OKEx has frozen withdrawals, audit firms are experiencing a backlog of DeFi projects and the Trump administration is examining DLT for national defense. Top shelf Audit (back)logsCrypto code audit firms say they are swamped with decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Three of the most well-regarded auditors in the space – OpenZeppelin, Quantstamp and Trail of Bits – told CoinDesk’s William Foxley they are all booked until at least Q1 2021. For example, Quantstamp’s Juliano Martinez said the “high volume” of applicants has led to his company “rejecting lots of projects.” The months-long backlog comes amid a sharp pullback across the $11 billion DeFi market, […]
DeFi
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How many Libertarians do you think there are in the United States? Everyone, right? Everybody wants personal freedom and a limited government. Just listen to Twitter bots and the talking heads on the propaganda channels. Everybody votes their principles and is internally consistent in their logic. Long live Ayn Rand! Lex Sokolin, a CoinDesk columnist, is global fintech co-head at ConsenSys, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based blockchain software company. The following is adapted from his Fintech Blueprint newsletter. The answer is … about 3% of the voting population. About 3% of the population actually cares enough about their personal philosophy to lodge a particular vote […]
Bitcoin (BTC) fell 2% Friday, the most in three weeks, after the market was spooked by the announcement that the cryptocurrency exchange OKEx had suspended withdrawals because founder Mingxing “Star” Xu was reportedly taken into police custody. The executive is the holder of a private key needed to authorize withdrawals, and that became impossible since he was out of touch, the exchange wrote in a notice published early Friday morning. Officials with OKEx, which is based in Malta but led by Chinese executives, said the issue involved a personal matter, not the exchange, and shouldn’t affect ongoing business. Traders said the price impact might be short-lived. “I don’t think this […]
If you’re an Ethereum project looking to get audits done before the close of 2020, it’s probably too late in the game. Audit firms CoinDesk spoke with said they are swamped with decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. The months-long backlog comes amid a sharp pullback across the $11 billion DeFi market, with most tokens down 19% over the last 30 days, according to Messari. Audit firm OpenZeppelin, which has overseen audits on DeFi staples such as Compound and Augur, said it is “seeing an overwhelming demand for audits” and is booking clients “well out into Q1 2021.” “We’re seeing a lot of […]
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s latest experiment to integrate decentralized finance with its centralized platform, Binance Smart Chain, is not here to beat DeFi, said the company’s CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. Instead, it aims to accelerate crypto and DeFi’s mass adoption. “Today, 99.9% of the money is still in fiat,” said Zhao in a one-on-one session with CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen, during CoinDesk’s invest: ethereum economy virtual conference Wednesday. “So in order to get those money in, we still need (fiat) gateways.” Too early for ‘meaningful’ competition Binance announced the launch of Binance Smart Chain, its version of a decentralized public blockchain, in early […]
Blockchain infrastructure firm Bloq is rolling out a new product to make it easier to invest in decentralized finance (DeFi) by asking users to stake their crypto, indicate a risk preference and letting the platform conduct the due diligence and actual farming for them. Announced on Wednesday, Bloq’s new platform, dubbed Vesper, is marketed as an easy-to-use platform for DeFi products. The platform will offer users the option to stake ether (ETH), wrapped bitcoin (wBTC) or USD Coin (USDC) using one of its “holding pools,” starting mid-November. Jeff Garzik, co-founder of Bloq, said that after depositing their crypto, users could indicate […]
After the BitMEX enforcement action, are other noncompliant exchanges on the CFTC’s radar? “Maybe,” said Chairman Heath Tarbert. In an appearance Wednesday, the regulator largely deferred to his colleagues at the SEC on the question of whether ether in a proof-of-stake version of Ethereum would be a security or a commodity. He similarly punted on DeFi. “Let me just basically say how impressed I am by Ethereum, full stop, period.” No, that’s not a Silicon Valley investor. That was Heath Tarbert, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who flexed a sophisticated understanding of blockchains during a live interview at […]
Bitcoin’s price is slipping while the amount ether parked in DeFi is in neutral. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,397 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 1.3% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,313-$11,730 BTC below its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bearish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Bitstamp since October 11.Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price was able to crack $11,700 in the past 24 hours, going as high as $11,730 on spot exchanges such as Bitstamp. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization then trended downward, dipping to as low as $11,313 before settling at […]
Yearn.Finance is managing a leadership transition right now and appears to be doing so effectively. Andre Cronje, the prolific coder and creator of Yearn, said he’s quit the project – and decentralized finance (DeFi) altogether – out of frustration with its realities. “I’m not building anything at all anymore,” he told CoinDesk over Telegram on Oct. 1. “I do it because I’m passionate, but if people are going to use my test environments, then lose money, and then hold me liable, it means there is 0 upside and only risk for me.” Yearn.Finance is the leading robo-advisor for yield in DeFi […]
A slowdown in cryptocurrency trading on so-called decentralized exchanges has helped to alleviate congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, at least temporarily mitigating concerns that the network was becoming overloaded. On Uniswap, the biggest decentralized exchange, or DEX, daily trading volumes have crashed to $224 million, versus a record high of $954 million on Sept. 1. “Low volatility in the crypto market as a whole has contributed to lower transaction volume and costs,” said Connor Abendschein, a crypto research analyst at Digital Assets Data. DeFi, a subsector of the cryptocurrency industry where entrepreneurs are developing semi-automated trading and lending platforms atop blockchain […]
