Recap: DeFi Week of Jan. 11 🦄
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up: The week started off with a sell-off in the cryptocurrency market, which prompted liquidations in DeFi to jump to the third-highest ever, while short positions on ETH climbed near the highest since 2019. There was also drama going on at one of Ethereum’s longest-standing teams, Aragon, which faced over a dozen of resignations.
We shone a light on rebasing tokens, aka elastic finance, with an op-ed by AmpleSenseDAO, our Defiant Weekly video, and a DeFi101 explainer. DeFi rockstar Andre Cronje penned part 2 of his post “Building in DeFi Sucks,” and we caught up with other DeFi founders, who said the pressure of building in open sourced systems is intense. Rumors about EIP-1559 being ready riled Ethereans up, as did the debate around social media’s power to deplatform individuals.
And there was even more :)
That was just one week. Subscribe to get the latest DeFi news and analysis straight to your inbox and you don’t miss a thing. Free-signups get partial content, paid subscribers get everything. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or click on the button below to subscribe with fiat ($100/yr, $10/mo).
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That was just one week. Subscribe to get the latest DeFi news and analysis straight to your inbox. Free-signups get partial content, paid subscribers get everything. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or click on the button below to subscribe with fiat/credit card (for $10/mo or $100/yr).
🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, Neutrino, an algorithmic price-stable protocol that enables the creation of stablecoins tied to real-world assets, Value DeFi Protocol, a suite of DeFi products including the Value Liquid AMM, which allows anyone to create trading pools with flexible ratio pairs, and Cartesi, an optimistic roll-ups solution that aims to revolutionize smart contracts by allowing developers to code with mainstream software stacks, has just launched CTSI Reserve Mining.
Interview
"I'm Imagining a World Where Every Song Has an Investable Layer:" DJ 3LAU
In this week’s podcast, we interview Justin Blau, better known as 3LAU, one of the world’s top DJs, who is also at the forefront of the intersection between music and crypto. He became interested in blockchain technology because it can provide a means for fans to provably to own digital content, and for artists to better monetize their work. He believes this innovation has the potential to revolutionize the music industry.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
Op-Ed
Elastic Finance: Definition, Use Cases and Framework by AmpleSense DAO
The team at AmpleSense DAO, a community focused on improving understanding and adoption of elastic finance assets, wrote a piece that aims to explain how rebasing tokens work. The quick definition for these tokens is that instead of price volatility, they have supply volatility. Their token supply expands and contracts in response to market demand to maintain a pre-determined target price. Rebases magnify holders’ gains when the price is going up, but also magnify losses on the way down, which is why it can be a risky investment. Another common criticism they get is that they historically haven’t been able to hold their peg, which in theory would make them less useful than a stablecoin as a means of exchange. Amplesens provides a framework for evaluating them, and list the many use cases they see for these assets.
Thursday
Dives
DeFi Founders Empathize With Cronje’s Rant Yearn Finance founder and prolific DeFi builder Andre Cronje posted a part two to his initial post “Building in #DeFi sucks.”
Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 Is Ready. Or is it? Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559, a long-awaited update to Ethereum’s core codebase, was rumored to be ready for deployment, according to a leaked Discord conversation on Twitter.
Markets
LINK Supply Off Exchanges is Near 1-Year Low Chainlinlink has fallen out of favor in the last few months, possibly due to the parabolic run-up it enjoyed in mid-2020, but the worst may be over.
Bytes
We Might Get a Blockchain Expert Heading the SEC President-elect Joe Biden will be appointing MIT professor Gary Gensler as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Reuters reported.
Ledger Suffers Another Data Leak Ledger, which makes hardware wallets for digital assets, said it has been targeted by rogue Shopify team members who exported over 200 merchants’ customer databases in April and June of 2020.
Links
Wednesday
Dives
Aragon Facing Mass Departures and It’s Not Clear Why The Aragon community is facing mass resignations and nobody in the leadership team is being forthright as to what exactly is driving the exodus.
Crypto Calls For Decentralization After Trump Ban While half of America likely cheered the deplatforming of Donald Trump, crypto was calling for decentralized social media.
Bytes
CryptoPunk Sold for Record 140k ETH Last Week A 24x24 pixel image last week sold for 140 ETH, or $176k, the highest USD price on-record for a non-fungible token.
Notional Comes out of Stealth With Fixed Lending Protocol Notional Finance has come out of stealth with $3M in liquidity following a closed beta over the past quarter.
Links
Tuesday
Markets
DeFi Liquidations Spike Amid Market Slump Total liquidation volume jumped to $14.6M on Jan. 10, almost tripling from the previous day, according to data compiled by DeBank.
Ethereum Short Positions at Highest Level Since 2019 Ether short positions on Bitfinex, a top-five spot exchange in terms of volume according to CoinMarketCap, are at the highest level since March 2019.
Dives
$300M Whale Spotted in DeFi’s Turbulent Seas A wallet holding over 1% of the $20B total value locked in DeFi, has surfaced on crypto Twitter.
Fei is the Latest Ethereum Stablecoin Fei released details of its plans to launch a decentralized stablecoin protocol in Q1. FEI is an algorithmic stablecoins which uses crypto collateral
Links
Wrapped Bitcoin ‘Burns’ Outpaced Minting for the First Time in December: CoinDesk
Block.one CTO Daniel Larimer Announces Resignation: The Block
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories this week were written by Daniel Kahan, Owen Fernau, Cooper Turley and Christopher Attard, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov, with writing from DeFiDad.
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
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 ($10/mo, $100/yr).