The Defiant

The Defiant is a content platform composed of a daily newsletter and weekly podcast focusing on decentralized finance and the open economy. It was founded in June, 2019 by Camila Russo, a former Bloomberg News reporter, and author of the book,The Infinite Machine.

Stories by The Defiant

Clock Starts Ticking for Filecoin Investors to Cash Out
[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that early investors in Filecoin were able to realize 100x returns when the mainnet launched yesterday. In fact, Filecoin specifically created a lockup that would force investors to hold onto FIL for at least six months after the mainnet launch. The story has been updated to reflect the correct information. In addition, Filecoin raised $205 million during its ICO, not $257 million.] Filecoin had a record breaking $205M token sale...
NewsCoins
3 min read
The DefiantOct 16, 2020
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Coinbase on Layer 2 is Latest in Ethereum Scaling Boom
There’s been an explosion of Ethereum scaling developments this past week, with the latest and arguably biggest one announced yesterday: Coinbase Wallet is integrating with Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup testnet. Coinbase Wallet is the US exchange’s non-custodial wallet and dapp browser (not the exchange itself) and the integration will allow users to view their balances and send transactions on Optimism’s testnet, according to the post. Coinbase Holds More Than $11 Billion of Bitcoin in Cold St...
NewsCoins
3 min read
The DefiantOct 14, 2020
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BitMEX Charges Highlight Case for Real DeFi
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission today filed charges against BitMEX and its owners and operators including CEO Arthur Hayes for operating a trading platform without CFTC approval, and for failing to implement know-your-customer procedures, a customer information program, and anti-money laundering procedures. At first glance this is concerning for DeFi, a financial system which hails open access—read: lack of KYC and AM—at its core. But the key here is enforceability. For most D...
NewsCoins
3 min read
The DefiantOct 1, 2020
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Some DeFi Forks Are Evolving From Copies to Unique Projects
In the last month, almost every major DeFi project has been forked. Some of the forks have even been forked themselves. But do these near-copies of projects actually add any value? Or are they simply opportunistic money-grabs? Like many things in life, the truth isn’t always clear-cut. Each fork, from SushiSwap to Swerve, to Cream, has its own unique value proposition—or lack thereof. While they originally started off as pure copy-and-paste clones, forks are growing ever more sophisticated. Alon...
NewsDeFi
6 min read
The DefiantSep 30, 2020
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Eminence Finance Exploit Leads to 'Degen' Soul Searching
The latest "test in prod" experiment from Yearn founder Andre Cronje has many degen traders questioning their YOLO nature following a flash loan attack of contracts that hadn’t been officially released to the public yesterday afternoon. Hackers Drain $15 Million From ‘Unreleased’ Yearn Finance Project Eminence Finance, an NFT gaming ecosystem that was still in development, was exploited by a hacker who stole $15M after traders rushed to farm EMN - a token meant to act as a reward stablecoin with...
NewsCoins
5 min read
The DefiantSep 29, 2020
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Maker Votes to Not Compensate Black Thursday Victims
Maker Votes to Not Compensate Black Thursday Victims MakerDAO traders who had their collateral wiped out during DeFi’s so-called Black Thursday, received bad news from the protocol’s decentralized court this week: they won’t be getting a penny (or gwei) back. Their only hope now lies in traditional/centralized courts. On March 12th, DeFi experienced its worst day on record as prices tanked by more than 50%. Amidst the crash, projects offering leverage were hit the hardest. In particular, MakerDA...
NewsCoins
4 min read
The DefiantSep 25, 2020
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YAM Finally Finds Fertile Ground After Successful Rebase
Yam Finance’s first successful monetary exercise yesterday marks a new start to DeFi’s original food-based token. YAM: The emoji that drew $400M in less than a day YAM is an experiment in rebasing cryptocurrencies, plus token incentives (aka yield farming) to drive liquidity, plus full on-chain governance, plus a DAO-like treasury managed by token holders. It’s also testing the power of the emoji 🍠. Image source: YAM Medium Its Aug. 11 launch immediately attracted hundreds of millions of dolla...
NewsDeFi
2 min read
The DefiantSep 22, 2020
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Here’s Why a Meme Coin Soared During a Market Sell-Off
It was a sea of red in the market yesterday. But while Ether slid by almost 10% and all DeFi tokens plunged even deeper, one project astonished the crypto world accelerating the 10x increase it had seen in the last seven days: $MEME A ticker most would pass off as a pump and dump. But is there more than meets the eye? The concept follows the road of coin pairings on DEX protocols like Uniswap, which allow traders to park funds and earn a part of the trading fees generated from volume on the pa...