Crypto trader, analyst and operator Qiao Wang looks at bitcoin’s macro resilience and why DeFi is here to stay. Today on the Brief: Stimulus talk shutdown spooks markets House recommends antitrust actions but likely to get nowhere CBDC trial results from China Our main discussion is with trader and entrepreneur Qiao Wang. In this conversation, NLW and Qiao discuss: Bitcoin’s resilience in the face of a barrage of bad news Why DeFi is a natural next step from the foundation bitcoin has built How bitcoin could end up the reserve asset for DeFi Why regulation is the greatest threat to the spac Source […]
Chinese tech companies were once seen as copycats of their Western peers: Alibaba was a knockoff of eBay and Baidu imitated Google. More recently, Chinese firms like TikTok and Huawei have established such dominant international positions that U.S. authorities have tried to hold them back. Now, the technological arms race is playing out in the cryptocurrency industry, where one Chinese company is taking on Ethereum, the world’s second-largest blockchain, which U.S.-based developers have used to build semi-automated trading and lending networks under the rubric of decentralized finance, or DeFi. Neo took aim at DeFi in late September with its launch of […]
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce discussed some major trends in the digital asset world during a chat with journalist Laura Shin, at the LA Blockchain Summit on Tuesday. While the talk kicked off with Peirce’s letter of dissent against the recent SEC decision to levy a $6.1 million fine on Unikrn, the commissioner spoke about a range of topics including decentralised finance (DeFi), her safe harbor proposal for token issuers, and, whether token airdrops and DeFi governance tokens could run into securities regulations. Right at the beginning of the talk, Peirce noted the views laid out in the chat […]
Ethereum’s highly anticipated 2.0 upgrade is poised to bring the network ever closer to fulfilling its original vision to be a “world computer” that plays host to a parallel, decentralized financial system. At Invest: Ethereum Economy on Oct. 14, we will address the ramifications for investors as decentralized finance takes the crypto world by storm. In a run-up to the event, our two-part CoinDesk Live: Inside the Ethereum Economy virtual miniseries on Oct. 8 and 12 introduces trending narratives we will break down at the main event: Why all the hype behind yield farming and food-inspired tokens? Should investors take them […]
Institutional interest in bitcoin futures has plummeted as the DeFi explosion made carry trades less attractive, said Bequant’s Denis Vinokourov. Source link
Crypto legal experts join to discuss the U.S. government’s case against BitMEX and its implications for the broader ecosystem. Our main discussion explores the ramifications of the recent BitMEX charges. Yesterday, BitMEX was targeted with both civil and criminal complaints, with the CTO being arrested for violation of the Bank Secrecy Act. In this conversation, NLW talks to crypto legal experts Stephen Palley and Preston Byrne to discuss: Source link
The sudden takedown of BitMEX has cast a new light on Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) markets. On Thursday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) served the Seychelles-based crypto derivatives exchange with a slew of charges, arresting CTO Samuel Reed and seeking out CEO (and admitted DeFi degen) Arthur Hayes for violating the Bank Secrecy Act. While centralized exchanges (CEXs) reside on central servers in various municipalities around the globe, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap remain uncensorable, existing within smart contracts on top of the Ethereum blockchain. However, they are founded by real, live humans who […]
It all started with a couple of retweets. On September 28, Andrew Cronje, the head honcho at Yearn Finance, retweeted graphic designs for a new project called Eminence, so described by Cronje as a DeFi protocol for a “gaming multiverse.” The game is allegedly a spin-off of a 2016 kickstarter trading card game called Eminence: Xander’s Tales and may incorporate non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The retweets included graphic designs of the words “Spartan” and “Marine” (playful nods to the respective monikers given to the Synthetix and Chainlink fanbases) and was an “art teaser” meant to “showcase all the different clans in the […]
The attention may have been with DeFi when it was warm, but as the cold winds of COVID-19 return fears and election volatility blow, bitcoin is resuming narrative dominance. Our main discussion is a narrative shift from DeFi back to bitcoin. Over the summer, DeFi led the crypto charge. From growth in total value locked to narrative dominance to even leadership in the all important category of crypto drama, DeFi was it. Now, as a potentially turbulent macro environment rears its head, the narrative is shifting back to a focus on bitcoin. Source link
Bitcoin’s price tested $10,800 to close out September while despite some market deflation, investors continue pushing crypto into DeFi. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,701 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 0.27% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,657-$10,859 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since September 28. Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price dipped down to as low as $10,657 Wednesday, bouncing into the $10,800 range and settling to $10,701 as of press time. Read More: BitcoinACKs Lets You Track Bitcoin Development and Pay Coders for Work […]
That was the story in cryptocurrency markets in September as prices tumbled for digital tokens from “decentralized finance” (DeFi), the fast-evolving arena of blockchain-based lending and trading platforms. Chainlink, which supplies data feeds to DeFi systems, saw its LINK token fall 42% month to date, the worst return among digital assets in the CoinDesk 20. The DeFi market correction came at a time when traditional markets also were hit hard by growing anxiety over the increasingly contentious U.S. presidential elections in November and resurgent coronavirus cases in the U.S. and Europe, according to Anil Lulla, co-founder of the cryptocurrency research firm Delphi Digital. It […]
