Recap: DeFi Week of Nov. 9 🦄
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up: It was a bullish week for crypto with DeFi “blue-chips” leading the rally. Not even an Infura outage stopped tokens from gaining; the infrastructure malfunction caused many key DeFi tokens to temporarily break down. LiquidStake is the latest staking-as-a-service project, offering USDC loans against staked ETH. Interest in the Hegic options platform if soaring fueled by Yearn Porotcol partnership. We explored PieDAO’s new DeFi tokens index, and Zerion’s effort to make it easier to track all those DeFi tokens investments.
Second State’s Vivian Hu broke down the highlights of Shanghai Blockchain week, while Harmony Protocol’s Robin Schmidt dove into social tokens in the latest Defiant video. DappRadar produced an excellent overview of the very latest in the NFT space. This week’s podcast episode is with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko. SBF has become known to be a ruthless trader, but he argues he’s simply using DeFi protocols for what they were made. For Anatoly, the reason we’re all here in the first place is to scale cryptography so that billions of people can take control of their assets.
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🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, Sorare, a fantasy football game with officially licensed cards on Ethereum, and Near, a high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain that interoperates with Ethereum.
Interview
"When Incentives Are Gone, What's Left? DeFi Gets Mixed Marks:" Sam Bankman-Fried
In this week’s interview, I speak with Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of crypto liquidity provider Alameda Research and derivatives exchange FTX, and with Anatoly Yakovenko, the creator of the Solana blockchain. Bankman-Fried, recently announced the launch of Serum, a DEX built on the Solana blockchain. SBF has become known to be a ruthless trader, but he argues he’s simply using DeFi protocols for what they were made. For Anatoly, the end goal of Solana is to find the fastest and cheapest way to scale cryptography so that people are able to have ownership and participation in the applications they use, and so that the financial system can become more open efficient.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
Op-ed
DeFi Takes Shanghai Blockchain Week By Storm
DeFi is meant to be global, interconnected and open, but there’s still a gap between East and West. Each side of the globe isn’t communicating of working together very much, which doesn’t make much (economic or business) sense. For example, did you know last week was Shanghai Blockchain Week? If you didn’t (even if you did), we got you. Vivian Hu of blockchain infrastructure firm Second State was there has a break down of the DeFi projects that stood out the most.
Friday
Report
The Nifty Ways That NFTs Become DeFi: DappRadar’s Defiant exclusive report dives into the fast-moving non-fungible tokens space. The report highlights recent traction, emerging Layer 1s and token standards, and the different ways that NFTs and DeFi are starting to interact, from NFTs to insure financial assets, to interest-bearing tokens.
Thursday
Video
Social Tokens; Plague or Paradigm Shift?: Video producer Robin Schmidt dives into social tokens in the latest Defiant video, produced in partnership with Harmony Protocol. “In this episode we cover a range of social tokens, explore the pitfalls, the idiosyncracies and the value of a community when reduced to only the most committed members.”
Bytes
LiquidStake to Issue USDC Loans for Staked ETH: LiquidStake is the latest venture that wants to make it easier to stake ETH by giving validators liquidity on their deposits.
PieDAO Launches New Small+Large Cap DeFi Index: PieDAO has fused its small-cap DeFi+S and large-cap DeFi+L index tokens to form DeFi++, a basket of the most popular DeFi tokens.
Zerion Adds Profit & Loss Analysis: Zerion now offers DeFi traders a way to easily track their profits and losses on any supported token in its asset management dashboard.
Wednesday
Dives
DeFi Temporarily Broke Down Showing It's Overly Reliant on a Single Provider: Many decentralized finance applications broke down earlier today after a series of unfortunate events resulted in an outage on a key piece of Ethereum infrastructure.
DeFi Blue Wave is Sweeping Over Losses: There’s a blue wave and we’re not talking about US politics; it’s the latest meme making the rounds in DeFi as tokens with blue logos are rallying ahead of the rest this month: That’s AAVE, YFI and SNX up at least 50% just in the past 10 days.
Bytes
Hegic Interest Soars on Yearn Partnership: Hegic is back with a bang. Demand for the protocol, which temporarily suspended activity after a bug earlier this year, is soaring as its partnership with Yearn Finance’s rockstar founder compounds with increasing demand for trading protection.
Links
Gemini Exchange Building ‘Wrapped Filecoin’ for the Ethereum Network: CoinDesk
Hackers Draining $10 Million a Month from DeFi: Report: Decrypt
💜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 at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.
About the founder and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.
