🐺 Wolf Game NFTs Spark Frenzy with Sales of $52M in Five Days
Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today,
News
Twitter Fight Between VC and Devs Stirs Angst Over Ethereum Gas Fees
Acala Network Wins Polkadot’s Parachain Slot as Auction Shifts to Next Phase
Deep Dive
Podcast
🎙Listen to this week’s podcast with Geoff Cook here:
Video
Links
Binance Seeks Investments From Sovereign Wealth Funds: CoinDesk
Polychain Monsters Uses Chainlink VRF to Fairly Distribute NFTs: Chainlink
Here’s how El Salvador’s President Plans to Use Bitcoin Bonds: The Block
Deposits for the @sushiswap $SUSHI reactor are now open on http://tokemak.xyz: SushiSwap
Thrilled to be speaking at @NFT_BZL to kick off Miami Art Week!: Rarible
Most Read on The Defiant
Smart Contract Platform NEAR Gains Momentum with Plan to Distribute 40M Tokens
DeFi 2.0 Wave of New Projects Test Liquidity Mining Alternatives
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Fintech Meetup, is fintech’s next big event--30,000+ online meetings for 3,000+ DeFi & TradFi participants! Online Mar.22-24. Learn More
Play-to-Earn Games
🐺 Wolf Game NFTs Spark Frenzy with Sales of $52M in Five Days
WOLF There’s a new game in town. Wolf Game, a new play-to-earn concept that brings together NFTs and DeFi on the Ethereum blockchain, has taken crypto by storm and players can’t get enough.
SHEEP The 10,000 NFTs were “stealth” dropped on Nov. 18 priced at 0.06942 ETH ($290) and quickly sold out. Minters had a 10% chance of getting a wolf, with the remainder being sheep.
FLOOR PRICE The current floor price for a sheep is 3.3 ETH ($13.7K), and the cheapest wolf will set you back the princely sum of 8 ETH ($33K). The highest sale recorded so far was Wolf #2772 that changed hands for 20.5 ETH ($85K).
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Ethereum Debates
🤺 Twitter Fight Between VC and Devs Stirs Angst Over Ethereum Gas Fees
INCENDIARY TWEET Crypto Twitter, the heart of web3 discourse, had its most raucous weekend in recent memory. The clash kicked off with an incendiary tweet from Zhu Su, co-founder of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, a juggernaut in web3 investment.
PURITY TESTS “Yes I have abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past,” Zhu wrote. “Yes Ethereum has abandoned its users despite supporting them in the past. The idea of sitting around jerking off watching the burn and concocting purity tests, while zero newcomers can afford the chain, is gross.”
LOWER FEES High fees have dampened Ethereum’s potential to become a permissionless backbone of the blockchain-based economy. After all, if only the rich can use Ethereum, does it really matter that it’s a public network? Still, Zhu’s comments rubbed people the wrong way as they were seen as criticizing a long-time builder of Ethereum and DeFi, the very ecosystems that made Three Arrows Capital huge returns.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Parachains
🔴 Acala Network Wins Polkadot’s Parachain Slot as Auction Shifts to Next Phase
TL;DR Acala Network secured Polkadot’s first parachain slot on Nov. 18, winning the auction with a bid of 32M DOT (worth roughly $1.3B at the time) that was supported by more than 81,000 unique addresses. Acala Network is now slated to go live alongside the next four parachain auction winners in mid-December.
LEASE AUCTIONS Polkadot’s parachain lease auctions (PLOs) are used to allocate shards or “parachains” to projects building on Substrate for three-month durations up to two years. Since Polkadot’s May 2020 mainnet launch, only its relay chain has been live, restricting the network to exclusively processing a small range of transactions such as transfers and staking functions. Parachain slots winners will build out support for specialized computation, smart contracts, and novel DeFi applications.
TOP PROJECTS Leased parachain slots are secured by pledging to lock up large sums of DOT for the duration of a lease’s period, with many of Polkadot’s top projects offering vast sums of governance tokens to users who lock up DOT in support of their parachain bids.
Bette Chen, co-founder of Acala Network
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
DeFi Black Swans
😬 Doomsday Scenarios in DeFi Revolve Around Stablecoins USDC and USDT
We asked a simple question: What black swan events could sink DeFi? Brady Dale investigated and found that crypto leaders worry most about the stability of two major stablecoins.
REBEL WARRIOR If decentralized finance were a character in a fable, we could imagine it as a rebel warrior taking on the world — traditional finance in particular. Then we can think about that rebel’s different body parts as composed of the industry’s best projects so far.
RESOURCES So, its two fists might be Uniswap and Curve, the decentralized exchanges that are letting people put their resources behind a lot of ideas and move them around quickly as one fades and another looks promising.
CRYPTO HIJINKS Basic financial products that let people do recognizable financial work but in a decentralized way, like Compound, Synthetix, Cover and dYdX, might be the arms that make our warrior strong. Ethereum itself would be — obviously — the heart, while long term plays — like Yearn, Convex and Index Co-op — might be thought of as the left brain and NFTs and crypto hijinks (like Jay Pegs Auto Mart) as the right brain.
FALL But what are the legs? What are the projects that, if they were to be cut out from under it, would make our metaphorical warrior fall to earth?
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
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The Tube
📺 Ethereum Abandoned, BSC Run by Teenagers, & Constitution DAO Rugged
Links
🔗 Binance Seeks Investments From Sovereign Wealth Funds: CoinDesk
Binance is in preliminary discussions with “several” sovereign wealth funds about investing in its global entity, Zhao said in a Nov. 23 interview with the Financial Times, declining to name any specific funds.
🔗 Polychain Monsters Uses Chainlink VRF to Fairly Distribute NFTs: Chainlink
Chainlink VRF’s tamper-proof and verifiable random number generator gives us a transparent source of on-chain entropy to demonstrably show that our team cannot influence the distribution of NFTs.
🔗 Here’s how El Salvador’s President Plans to Use Bitcoin Bonds: The Block
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is planning to use a so-called bitcoin bond to fund a new municipality called “Bitcoin City,” which would be powered with geothermal energy from a volcano.
🔗 A Beginner’s Guide to Social Tokens: Mirror
Social tokens are tokens issued by individual creators or communities that enable community members to collaborate and share ownership in the value created together.
Most Read on The Defiant
Smart Contract Platform NEAR Gains Momentum with Plan to Distribute 40M Tokens NEAR protocol is a scalable smart contract platform that supports decentralized applications of almost any kind. Its token, NEAR, can be used to pay for transaction fees and storage as well as for staking by token holders who participate in achieving network consensus as transaction validators.
OlympusDAO’s Success Inspires Dozens of Forks They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. In crypto, this manifests as forks, or copies of a project’s codebase. In that sense, OlympusDAO must be feeling pretty flattered.
DeFi 2.0 Wave of New Projects Test Liquidity Mining Alternatives Things aren’t getting easier for those struggling to stay current with the lightning quick DeFi space. Just when you think you’re up to speed with the latest token or protocol along comes something new. Brace yourselves because here comes DeFi 2.0. What that term actually means is still in flux.
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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, Bailey Reutzel, 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).