As the limitations and costs of running decentralized finance (DeFi) apps on Ethereum continue to ride high, a growing list of projects are lining up on competing blockchains. Adding to this trend, Polkadot-based Reef Finance has closed a $3.9 million seed funding round for its cross-chain suite of DeFi services, the company announced Wednesday. Included in the round were NGC Ventures, AU21 Capital, QCP Capital, Kenetic Capital and Woodstock Fund. Reef aims to solve the high technical barrier investors face when attempting to participate in DeFi, said Reef Finance CEO Denko Manceski, not to mention doing away with gas fees on […]
Hybrid blockchain platform Kadena plans to launch a new multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) in hopes of wooing business from congestion-plagued Ethereum-based rivals. Called Kadenaswap, the new DEX, unveiled Tuesday and set to debut late this year, will attempt to skirt Ethereum’s surging gas fees and perennial network congestion (caused in part by the explosive success of Uniswap) by providing decentralized finance (DeFi) traders with an alternative platform that Kadena President Stuart Popejoy claims can handle high volumes. Source link
When the DeFi degens caught wind of a new pre-release Andre Cronje project they piled in, only to get $16 million hacked away in a flash. DeFi is one of the breakout crypto categories of 2020. Indeed, yield farming and the grand game of “money legos” has been so profitable that many are following every new protocol with rapt attention. This is all the more true for projects graced by YFI creator Andre Cronje. So when word got out about a new, pre-release game economy engine called “Eminence,” the DeFi degens took advantage of the permissionless nature of DeFi to pump […]
It might be part of every job in crypto to anticipate and react to fast-moving developments that seemingly change the industry’s direction overnight. And apparently not even Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the high-profile leader of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is immune to the industry’s capricious shifts. In a video interview with CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen, Zhao acknowledged that the emerging blockchain sector of decentralized finance, known as DeFi, could eventually upend the business that Binance has grown to dominate: running a centralized cryptocurrency exchange. “Our mission is not to build a CeFi exchange,” Zhao said in the interview, using a shorthand term for […]
Bitcoin is moving off exchanges, has been less volatile than TLSA and broke its record for longest streak trading above five figures. Also: Bitwise’s bitcoin fund has more than doubled in size, KuCoin was hacked and Jack Dorsey dropped a few more hints about his decentralized social media standard, Blue Sky. Top shelf Accredited investor interestBitwise’s bitcoin fund has brought in $8.9 million, the single-largest increase in assets raised in the fund’s two-year history, according to a recently amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm’s Bitcoin Fund provides accredited U.S. investors with exposure to bitcoin through a traditional product. […]
After passing $2 billion in locked assets, there’s now more value in Uniswap than there was in the entire DeFi space on July 9. Source link
A boom in decentralized finance (DeFi) has turbo-charged returns for Pantera Capital’s bitcoin and mixed cryptocurrency hedge funds this year. From Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, Pantera’s bitcoin (BTC) fund gained 61%, its digital asset fund 168%, its initial coin offering (ICO) fund 323% and its long-term ICO fund 270%, thanks in large part to Yearn Finance’s YFI, Terra’s LUNA, Polkadot’s DOT, Flexa’s AMP and Ampleforth’s AMPL DeFi-related tokens, according to an investor letter sent out last week. Year-to-date, the funds have outperformed the S&P 500 stock index, as well as index and hedge funds. The returns also tipped the ICO […]
BASED has a new method for aligning decentralized finance (DeFi) projects with each other. At its core is a smart contract called Moonbase, CoinDesk has learned. Based.Money is a project of the Ghouls, a loose consortium of crypto developers, artists, designers and meme makers. Friday night, the outfit will release its newest project since BASED, the rebasing game dropped this summer during the boom of Weird DeFi. Based.Money is a game that riffs on Ampleforth’s rebasing mechanic, where it makes a daily readjustment in the supply of BASED tokens, adjusting the amount in everyone’s wallet. It’s a game of optimizing for […]
Buying volume is pushing bitcoin higher. Meanwhile, DeFi investors continue to seek places to park crypto for steady yield. Bitcoin (BTC) is trading around $10,730 as of 20:30 UTC (4:30 p.m. EDT). Gaining 0.50% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,550-$10,795 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since Sept. 23(TradingView) Bitcoin’s price was able to cling to $10,700 territory, rebounding from a bit of a dip after the cryptocurrency rallied on Thursday. It was changing hands around $10,730 as of press time Friday Read more: Up 5%: […]
The super-charged trajectory of the cryptocurrency industry is translating to faster growth at the publicly traded digital-asset brokerage Voyager Digital, where revenue this quarter is tracking at an eightfold increase over the prior 12 months’ average pace. Voyager CEO Steve Ehrlich told CoinDesk in a Zoom interview that the company’s on pace for revenue of about $2 million during the fiscal first quarter that ends Sept. 30. That compares with $1.1 million during the fiscal year that ended in June. The company’s shares, listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, have rallied about 250% year, far surpassing the 49% year-to-date gains for […]
On Thursday, ConsenSys-incubated startup Liquality released a new wallet that lets you atomically swap digital assets directly from your browser. The Liquality Atomic Swap Wallet can act as a trustless alternative to current methods of porting cryptocurrencies into the decentralized finance (DeFi) space due to the peer-to-peer (P2P) nature of atomic swaps, Liquality co-founder Thessy Mehrain told CoinDesk in a phone interview. The wallet interacts similarly to cryptocurrency wallet MetaMask, but with an entirely different end-game: swapping assets trustlessly. “It’s called a chain abstraction layer, which basically is a way of making different blockchains talk the same language and interact,” Liquality […]
