🎈"Hypothetical Moon House" & Meebits for $1.4M Have Some Calling Bubble

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today,

• $100k NFT Offers Blueprint for Hypothetical Moon House

• Meebits’ $1.4M Sale Has Crypto Artists Calling Bubble

• Curve Finance Token Holders are Reaping Rewards

• S&P Adds Bitcoin and Ether Indices With ETF Providers Lining Up

• Sotheby’s Collaborates with Coinbase to Accept BTC and ETH

Also, Uniswao V3 launched today! We’ll have a deep dive analyzing its first day tomorrow, for now read our past coverage:

• Uniswap V3 Drop Features L2 Move and 4,000x Gain in Capital Efficiency

• “I Thought I Was Living in a Simulation.” The Story Behind The +$500k Uniswap NFT

and more :)

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🙌 Together with: 

• Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!

• 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. 

• The DeFi Pulse Index, a capitalization-weighted index that tracks the performance of selected DeFi assets across the market. 

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Video

📺 First Look: NFTs to IPFS with Minters Vault

📺 Tuesday Tutorials: Use DeFi Without Spending Any Money

📺 Quick Take: EVM Optimistic Rollup Using Truebit

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🌖 $100k NFT Offers Blueprint for Hypothetical Moon House

MOON HOUSE Have you ever wanted to go to the moon and reach those crypto prices with your own hands? Well, strap into your spaceship, because millionaire, serial IT entrepreneur Roman Kropachek has an NFT for you. “Moon house concept by Roman Kropachek” is the NFT for a blueprint of a hypothetical house on the moon, which can be purchased for the reserve price of $100k.

“This is just a concept,” Kropachek said to The Defiant. “Although some modules have been thoroughly thought through, like oxygen leakage and the use of decompression modules for this purpose, we would still not know what materials could actually be used for construction. It will require millions of dollars in costs, many more hours of engineers and scientists invested, to have the actual construction plan approved and to develop a concept in the smallest detail.” 

MIAMI YACHT On top of gaining access to the original digital files assuring you a viable plan to build a hypothetical moon house, the buyer will also get to enjoy a day trip on Kropachek’s yacht in Miami. 

ROLLS ROYCE IN SILENCE His first piece, “22 seconds of ‘silence’ in Rolls Royce Wraith by Roman Kropachek,” dared to pose the question of whether or not anyone would bid $1,500 on an NFT audio recording of a man in a car. The art world, though, appears to still be sitting on their laurels, as nobody has bid to date.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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SPONSORED POST

DeFi Saver’s Recipe Creator Lets You Combine DeFi Legos 

The new DeFi Saver Recipe Creator is an advanced DeFi transaction builder - it allows you to combine a number of actions, such as flash loans, asset swaps, and other DeFi protocol interactions into a single transaction. 

Some of the things you can do include maximizing AAVE and COMP liquidity mining rewards, moving debt positions between protocols, and creating instantly leveraged positions. 

They also introduced a new Simulation mode, that allows everyone to experiment, test, and verify anything in the app, without having to pay any fees or commit actual funds. It's a perfect way to try creating custom recipes and to verify everything works as planned. 

As the app name suggests, the team’s number one priority is safety, and all of the new tools have been audited by both ConsenSys Diligence and Dedaub. And, perhaps more interestingly, the team claims you can expect to see automated recipes based on customizable triggers as well as an L2 edition of DeFi Saver this summer (make sure to follow them on Twitter for more news on this). 

You can try out the Recipe Creator today at DeFiSaver.com⬅️

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🎈 Meebits’ $1.4M Sale Has Crypto Artists Calling Bubble

TLDR Meebits has everything an NFT investor could ask for ––random computer-generated traits to assign uniqueness and scarcity, the pedigree of the CryptoPunks maker and their community, and extremely cool-looking creatures many crypto enthusiasts would want to have as an avatar.

But is that all worth $1.4M for a single token? Artists in the NFT community say the staggering sums and frenzied trading are the latest sign the market is overheating.

HUGE SUCCESS In less than a week, Meebits is the 8th most successful NFT project of all time based on secondary sales volume, according to DappRadar. The take for Larva Labs was nearly $80 million and OpenSea reported that a single Meebits character that would have initially sold for less than 3 ETH broke its highest single item sales record at 420 ETH, or over $1.43 million at the time of writing.

3D AVATARS Beyond basic character design, Larva Labs noted the widespread use of CryptoPunks as 2d social media avatars. Meebits is intended to be the leading “3D avatar for virtual worlds, games, and VR.” To achieve this goal, the company will soon release an asset pack that will support character animation in virtual worlds. In enthusiasts’ terms, Meebits are designed to be the preferred identity in the Metaverse.

