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“The common-denominating theme since the launch of yield farming and liquidity mining is this: fair launches.
In the world of Ethereum, there has been a long-standing assumption that rent-seeking protocol fees will generally trend towards 0, or at least as low as possible because any protocol that introduces a fee also introduces the incentive to fork it, and offer the same product/service but without the fee.
Swap out ‘fee’ with ‘early VC investment’, and you get the current state of DeFi. Now, for every VC-backed protocol with a high percentage of tokens held by teams and investors, there is an opportunity to fork the code, introduce some yield-farming incentives, and redeploy the same product/service under new management.
The incentives for this are so dumbfoundingly simple, that it’s a pretty safe bet to expect that every single DeFi app will have a ‘fair-launch’ carbon-copy spin-off.
We’ve just invented a new way to allow retail to gain the same level of access as VCs! With Ethereum, not only can you be your own bank, but you can be your own VC. That’s game-changing.“
Case in point:
“A liquidity war is brewing between Uniswap and a fork of DeFi’s darling DEX, called SushiSwap. In less than a week, SushiSwap has aggregated more than $800M worth of tokens, or about 80% of total Uniswap assets.
This isn’t just another liquidity-pool based DEX that’s popped up to compete with Uniswap: SushiSwap is coming to directly take Uniswap’s liquidity.
APYs on these pools currently range from about 500% to over 2,000% for the highest yielding option, the UMA-ETH pool. SushiSwap’s plan to bootstrap its native AMM by sucking Uniswap’s liquidity is aptly called “Vampire Mining.”
Popular anon accounts have signaled their support for a “community-owned AMM LP protocol,” versus VC funded projects, like Uniswap which raised $13M from giants including a16z and USV.
SushiSwap is an experiment in protocol governance to see if the community is ready to lead themselves.“
See Also: Uniswap Rises to Top of DeFi Charts Thanks to Rival Looking to Unseat It
“As of Tuesday, average and median transaction fees have skyrocketed to record highs of $10.33 and $5.68, respectively.
Steep network fees are a double-edged sword. ‘They can ward off potential users, but rising fees also signify an increase in network utilization and demand for block space.’
As transaction fees continue to increase, this is causing DeFi to ‘slowly become a game reserved for the wealthy.’ Entities responsible for large on-chain transaction volume are searching for techniques to reduce pressure on the network.
Zk-rollups are at the moment the most comprehensive L2 solution for the Ethereum scalability problem.”
See Also: Ethereum Miners Earn $500,000 in Just One Hour
See Also: Decentralized Exchange Volume Rose 160% in August to $11.6B, Setting Third Straight Record
“Analysts predict that the imminent launch of yETH by Yearn Finance could trigger a renewed surge in buying pressure on the ETH markets. The product will automatically find the highest yielding decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol/strategy for Ether (ETH) deposits.
This adds to a long list of catalysts for Ethereum, but it also reduces the available supply.
YFI currently ranks as the 27th-largest crypto asset and is trading for nearly $34,000.”
See Also: Yearn.Finance’s New Vault Leverages DeFi ‘Triforce’: ETH, MakerDAO and Curve
See Also: UMA overtakes Yearn.Finance as the biggest ‘DeFi’ protocol on Ethereum
See Also: Vitalik Buterin compares DeFi tokenomics to the Fed’s money printer
“Investors may be entering the crypto market via ether and decentralized finance protocols rather than bitcoin, which served as a gateway to crypto markets during the 2017 bull run.
On-chain metrics suggest ether’s price rally has legs. The options market, too, is biased bullish on ether with the one-, three- and six-month put-call skews hovering below zero.”
“Acting Comptroller of Currency Brian Brooks is spearheading the move that would empower payment firms to operate across state lines with a single set of consolidated rules.
The charter would simultaneously enable such firms to expand their financial service offerings and avoid having to apply for licencing in each state individually.