As decentralized finance (DeFi) balloons to a roughly $10 billion market, infrastructure builders are coming up with ways to reduce the associated risks. Announced Wednesday, wallet and custodial technology provider Trustology has added a “DeFi Firewall” to its suite of institutional-investment tools. The “Firewall” is basically a set of rules or filters selected by a fund, specifying which DeFi protocols or decentralized exchanges they consider kosher. With DeFi’s liquidity mining opportunities driving adoption and demand, investors from a more traditional or institutional background want some of this action. At the same time, they have to be able to show that funds […]
The upcoming U.S. presidential election has become one of the most contentious in history, fraught with searing divisions over everything from the economy to race to the continued health of democracy itself. So it’s not surprising that Wall Street options traders are now pricing in expectations of elevated market volatility around the November election. Analysts for the investment banking giant Goldman Sachs noted earlier this month that price swings of nearly 3% are implied around election day in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of U.S. stocks. What’s surprising is that options trading on notoriously volatile bitcoin prices, which often trade in sync with stocks, […]
Ethereum data firm Dune Analytics, which has stood out from the pack for its focus on decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, has raised $2 million from a mix of seasoned crypto investors and DeFi angels. Announced Wednesday, the seed round was led by Dragonfly Capital and included Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Digital Currency Group (the owner of CoinDesk). The list of angel investors in the round included the likes of Compound’s Calvin Liu, Matteo Leibowitz of Uniswap and Aave founder Stani Kulechov. Yearn creator Andre Cronje, who also participated in the round via a non-dilutive grant, said for the record that […]
APY.Finance, a yet-to-launch decentralized finance (DeFi) yield farming aggregator, announced Monday that it has completed a $3.6M seed funding round joined by investors including Arrington XRP Capital, Alameda Research, Cluster Capital and CoinGecko. Source link
DeFi is short for “decentralized finance,” an umbrella term for a variety of financial applications in cryptocurrency or blockchain geared toward disrupting financial intermediaries. DeFi draws inspiration from blockchain, the technology behind the digital currency bitcoin, which allows several entities to hold a copy of a history of transactions, meaning it isn’t controlled by a single, central source. That’s important because centralized systems and human gatekeepers can limit the speed and sophistication of transactions while offering users less direct control over their money. DeFi is distinct because it expands the use of blockchain from simple value transfer to more complex financial […]
Kava Labs has launched its first application: a yield-generating decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for bitcoin (BTC) and other non-Ethereum assets. The product, called Harvest and built on the Kava blockchain, allows users to stake their crypto so it can be lent out to other users. Harvest will initially support deposits of BTC, BNB, BUSD and XRP. Soon, Kava Labs plans to debut automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap and robo-advisors like Yearn.Finance on the blockchain as well, said Kava Labs CEO Brian Kerr. Similar to DeFi platform MakerDAO, Kava will allow users to create collateralized debt positions (CDPs) on the Kava […]
The Chicago DeFi Alliance, launched in April 2020, is poised to help members make a killing from the recent decentralized finance (DeFi) craze. So many billions of dollars worth of assets are now cycling through various DeFi projects, at such erratic rates, that while you’re reading this the estimates are probably changing. Suffice it to say, the Chicago DeFi Alliance now has roughly 55 members, including new additions like Binance.US and MakerDAO. After graduating seven DeFi startups from its first accelerator program this summer, CDA partner Qiao Wang said the organization is now launching a Liquidity Launchpad program to get “informed […]
Uniswap’s governance token, UNI, which was launched Wednesday night, has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past 24 hours, but despite the price volatility the total market cap of UNI could make the automated market maker (AMM) one of the most valuable decentralized finance (DeFi) projects in the coming years. Based on 1 billion tokens outstanding and a current market price of $3.50, the project has an implied market value of $3.7 billion on a fully diluted basis, according to data compiled by CoinGecko. There is currently $829.7 million worth of crypto assets committed to Uniswap, according to DeFi Pulse. […]
Ethereum whales undoubtedly drive the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement, but many people making money on DeFi trends are just regular Joes, so to speak. One such trader, who asked to go only by Joe, is a math student at a Canadian university. Just by playing with Ethereum software and his own calculations, he managed to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2020. This wasn’t his first rodeo, however, he’s been trading on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) for more than a year. “I’m not a whale in the crypto world but I’m one of the top users of the DeFi protocol I […]
Blockchain-based lending and trading systems known as “decentralized finance,” or DeFi, have dominated recent cryptocurrency-market headlines, with collateral locked into the semi-automated platforms surging 10-fold this year to more than $9 billion. DeFi trading platforms like Uniswap, Curve and Balancer have appealed to cryptocurrency traders with their low cost and ease of use, and they’re now starting to steal a growing and no-longer-negligible share of market trading volumes from bigger, established exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Huobi and OKEx. These “centralized” exchanges — the term is sometimes tossed around with a sneer — are rolling out new business initiatives they describe as decentralized, in an apparent bid to cash in on the trend and stanch a further […]