BUBBLE TALK One artist balked at the starting price of 2.5 ETH characterizing it as “some crazy rich people stuff.” Gisel X Flores urged caution tweeting that,

“These hot or not collecting situations are training each other not to think & just buy. It will backfire on the community… especially the ones who are not in the ‘know’ but follow.”

ROBNESS, a highly outspoken crypto artist, stated in an interview that he first “started noticing it after CryptoPunks valuations got absurd.” He maintained that the “hype of that spurred a ton of generative collectible attempts” as well as searches for “long forgotten ones like MoonCats.”

CATCHING FIRE Recent releases of NFT collectibles that caught fire include the rediscovered MoonCats, with a trading volume of over $9 million in the first seven days, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which did $7.3 million in volume in its first week, and Hashmasks, which sold around $10 million in four days. Each release was characterized by a great deal of anticipation indicated by social media chatter, a fast initial sale and heated secondary sales.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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🍬 Curve Finance Token Holders are Reaping Rewards

TLDR Curve Finance users are getting a steady stream of rewards lately.  Holders of the Curve voting token veCRV have gotten news of airdrops from two separate projects in the past month. 

FROYO, CVX Frozen Yoghurt, a Curve Finance fork, launched this week on the Fantom blockchain, but the project will airdrop its token, FROYO, to holders of veCRV (as well as to liquidity providers for the FROYO token). And in mid-April, Convex Finance, which aims to boost rewards for CRV stakers and liquidity providers, announced it will also be airdropping CVX tokens to veCRV holders once the project launches in May. 

MOAR REWARDS Ellipsis, another Curve Finance fork which launched in March, also airdropped its token to veCRV holders. Plus, trading fees from Curve’s deployment on the Layer 2 solution Polygon, also accrue to veCRV holders. 

LOCKUP PERIOD According to a Coinmonks report, the average lockup period for Curve stakers is 3.63 years (the maximum lockup period is four years). Plus, Curve users must pre-commit to the amount of time they will lock up their CRV. Both these things make veCRV holders more dependable, compared with yield farmers moving around protocols on a daily basis as they search for the best payouts.

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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📈 S&P Adds BTC and ETH Indices As ETF Providers Line Up

TLDR The S&P Dow Jones Indices, the maker of likely the most widely referenced indices in finance, has added three crypto indexes to its offerings. The firm added the S&P Bitcoin, Ethereum and Crypto Mega Cap —a combination of BTC and ETH— indices.

SO WHAT The benchmarks can be used by the financial industry to track the underlying assets’ performance. The indexes also mean that providers of exchange-traded products vying to launch the first US-based Bitcoin ETF will now be able to base their funds off the reputable data feed.

The move further solidifies cryptocurrencies as a legitimate asset class with S&P saying that “enormous value is now being transacted in dozens of exchanges where there are no traditional market makers” in its announcement post which also conceded that “no one entity can fully control or halt the use of these currencies.” 

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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🖼 Sotheby’s Now Accept BTC and ETH Via Coinbase

TLDR Sotheby’s art auction house is accepting Bitcoin and Ether as payment for physical artworks, starting with Banksy’s iconic “Love is in the Air,” to be auctioned off on May 12. In collaboration with Coinbase, Sotheby’s becomes the first major fine art auction house to do this. 

ONE-UPPING While Christie’s art auction house recently accepted $69M in ETH for Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS,” that was an NFT. Sotheby’s is taking its acceptance one step further in allowing crypto transactions for physical art. 

👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈

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🔗 Uniswap V3 Mainnet Launch

“Uniswap v3 is the most powerful version of the protocol yet, with Concentrated Liquidity offering unprecedented capital efficiency for liquidity providers, better execution for traders, and superior infrastructure at the heart of decentralized finance. For a full description of v3’s features, please refer to our announcement blog post. Audit reports for the core and periphery contracts can be found here and here.”

Proud owner of @Uniswap v3 NFT #1: @haydenadams

Hayden Adams 🦄 @haydenzadams

1/ 🦄 Proud owner of @Uniswap v3 NFT #1 Mini thread on v3 NFT positions which are SVGs generated entirely on-chain and derived from the properties of the underlying position

Uniswap Labs 🦄 @Uniswap

4/ 🖼️ LP positions are now NFTs! 🎨 NFTs will appear as unique on-chain generated art based on the properties of your position ✨ Look out for rare sparkles! https://t.co/fC2e5Wzc3l

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✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰

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🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Dan Kahan, Owen Fernau, Andras Beak, and DeFiDad, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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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).