Brooks told Politico the OCC would be ready by Tuesday to begin processing applications for the charters, which could potentially include companies like Paypal and Coinbase.
The news has sparked outrage among traditional banks, credit unions and elsewhere.”
“Pornhub is a year older than Bitcoin, having been founded in 2007 in Montreal, Canada. Currently, it stands as the world’s ninth most popular website with 3 billion monthly visitors.
As a leader in adult content with over 130 million visitors per day, Pornhub is excited to now offer two widely-used and leading digital currencies for our users.”
“Maker (MKR) holders have voted to prioritize adding Gemini USD, Binance USD, and several other tokens as collateral assets to the Maker DAO protocol so those tokens can be used to generate DAI stablecoins.
Community members also gave thumbs-ups to TrueGBP, TrueAUD, TrueCAD, Ren, Huobi Global BTC, UniswapV2 USDC-ETH Liquidity Token, New Silver DROP, and Harbor Trade Credit DROP.
Just because an asset has passed a greenlight does not necessarily indicate it will become a collateral type in the Maker Protocol. First, it has to go through a “thorough review by the [elected] Domain Teams in areas such as risk, oracles, and smart contracts to ensure the protocol can handle them in a secure manner.”
“Armstrong told O’Shaughnessy his product will streamline clients’ token launches from custody to smart contract creation to governance to distribution. It will ‘hand hold people through the process.’
Armstrong projected it could power ‘a thousand new startups.'”
See Also: BitMEX Launches Mobile Trading App in 140 Countries
See Also: Binance Launches Smart Contract-Enabled Blockchain, Adds Staking for Its Coin
“The popular privacy coin might not be so private anymore, as CipherTrace claims to have developed tools to trace it. CipherTrace claims that its tools will allow investigators to search, explore, and visualize Monero transactions.
Furthermore, CipherTrace plans on adding further functionality to the current version of the toolset, with features such as ‘entity transactions clustering, wallet identification, [and] exchange attribution‘ planned for the future.”
“According to CCB’s Terms, a DC/EP hardware wallet is a physical medium that is activated upon users’ request at a bank’s counter or a digital channel for carrying DC/EP. With the addition of a hardware wallet, users could keep custody of larger sums of their digital yuan off-line without relying on a third-party mobile app.
There is one key difference, however. The DC/EP hardware wallets can be traceable and would strip off the anonymity feature of paper cash as users would need personal information such as IDs and phone numbers to activate the wallet in the first place.
The Terms indicated China’s DC/EP wallets could be offered in the future in a four-tier system, which would potentially put a cap on how much users can spend their digital yuan. Under the Terms, for instance, a user could only maintain a balance of up to 10,000 ($1,500) yuan in a tier-2 DC/EP wallet.”
See Also: Government of Bermuda Pilots Stimulus Token in Response to COVID-19 Crisis
“Researchers at ZenGo have properly disclosed a vulnerability discovered in the Diogenes protocol proof. The proof is designed to provide the raw entropy for a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) for the Ethereum 2.0 random beacon chain.
Ligero Inc., the team behind Diogenes, is redrafting the proof of the protocol to iterate away the vulnerability.
VDFs are necessary for building a truly secure random beacon chain. The vulnerability is part of an ongoing security audit of the protocol commissioned by the Ethereum Foundation and the VDF Alliance.
The ‘quality of the bug attests to the high quality of the project and the amount of scrutiny that is put into testing this protocol,’ and Eth 2.0’s burgeoning tech stack appears to be ‘highly resilient.‘”
“The complaint, a class action for those who invested in the Tezos ICO, alleged defendants violated U.S. securities law by hosting an unregistered sale.
The plaintiff’s attorneys will take more than $8.5 million, a third of the total settlement, in fees and expenses. The remaining $16.5 million will be divided among those who invested in the Tezos ICO and had a monetary loss.
Those who gained from their investment, through selling at a profit or staking (dubbed “baking”) their XTZ tokens will not be able to claim damages.”
The Disrupt 