Bitcoin is making gains not seen since early September; the amount of BTC locked in DeFi hits six figures. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,778 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. EDT). Gaining 0.70% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,252-$10,950 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since September 13. Source: TradingView Bitcoin was able to reach as high as $10,950 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase Tuesday before losing some steam, settling around $10,778 as of press time. Read More: Two Charged With Duping Investors of $5M […]
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been grabbing the headlines and capturing the imagination of traders in recent weeks and some of the biggest centralized cryptocurrency exchanges seem to be afraid they’re missing out. That’s why they are now trying to reposition themselves as integral parts of this exploding sector, particularly as traders in China grow more interested in DeFi. Huobi announced Tuesday it was adding 10 more members to its DeFi initiative, described as “a consortium of centralized and decentralized financial services providers.” Archrival OKEx, which launched its OKxChain blockchain earlier this year, boasted Monday that with its latest upgrade the network […]
Data company DeFi Pulse and investment-minded Set Protocol have created a permissionless index of the very best DeFi tokens, called the DeFiPulse Index. DeFi Pulse has become the key source of information for assessing which projects are leading and which ones are rising, judged by the total amount of crypto staked on each one, which the company calls Total Value Locked (TVL). “We want a way that people can get exposure to DeFi without having to go and buy every token individually, because that costs a lot of gas,” Scott Lewis of DeFi Pulse told CoinDesk in a phone call. Ethereum […]
The already highly priced YFI governance token for yEarn.Finance has jumped an additional $6,000 on the news it’ll be listed on Coinbase Pro. Source link
This column has written in recent weeks about the surprising possibility that cryptocurrency markets might have become the new home for capitalism, in an environment where central banks and governments are intervening deeply in markets while picking corporate winners via emergency aid. If anything, the ridiculousness of the recent weeks’ saga involving the deliciously named startup protocol SushiSwap shows that not only are market signals alive and well in digital assets, but competition is, too. While from the outside these markets may seem like a den of rampant speculation, the innovative mania now taking place in the fast-growing arena of decentralized finance , known as DeFi, is providing a test of […]
Crypto.com’s new Defi Swap product will provide yet another platform on which users can token swap and yield farm. Source link
Square is pushing back against crypto patent hogs, Binance is doubling down on DeFi and what’s the story with crypto’s latest attempt at a backdoor public listing. Top shelf Patent posseSquare, the bitcoin-friendly payments company, is building an “alliance” to pool crypto patents and preserve the industry’s open-source spirit. The non-profit Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) aims to stop companies from locking up useful technologies in patents, a practice Square says hamstrings innovation and stifles crypto adoption. Members must pledge to make their patents freely available to all other members using a shared library. DeFi attractionBinance is connecting its decentralized Binance Smart Chain (BSC) […]
Shiv Malik is the author of two books, the co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation think tank and a former investigative journalist for the Guardian. He currently evangelizes about a new decentralized data economy for the open source project Streamr. Last week, the eminent anthropologist and co-founder of the Occupy movement, David Graeber, passed away aged just 59. His tome on the origins of money and finance, “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” should be required reading for anyone involved in crypto. Ranging from Mesopotamia to Manhattan, just about every page is filled with a salutary lesson or insightful parable on how over […]
Binance continues to chase after decentralized finance, known as DeFi, by giving its new Binance Smart Chain access to its centralized exchange. Source link
Bitcoin was rising for a second straight day, to about $10,281, after a rapid sell-off earlier in the week. “In a flash, investors have gone from running for the hills to buying the dip,” Mati Greenspan, founder of the cryptocurrency and foreign-exchange analysis firm Quantum Economics, told clients in an email. The crypto investment firm Stack Funds wrote in a weekly report that prices appear to have found a temporary floor around $10,000. Taimur Baig, chief economist for Singapore’s DBS bank, told CoinDesk that the pandemic and the associated central-bank money-printing have strengthened the case for bitcoin. “People are worried about […]
Uniswap fork SushiSwap has begun migrating $830 million of crypto assets to a new community-owned automated market maker (AMM). The process began at approximately 14:15 UTC, when testing the migration first began. The event is perhaps the largest test to date of a growing mood in DeFi: that all major projects should be community-owned. As of now, Uniswap is a standout market leader without a governance token, the type of coin that makes decentralized decision-making possible. Stepping back, some liquidity providers to Uniswap’s AMM system have given control of their crypto to the rival AMM for the purpose of migrating assets […]
Huobi, the third-largest crypto exchange by derivatives trading volume, is now giving users a way to earn relatively attractive interest rates on a bitcoin or USDT savings account. The product, launched Sept. 7, is the exchange’s latest bid to beat its competitors as it boosts its assets under management. Huobi’s addition targets retail traders less interested or involved in day-to-day trading activities but still willing to receive a certain amount of returns from their digital assets, said Ciara Sun, the vice president of Huobi Global Markets, during an exclusive interview with CoinDesk on Sept. 8. “Huobi has millions of users but […]
NGC Ventures, Hashed, CMS Holdings, Genesis Block and Kenetic Capital also led the round. Source link
