps and projects – 1inch, Instadapp, CryptoKitties– have come from hackathons like the ones organized by ETHGlobal. These events have become good breeding grounds for builders and investors.
CONTEST More than 1,500 hackers participated in the contest to build the best Ethereum-based dapp over the weekend at the Altman Building in NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood. Over $500,000 in prizes were awarded to ten winning teams.
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NFT Controversy
⚔️ Yuga Fires Back at #BURNBAYC Creator
By Jason Levin
NOT TRUE Over the last week, #BURNBAYC has been trending on Twitter after a rumor flew around that the design for the Bored Ape Yacht Club is based on Nazi symbolism. The BAYC team adamantly states this is not true.
RUMORS The source of these rumors is Ryder Ripps, a conceptual artist and Bored Ape Holder. In January, he released a document online called “Bored Ape Yacht Club is Racist and Contains Nazi Dog Whistles.”
DISINFORMATION He then sold his own ersatz versions of Bored Apes called RR/BAYC and walked away with at least 300 ETH, according to Etherscan. Wylie Aronow, cofounder of BAYC, stated that BAYC is not based on Nazi imagery. “As you may have heard, we’ve become the target of a crazy disinformation campaign accusing us — a group of Jewish, Turkish, Pakistani and Cuban friends — of being super-secret Nazis,” he tweeted under his Twitter handle, GordonGoner.eth.
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DeFi Identity
💵 DEX Lets Customers Make $100,000 Transfers with No Identity Check
By Samuel Haig
TRANSFERS Big money transfers? With no know-your-customer requirements? In the TradFi world that would be impossible. In DeFi, it’s part of the anonymous ethos. Now a new deal is testing the expectations of both sides of finance.
VERIFICATION On June 27, THORWallet DEX, a self-managed wallet supporting cross-chain trades across multiple blockchains, started permitting customers to make $100,000 worth of annual transfers without requiring additional identity verification.
KYC THORWallet DEX joined forces with Mt Pelerin, a Swiss fintech firm specializing in digital assets. The partnership allows users in 172 countries to transfer up to 100,000 Swiss francs ($CHF) to and from the platform per year without undergoing know-your-customer (KYC) verification.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Dustups
👉🏼 Nexo Demands Anonymous Twitter Account Stop Maligning Firm
By Jason Levin
In a dustup that demonstrates the rising tension in crypto, Nexo, a lending platform, demanded Monday that an anonymous Twitter account stop disparaging the firm in an incendiary thread.
“You are currently engaged in malicious spreading of inaccurate, fake and unfounded information,” Nexo wrote in a letter posted online. Nexo said the Twitter account was damaging its reputation.
Nexo demanded that the accountholder, who goes by the handle otteroooo, “cease and desist” from making more comments and delete communications about the company on social media.
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Shoutout
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The Tube
📺 Quick Take: Harmony hacked, Yuga strikes, BlockFi on the rocks
📺 The Defiant Weekly: NFT.NYC is over but what have we learned?
Elsewhere
🔗 Dissecting the DAO: Web3 Ownership is Surprisingly Concentrated: Chainalysis
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a staple of web3. Internet-native and blockchain-based, DAOs are intended to provide a new, democratized management structure for businesses, projects, and communities, in which any member can vote on organizational decisions just by buying into the project.
🔗 Tether CTO refutes stablecoin FUD as short-sellers circle: CoinTelegraph
Paolo Ardoino alleged some hedge funds are trying to create pressure “in the billions” to “harm Tether liquidity” so that they can eventually buy back tokens at a much lower price.
🔗 More Hedge Funds Are Betting Against Tether as Crypto Melts Down: The Wall Street Journal
Short sellers have been ramping up their bets against tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, amid a broad market selloff that has called into doubt the financial health of some crypto companies.
Trending in The Defiant
Fear and Reveling in Goblintown: A Savage Journey into NFT Land Just before midnight in Hell’s Kitchen, we snuck out the backdoor at Terminal 5 and boarded a slapdash, wooden bus befitting mythical creatures associated with dirt, bugs, and the macabre. We were, after all, among the “VERY few” who’d been chosen to go down, down to Goblintown.
Time to be Boring: How Crypto Goes 100x From Here How does DeFi go 100x? There are two basic approaches. One is to focus on banking “crypto native” activity. This means that NFTs, crypto gaming (”GameFi”), web3 social, and other uniquely-web3 innovations could all be DeFi’s savior.
NFT.NYC is over but what have we learned? In this video we review the highlights of the week.
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Claire Gu, Samuel Haig, Jason Levin, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt, Daniel Flynn, 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.