🦹🏻♂️ NFTs Worth Millions Stolen After Bored Apes Instagram Hack
Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today:
News
OpenSea’s Deal for Gem a ‘Hell of an Upgrade’ for Leading NFT Marketplace
Stripe to Start Using Crypto’s Financial Rails for Payments Today
DeFi Primers
Video
Elsewhere
Twitter Employees Search for Answers as Musk Takeover Becomes Reality: The New York Times
Fidelity Investments Will Offer Bitcoin Inclusion in Its 401(k) Accounts: Reports: CoinDesk
FTX/ Defi: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . . : The Financial Times
Trending in The Defiant
TRON’s Sun Vows to Rock Stablecoin Market With his Own $10B Play
Black Pilled at Bitcoin 2022: Do We Know What All This Is For?
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NFT Exploits
🦹🏻♂️ NFTs Worth Millions Stolen After Bored Apes Instagram Hack
By Owen Fernau
EXPLOIT Ape owners continue to fall prey to scams. In the latest exploit, some users have lost their Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and other NFTs after the project’s Instagram was hacked, directing users to a malicious website that promised an airdrop of virtual land.
WALLET According to on-chain sleuth, zachxbt, the hacker stole 91 NFTs in total, including four Bored Apes, and seven Mutant Apes. Just those 11 NFTs are worth $2.6M going by current floor and ETH prices as of Apr. 25. Zachxbt also shared the address of the attacker’s wallet whose value can be seen spiking and then falling as the attacker offloaded the NFTs.
SCAMMERS The Bored Apes site looks to have redirected the Instagram favicon back to its homepage in order to minimize the damage. BAYC holders have often been successfully targeted by scammers in the past, leading prominent crypto commentator Cobie to call for a change. “Yuga Labs or ApeCoinDAO should create a custody service asap,” he tweeted.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
NFT Marketplaces
🌊 OpenSea’s Deal for Gem a ‘Hell of an Upgrade’ for Leading NFT Marketplace
By Jason Levin
ACQUISITION OpenSea, the most popular site for buying NFTs, has made an acquisition of its own. On Apr. 25, OpenSea acquired Gem, an NFT marketplace aggregator. Amongst other features, Gem provides the ability to buy NFTs across multiple marketplaces in one transaction. OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer wrote in a blog post that it plans to add Gem’s key features to the platform, which is doing about $124M in daily sales volume, according to DappRadar.
MONOPOLY “OpenSea seems to be monopolizing the space as quickly as possible to keep their lead,” said Garrett Allen, a member of the product team at NFT marketplace Infinity. “There will certainly be a place for other specialized NFT marketplaces like those focused on social or gaming even with an OpenSea monopoly.”
ANTITHETICAL Allen called OpenSea’s approach “antithetical to web3 values,” referring to web3’s overarching mission of decentralized finance and power. Levi Johnson, founder of Asteria Labs and NFT collection Ethalien, applauded the deal. “Gem is a team of executors,” he told The Defiant. “Like most successful early startups, they get stuff done faster and better than most of the market. If it means direct integration of Gem’s tools into OpenSea’s platform that’s a hell of an upgrade.”
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Rewards
🧐 Synthetix Incentivizes sUSD Liquidity On Optimism With Lyra
By Jason Levin
NEWS Legendary investor Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” On Apr. 22, Synthetix, a derivatives protocol, unveiled its new initiative with Lyra: an options protocol that launched last year.
SCALING It’s designed to incentivize liquidity for its synthetic dollar-pegged sUSD stablecoin on Optimism, the Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution. Weekly rewards of 12,000 $SNX and 50,000 $LYRA have been allocated towards bribes to veCRV voters to incentivize them to vote for the sUSD Curve pool on Optimism.
TOKEN Didn’t catch all that? Let’s run it back. CRV is the Curve Finance token, veCRV is vote-escrowed CRV, and LYRA is the governance token of the Lyra protocol.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Infrastructure
💸 Stripe to Start Using Crypto’s Financial Rails for Payments Today
The payments giants will use USDC and Polygon, with Twitter as its first partner.
By Owen Fernau
FUNCTION Stripe, the payments processing giant, introduced a new function which will allow businesses to pay users in crypto using the Polygon network. Twitter will be Stripe’s first partner in the rollout. Now people who earn revenue on the social media platform through Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows can get paid in the USDC stablecoin.
PAYMENTS Stripe emphasized in a blog post the “open-access global financial rails” crypto enables, allowing the company to sidestep the complexity of heterogeneous payment systems.
ECOSYSTEM “Not every creator is fortunate enough to live in a region with well-connected financial infrastructure and ecosystem,” tweeted Forbes 30 under 30 security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, expressing enthusiasm for Stripe’s new feature.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Tutorials
How to Buy Crypto on Uniswap
A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Use a Decentralized Exchange
By Arya Ghobadi
AIRDROP If you’ve been following DeFi, you have probably heard of, or been part of, Uniswap’s airdrop on September 17, 2020. Uniswap gave away 400 UNI tokens, amounting to $1,200 at that time, to anyone who had interacted with the platform before September 2020. Uniswap managed to lock in more than $2B dollars, making it the largest player in DeFi when it comes to total value locked in.
DEX Uniswap is a decentralized financial exchange, or DEX, which allows anyone to take part in the financial transactions of Ethereum-based tokens without a central body or intermediary. It’s committed to giving users permissionless access to financial services with security and immutability and without the fear of discrimination or counterparty risk.
SMART CONTRACTS Because it’s built on the Ethereum blockchain and uses smart contracts, Uniswap replaces traditional centralized market tools like exchange listings and limit-order books with automated and permissionless liquidity pools executed purely by algorithms.
PRIMER Here’s a primer on how to use this platform: Go to the UniSwap official website and click on Launch App and it brings you to app.uniswap.org:
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
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The Tube
🔗 The Defiant Weekly: Meet war hero saving lives with crypto
🔗 Quick Take: 3NFTs launch big, but did they all make it?
Elsewhere
🔗 Twitter Employees Search for Answers as Musk Takeover Becomes Reality: The New York Times
Workers say they have been left largely in the dark about what a sale to the billionaire will mean for them and their shares in the company.
🔗 Fidelity Investments Will Offer Bitcoin Inclusion in Its 401(k) Accounts: Reports: CoinDesk
U.S.- based financial services firm Fidelity Investments will allow investors to put bitcoin (BTC) in their 401(k) retirement savings accounts later this year, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported Tuesday.
🔗 FTX/ Defi: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . . : The Financial Times
Honk honk! Here comes the crypto clown car.
Trending in The Defiant
TRON’s Sun Vows to Rock Stablecoin Market With his Own $10B Play Justin Sun, the provocative founder of TRON with a taste for drama, is at it again.
OlympusDAO Strives to Revive with ‘Inverse Bonds’ Offering It may not be quite a Hail Mary, but the OlympusDAO community is voting on whether to deploy the project’s Protocol-Owned Liquidity for its new Inverse Bonds product.
Black Pilled at Bitcoin 2022: Do We Know What All This Is For? As I’m watching men struggle on the mechanical bull (thinking, shouldn’t they only be using one hand?) at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami last week, a thought from the deep recesses of my mind emerges: What is all this for?
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Samuel Haig, Jason, Levin, 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. Signest, 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)