Yearn.Finance aspires to be the gateway to a bevy of yield-generating products in the Ethereum ecosystem. After a rapid ascent in August 2020, there is now $650 million worth of crypto assets staked in Yearn, seeking the best returns in the booming decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. The prospect of what one observer called an “intuitive interface to all of DeFi” is what makes Yearn and its YFI coin stand out from the recent crop of “Weird DeFi” projects. But given that Yearn has several different elements, the platform is one of the harder ones for novice investors to understand. Some $650 […]
Bitcoin is stuck around $10,000 with little price action while some ether holders have pulled out of the DeFi ecosystem. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,014 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 1.1% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $9,920-$10,439 BTC below its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bearish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since Sept. 5.Source: TradingView Scant action in the bitcoin market over the weekend was a welcome respite from the downward trend since the start of September, when prices hit as high as $12,083 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase. Read […]
A Lightning-based derivatives platform took in pre-seed capital, a new blockchain analyst will try to track down missing funds from the defunct QuadrigaCX exchange and CoinDesk looks at how retail interest in DeFi compares to the infamous ICO bubble. Top shelf DeFi interest?Retail interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications remains quite low compared to the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble, measured by Google search queries, CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole reports. Indexed to the peak of searches for “ICO,” searches on Google Trends for the word “DeFi” currently return a value of 18, indicating the retail crowd is as interested in open-source finance as they were […]
eToro’s GoodDollar initiative will provide a universal basic income for some of the world’s poorest by incentivising people to yield farm on its platform. Source link
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has exploded in 2020, but retail interest in the space remains quite low, if measured by Google search queries. These suggest it may still be too early to draw parallels between DeFi’s growth and the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble of the final months of 2017 and early 2018. Indexed to the peak of searches for “ICO,” searches on Google Trends for the word “DeFi” currently return a value of 18, indicating the retail crowd is as interested in open-source finance as they were in ICOs during the latter’s boom. The DeFi movement seeks to transform old financial […]
SushiSwap investors were handed a raw deal over the weekend after the pseudonymous founder of the $1.27 billion, 1.5-week-old decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol cashed out. A fork of DeFi darling Uniswap, SushiSwap is the brainchild of a pseudonymous founder, Chef Nomi, who took the former project an extra yard by adding rewards for providing liquidity to the exchange through a liquidity provider token (LP), called sushi (SUSHI), that earns a portion of the AMM’s revenue. In essence, AMM’s provide the infrastructure to match lightly traded tokens with liquidity. A variant of other decentralized exchange (DEX) experiments, Uniswap has grown to be […]
Bitcoin is in bear territory for the third straight day and investors are still looking to DeFi to capture gains during the dump. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $10,606 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 0.90% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $9,894-$10,081 BTC below its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bearish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since September 2.Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price dropped below $10,000 Friday, sliding as low as $9,894 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase. “It’s not the best look for BTC from a momentum and positive volume standpoint, to be […]
A group of VC heavyweights and crypto entrepreneurs, including Blockfolio founder Ed Moncada, are backing a new risk management tool for the exploding decentralized finance (DeFi) space. Announced Thursday, Cozy Finance has raised a $2 million seed round, led by Electric Capital and including Variant Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Robot Ventures, Slow Ventures, Volt Capital, Spencer Noon, Moncada and others. The team attempting to bring some order to the creative chaos that is DeFi consists of Cozy co-founders Tony Sheng, formerly of Multicoin Capital, and Payom Dousti, co-founder of Rare Bits, a peer-to-peer marketplace for crypto goods. The value of assets deposited […]
A look at the subculture and ethos driving the white-hot DeFi space, which has grown from $2 billion to $9 billion in total value locked in just two months. Today on the Brief: Traditional markets falter, led by tech stocks Bitcoin falls under $11,000 for the first time since July Stablecoins mint $100 million daily since mid-July Our main discussion is about DeFi’s “degens.” NLW talks about: The numbers behind DeFi’s recent run-up What “degen” means in this context Why degen is, in part, a reaction to previous bitcoiner critiques of Ethereum Why degen is (in even bigger part) a reaction […]
William Mougayar is the author of “The Business Blockchain,” producer of the Token Summit and a venture investor and adviser. DeFi has grown to a point where its mindshare now far exceeds its relatively small crypto market share. It has benefited from a catchy name, and continues to spawn catchy words like “sushi.” DeFi sounds better than what it is: “automated algorithmic financial products with no central human intermediaries and plenty of decentralized computer-based protocols as the intermediaries.” That said, no matter how you cut it, DeFi’s market share numbers are still relatively small. By market cap, hovering at $16 billion, DeFi […]
You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team and edited by Bradley Keoun, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can subscribe here. Price Point Bitcoin (BTC) was up 2.2% early Tuesday, starting off September on a strong note after an anemic performance last month. The dollar dropped to a two-year low against major trading partners’ currencies. The largest cryptocurrency climbed 2.6% in August, underperforming the 25% gain […]
