Recap: DeFi Week of Sept. 7 🦄
Hello Defiers, hope you’re having a great weekend!
Summing up: SushiSwap continues to make headlines this week, first with a successful migration of liquidity, where it was able to take about half of Uniswap’s assets, and next when founder Chef Nomi returned the full $14M he has taken from the project. yEarn launched yet another DeFi lego with StableCredit, Perpetual Protocol and Hegic tested new token distribution mechanisms, and UMA teamed up with Ren to create a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin.
Ian Lee of IDEO CoLab wrote a great guest column showing hoe DeFi is disrupting the entire finance stack. This week’s podcast episode is with Grammy-award winning DJ RAC, who talks about how crypto and blockchain technology can reduce intermediaries in the music industry, and help artists capture more of the value their work produces.
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🙌 Together with Perpetual Protocol, which provides decentralized perpetual contracts for any asset, and Zapper, the ultimate hub for managing DeFi assets & liabilities.
Interview
"It Turns Out Music Does Have Value. We've Been Pricing It Incorrectly For 20 Years:" RAC
In this week’s interview, we chatted with Grammy Award-winning DJ Andre Anjos, aka RAC. Many have seen cryptocurrencies as a way to decentralize the financial system, thanks to the innovation of digital scarcity. RAC says that digital scarcity can also help disrupt the music industry. His experiments have so far showed how distributed networks can be the underlying infrastructure that helps artists can sell their creations directly to fans; how tokens on open markets can help more accurately price goods and help them benefit from secondary trading of their products; and now how digital assets can help strengthen communities.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
Op-ed
We're the Architects of a More Open, Free and Fair Financial System: IDEO CoLab's Ian Lee
IDEO CoLab’s Ian Lee takes us through the evolution of finance, from the pre-internet days to DeFi. He breaks down the full stack for money, showing how, despite sleek-looking applications, fintechs have only innovated on the surface, while the core had remained the same for hundreds of years —until the advent of cryptocurrencies. Public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum have enabled a better infrastructure layer, while the application layer had remained centralized. With DeFi, decentralization is moving up the stack for the first time, revolutionizing finance from the ground up.
📺 Watch New Video on The Defiant’s YouTube Channel and Subscribe
Check out the just-released video on The Defiant’s YouTube channel! The amazing story of SushiSwap. The video was produced in partnership with Robin Schmidt of Harmony Protocol.
Friday
Dives
"I F*cked Up. And I am Sorry:" Chef Nomi Returns $14M of ETH to SushiSwap: The founder behind the Uniswap fork SushiSwap, an anonymous developer going by the name of Chef Nomi who had run off with about $14M worth of ETH and prompted accusations the project was an exit scam, today returned his stash.
Bytes
yEarn Unveils StableCredit Loans: yEarn Finance said it’s preparing to release a new decentralized lending protocol and automated market maker.
Aavegotchi Showcases GHST Governance Token: Aavegotchi, an NFT x DeFi crossover, released details for a new governance token, giving players the ability to dictate key parameters of the forthcoming digital pet universe.
Wednesday
Dives
SushiSwap Drains Uniswap Liquidity. Still, Everyone Won: SushiSwap, a fork of Uniswap, successfully migrated Uniswap liquidity into its own protocol. It was the first time the scheme that has come to be known as Vampire Mining had ever been attempted.
Bytes
UMA & REN Team up for Bitcoin-Based Yield Dollar: UMA and Ren Protocol are teaming up to offer a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin. The price of UMA’s uUSD stablecoin will tend towards $1 as it approaches its maturity date, and will be redeemable for $1 of the collateral asset at expiry.
DeFi Protocols Are Testing New Token Sale Mechanisms: DeFi protocols Perpetual and Hegic are listing their tokens with new distribution mechanisms aimed at reducing front running and price speculation.
Tuesday
SushiSwap Migration is Hours Away With $1.3B at Stake: In less than 48 hours, a two-week upstart will attempt to drain liquidity from DeFi’s largest exchange, in a never-before-attempted vampire-like attack, which right now has $1.3B in tokens at stake. This is the definitive SushiSwap saga story.
💜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: I’m Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum. I was previously at Bloomberg News in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires covering markets. I’ve extensively covered crypto and finance, and now I’m diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.
