🖼 A16Z’s Latest Bet on NFTs: Free Licenses for Everyone
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Celsius files to reopen withdrawals for a minority of customers: CoinTelegraph
Ethereum Name Service Touts Third-Highest Monthly Revenue as Merge Approaches: Decrypt
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NFTs
🖼 A16Z’s Latest Bet on NFTs: Free Licenses for Everyone
Venture Capital Giant’s Move Signals Outsize Ambitions in NFT Market
By Owen Fernau
STOLEN Who owns what when someone owns an NFT? It’s not always clear. When Actor Seth Green’s Bored Ape was stolen, for instance, it brought plans for a show with the animated character into question.
CODE There’s the ambiguity of whether the metadata, the code that creates NFT images, is actually stored in a way owners can rely on. And then there is the more general mystery of how someone can “own” digital images or characters that are only a right-click away from duplication.
MORASS Now Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that closed a $4.5B crypto fund in May, is wading into the NFT ownership morass. On Aug. 31, a16z, as the firm is known, launched six new NFT licenses under the brand “Can’t Be Evil” that purport to help artists monetize the new technology. The licenses have been released to the public gratis. According to the VC firm, the licenses aim to accomplish three goals:
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Market Action
📈 Crypto Markets Hold Up As Stocks Swoon
Ether Has Rallied 5.4% Since Monday
OUTPERFORMED Despite moving in unison for much of the year, Ether has outperformed major U.S. stock indices this week. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite were on track for five consecutive days of losses before rallying late Thursday, dropping 1.4% and 1.7% respectively since they opened on Monday.
GAINS Several major cryptocurrencies, meanwhile, have eked out gains over the week. Ether has rallied 5.4% since Monday, according to data from The Defiant Terminal. Cardano is up 1.1%, and Polkadot is up 0.4%.
LOWS Bitcoin, Binance and Ripple have also fared better than the stock market, having dropped 1.1% or less since Monday. While stock markets hit fresh weekly lows earlier today, major cryptocurrencies held above their Aug. 28 lows.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
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DeFi Explainers
🧐 What Is DAI?
A Step-by-Step Guide to One of DeFi’s Most Important Stablecoins
URGENT After the collapse of Terra’s UST stablecoin in May and the wipeout of $60B in market capitalization it has become increasingly urgent to see how stablecoins are backed. DAI, one of the earliest stablecoins, is one of the most important such tokens in DeFi.
RESERVES On a spectrum between fully algorithmic and backed by cash reserves, DAI stablecoin lies somewhere in between. Let’s learn more about DAI.
INTERMEDIARIES DAI stablecoin is supported by MakerDAO, a DeFi lender. Founded by Rune Christensen, the Maker Foundation launched open-source MakerDAO in 2014 to spearhead decentralized finance. Like other protocols, Maker runs on Ethereum’s smart contracts to replicate traditional finance without intermediaries such as banks.
LENDING As a lending protocol, MakerDAO was missing a key component — money that is digital but not as volatile as cryptocurrencies. This is where stablecoins come in.
👉READ THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO👈
Elsewhere
🔗 Celsius files to reopen withdrawals for a minority of customers: CoinTelegraph
Celsius has motioned for $50 million worth of the total $225 million held in the Custody Program and Withhold Accounts to be released to owners.
🔗 Ethereum Name Service Touts Third-Highest Monthly Revenue as Merge Approaches: Decrypt
The Ethereum Name Service reported its third highest month of revenue in August, with 2.17 ENS domain names created on the service.
🔗 When White Hat Hackers Go Bad: CoinDesk
In most cases, cybersecurity can be achieved through ethical hacking – an established practice used to identify weaknesses and offer guidance on vulnerabilities.
Trending in The Defiant
Bitcoin Dominance Drops Under 40% For The First Time Since January Bitcoin dominance (BTC.D), which is the market capitalization of BTC relative to that of all digital assets, has fallen below 40% for just the second time since 2018 and stands at an eight-month low, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Moonbirds Fly High On $50M Round and New Collections Institutional investors continue to place bullish bets on NFTs despite the current bear market in digital assets.
Christensen Calls For MakerDAO to Float Stablecoin In what would mark a dramatic strategic reversal, Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, is calling for the DeFi stalwart to reduce its exposure to real-world assets and freely float the value of its stablecoin, DAI, against the dollar.
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories in The Defiant are written by Owen Fernau, Aleksandar Gilbert, Samuel Haig, and yyctrader, and edited by Edward Robinson, yyctrader and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.
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🤑 Seven Traders Raked in $114M in Profits via MEV Stratagem
Trading Bots Quietly Make a Killing in a Market That is Supposed to Be 'Democratizing'
By Samuel Haig
ANALYSIS Just a handful of players are profiting handsomely from Maximal Extractable Value at the expense of ordinary Ethereum users, an analysis of Dune Analytics data shows. In the last 12 months, six transactions account for half of the $163M extracted by bots through MEV, an arcane trading strategy in the crypto market.
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