Decentralized finance (DeFi) started out by imitating the regular financial world, but the way its pieces can be mixed and matched has become so easy that new entrants are starting to get strange. Yearn Finance (YFI), YAM, Spaghetti, Based, whatever today’s variant is – the “Weird DeFi” cohort keeps growing. Yearn.Finance seems to have been a key shift in the market. It’s effectively a robo-adviser for yield in a smart contract, but something about it got creative juices flowing. Weird DeFi started earlier than this. But the broader crypto world first noticed it with YAM, which seems to be a serious […]
Oasis Network, a privacy-centric data-sharing network, said it will integrate Chainlink’s price feeds into its network. Source link
Framework Labs says it’s already playing a key role in projects including Uniswap and Chainlink. Source link
Bitcoin bounced back from Thursday’s drop at a time when more of the cryptocurrency is locked in DeFi than ever before. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,511 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 2.2% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,231-$11,552 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since August 26. Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price trended upward Friday, going as high as $11,552 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase. “Bitcoin has rotated around the most traded price at $11,500,” said Daniel Koehler, liquidity manager at cryptocurrency exchange […]
The bitcoin market bottomed out around $11,100 before bouncing back; DeFi continues an upward trend, garnering interest from traders and perhaps creating new ones. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,467 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 1.2% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,102-$11,593. BTC above its 10-day moving average but below the 50-day, a sideways-turning-bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since Aug. 24.Source: TradingView Bitcoin’s price was able to hold above $11,100 Wednesday, going as low as $11,102 before jumping as high as $11,593. Read More: Bitcoin Drop Squeezes Out Weak Derivatives Positions Katie […]
Market moves The explosive growth of decentralized finance, or DeFi, on the Ethereum blockchain has brought unwanted attention to the recent surge in congestion on the network, with a resulting jump in transaction fees. There’s another consequence for crypto traders: Rising volatility in prices for ether, the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency. That’s especially true when ether’s volatility is compared with that of bitcoin. You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team and edited by Bradley Keoun, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context […]
Decentralized finance (DeFi) credit market Aave has pulled ahead of stablecoin mint MakerDAO for the title of most collateral staked on Ethereum, according to DeFi Pulse. Aave now has $1.47 billion-worth of different crypto assets staked for credit lines, while MakerDAO has $1.45 billion in total value locked (TVL). “Reaching the highest TVL was possible due to the wide range of developers building on top of Aave who are expressing their innovation in DeFi,” Stani Kulechov, Aave CEO, told CoinDesk. “This innovation has sparked interest from institutions who are now dipping their toes into Aave.” This is only the second time […]
Beijing-based decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator Bella Protocol announced Monday a $4 million seed round led by Arrington XRP Capital. Source link
Donna Redel is the former chairman of COMEX, a board member of New York Angels and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. Olta Andoni is an Adjunct Professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and Of Counsel at Zlatkin Wong, LLP. A corner of the crypto universe representing less than 1% of total market capitalization of crypto assets has been grabbing the headlines since June. This is the world of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which alternatively is referred to as the center of innovation, an experiment or the new wild, wild west where projects move fast and break things. […]
Unsecured borrowing has come to decentralized finance (DeFi). Aave, a DeFi money market that allows users to earn interest on cryptocurrency and borrow against it, introduced credit delegation in early July. This service allows someone with a lot of collateral deposited on Aave and no desire to borrow against it to delegate their credit line to a third party they trust. In return for essentially co-signing a loan to the trusted third party, the delegator gets a cut of the interest, juicing the return on their deposit. The development represents a significant shift for DeFi lending, which until now has been […]
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CORRECTION (Aug. 20, 13:18 UTC): Adds context at the top of the story to make it clear it’s the price of a single YFI that’s more expensive than a single BTC and that the overall market value of bitcoin continues to be vastly greater. Also notes other tokens are priced above bitcoin, but YFI is the only one with notable trading volume. Though the total market value of yEarn.finance’s governance token (YFI) is still little more than a rounding error compared with sector behemoth bitcoin’s (BTC), the explosive growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) along with the recent fallback in BTC have […]
Bitcoin’s price is trending up while August has been a hot month for the cryptocurrency in decentralized finance. Bitcoin is on the uptrend, going as high as $11,891 with buyers outnumbering sellers in the market Thursday. ”This is similar to what we saw on Sunday, Aug. 9 – a quick move from $11,500 to $12,000 and then back to $11,300,” said John Willock, CEO of crypto asset manager Tritum. “Maybe we’ve got $13,500 in the next phase up in the coming days,” he added. David Lifchitz, chief investment officer for quant trading firm ExoAlpha, expects a bitcoin price bull run to […]
Users of crypto exchange Binance can now stake Dai and Kava as the exchange’s decentralized finance (DeFi) staking platform goes live. Binance’s DeFi staking program was first announced Wednesday with Dai, the stablecoin generated by loans on MakerDAO. The Binance initiative aims to tap into this year’s booming DeFi market by offering the ability for users earn staking rewards (akin to interest) on select digital assets. On Thursday, Binance added Kava as the second asset to its staking product. Kava is a DeFi platform backed by Binance, Huobi and OKEx with a native token by the same name. In a statement to […]
Markets have responded well to Algorand’s plans to get in on the DeFi action – the native ALGO token has experienced a jump in price. Source link
Prices for ren, the token for the RenVM DeFi network, surged by more than 100% over the past week. That’s because the total amount of renBTC, a tokenized bitcoin that is locked in RenVM, broke 10,000 on Monday, according to data collected by DeFi Pulse. Source link
Price Point It’s been two steps forward, one step back for bitcoin (BTC) over the past couple months. Prices were down early Wednesday for a second straight day after pushing earlier this week past $12,000 to a new 2020 high. The price move accelerated as traders got hit with margin calls on the BitMEX exchange. You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have […]
The DeFi craze continues as investors stake $200 million in a new yield farming protocol that’s not even 12 hours old yet. Source link
The Mumbai-based crypto exchange WazirX, one of the biggest in India, recently announced it is developing a decentralized finance (DeFi) product in partnership with Matic Network, a blockchain scalability platform. “We are launching an automated market maker (AMM) protocol and partnering with Matic Network to launch the protocol”, the exchange, a subsidiary of Binance, said in a blog post on Saturday. Automated market makers are algorithmic agents that make it easier to list and exchange cryptocurrencies without the help of an order book. AMM-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap, which enable running of openly accessible, on-chain liquidity pools for different tokens, […]
Bitcoin made a major gain Monday while investors have locked over $6 billion in crypto into various DeFi services. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $12,332 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 4.1% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,774-$12,485 BTC slightly above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since August 15.Source: TradingView The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization opened the week with higher-than-normal volume pushing bitcoin to as high as $12,485. For some market observers it was only a matter of time before it happened. Read More: Bitcoin […]
More bitcoins were tokenized than mined this Sunday, decentralized finance is coming to the Bitcoin system and a former Prudential Securities CEO thinks crypto is a safe bet. You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Top shelf Bitcoin’s DeFiDG Lab recently open sourced its proposal for a decentralized finance (DeFi) product leveraging the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin is a growing part of the DeFi ecosystem, built primarily on top of Ethereum, as a tokenized asset. A number of firms including Bison Trails, Crypto […]
Huobi has launched a new consortium with MakerDAO and Compound to promote decentralized finance. Source link
One of the quietest yet best-funded bitcoin companies in the world is gearing up to enter the 2020 decentralized finance (DeFi) bull run. In July the DG Lab conglomerate, which like Ethereum powerhouse ConsenSys includes both an investment arm and an adjacent software company, open sourced its proposal for self-sovereign derivatives trading on the Bitcoin blockchain, using the Lightning Network. These contracts turn bitcoin, the asset itself, into programmable money capable of a wider variety of functions. This offers a stark contrast to the typical DeFi approach so far, which relies on “wrapped” representations of bitcoin or exchange platforms. The Silicon […]
Paul Brody is a Principal and Global Blockchain Leader at EY. Decentralized finance (DeFi) services are booming, but there’s indication it’s recycling the same money around and around. To grow this market, enterprises need to get involved – and that won’t happen until users have privacy and security. In the old-school world of CeFi (centralized finance) it’s common to dismiss DeFi because it is designed to support anonymous transactions that can enable money laundering. This is, of course, completely wrong, but it makes for a good scare story against the competition. In reality, it’s DeFi’s lack of privacy that may become […]
Bitcoin hit $12,000 but then fell as long derivatives traders were wiped out. Meanwhile, DeFi lending continues to grow. Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $11,884 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 1.8% over the previous 24 hours. Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $11,468-$12,084 BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians. Bitcoin trading on Coinbase since Aug. 8.Source: TradingView Bitcoin was able to hit as high as $12,084 on spot exchanges such as Coinbase only to quickly drop 4.5% a few hours later. Leverage may have played a large part in its initial runup and the […]
Traders are expecting bitcoin to go higher. DeFi is surging in web traffic. And Cosmos is alive and well, despite internal feuding. No cultsCosmos, the blockchain interoperability project that turned a small ICO into a thriving ecosystem, almost came to an end in February 2020 when the project’s co-founders engaged in a heated feud. It is now a testament to open-source collaboration and teamwork. “The Cosmos community managed to mature beyond a cult of personality without turning founders into martyrs, working together to reduce individual influence over the shared resources,” says CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen. In lineThe blockchain subsidiary of messaging app […]
Call it a “gentlecoin,” perhaps? A new decentralized finance (DeFi) project aimed at softening volatility has closed a $1.68 million seed round led by Paradigm, with participation from Standard Crypto, Compound founder Robert Leshner and Variant Fund, from a16z alum Jesse Walden. Reflexer Labs is building a new asset called rai (RAI) that’s meant to follow the price movements of ether (ETH) but more gradually. “I think RAI will be extremely useful for protocols. A form of collateral that will help users not get liquidated that much,” Stefan Ionescu, the project’s CEO, told CoinDesk in a phone call. Or, as Paradigm […]