NewsDeFi
6 min read
The DefiantSep 22, 2020
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"Be Greedy in Private," Urges DeFi Investor Riding the Fair Launch Trend
In the latest DeFi drama, a developer and investor behind a token called SAFE made a mistake when deploying a piece of code—and now they’re both calling each other out and publishing their private chats, as the token tanks. But this petty squabble points at a bigger problem: the latest DeFi trend of community-owned projects and fair launches has raised the "virtue bar" to a level that most can’t or won’t reach. Greed is good, Gordon Gekko said. But just… quietly. Setting the Stage Projects will...
NewsDeFi
4 min read
The DefiantSep 16, 2020
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Pickle Finance Wants to Bring Stability to DeFi
Just when farmers thought food coins had run their course, perhaps the most absurd project yet is leveraging pickle memes to help mitigate stablecoin volatility. Yearn.finance Preps a New Stablecoin-based DeFi Protocol Pickle Finance, a project incentivizing liquidity on the four largest DeFi stablecoins, saw $53M in 24-hour volume this weekend as its native governance token, PICKLE, traded as high as $85, according to CoinGecko. Touting the tagline "Off-peg bad. On-peg good," Pickle Finance of...
NewsDeFi
3 min read
The DefiantSep 15, 2020
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SushiSwap: What happened, What it Means for Defi and What's Next.
Decentralized finance is living through what may become one of its most defining moments. In less than 48 hours, a two-week-old 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. Here’s a quick summary: An anonymous developer copied Uniswap to make SushiSwap, which was meant to be exactly the same, except it added a token, SUSHI, and token rewards for liquidity providers and token ho...
NewsDeFi
10 min read
The DefiantSep 8, 2020
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A Deep Dive Into DeFi Venture Funding: VCs are Stronger Than Ever
Sushi scams notwithstanding, decentralized finance keeps hitting new highs in its most popular metric, total value locked. But there’s another, lesser-known milestone DeFi projects just crossed half a billion dollars raised in venture capital funding. $SUSHI Price Doubles After Creator Shifts Control To FTX CEO The 34 DeFi Companies listed on DeFi Pulse have together raised just over $500M from more than 100 VC funds. 2017 was the crazy year of ICOs and indeed, money raised in token sales contr...
NewsDeFi
3 min read
The DefiantSep 7, 2020
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'NFT Farming' Takes Root With a $3M Meme Coin
At the height of degen farming, where new food coins are quickly diminishing the reputation around liquidity mining, there’s at least one project that shines through the rough thanks to a tight-knit citadel banding around the very thing that drives farming forward: memes. This is a story of Meme Protocol—a community-conceived project spawned out of a Telegram airdrop that’s since blossomed into a team of highly creative contributors pushing forward the potential for tokenized farming opportuniti...
NewsCoins
6 min read
The DefiantSep 3, 2020
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The Mirage of Emojis Delivering Million-Percent Yields
There’s a new DeFi project called Hotdog. There’s also Kimchi, Noodle, and Harvest, and they all sprang up in the past day or two. But what’s more impressive is this: Some claim to offer annual yields in the seven figures. That’s 1,000,000% APYs. Yes: Million. Percent. Yield. Image source: @RougeVert4 This is the latest trend in decentralized finance, which has been heating up with traders pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into platforms incentivizing liquidity by offering their native to...
NewsDeFi
4 min read
The DefiantSep 2, 2020
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For All You Degens Farming in Public: Here's Your Privacy Toolbox
No sign-up, no KYC, and no real names. You’d think that means DeFi is private, but the reality is, while a major improvement from centralized exchanges, all your transaction history and assets are open for the world to see—they can be even linked to your IP address. We’ll go over what you can do to protect your privacy right now, and what developers are doing to make it easier to do in the future. Here’s the issue: To start, every smart contract that you interact with —whether that be Uniswap,...
NewsCoins
10 min read
The DefiantSep 1, 2020
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SushiSwap Takes On Uniswap as DeFi's Highest-Flying Unicorn
A liquidity war is brewing between Uniswap and a fork of DeFi’s darling DEX, called SushiSwap. Don’t let the flippant name and emoji throw you off: Sushi means business. In less than a week, SushiSwap has aggregated more than $800M worth of tokens, or about 80% of total Uniswap assets, according to Sushiboard, which tracks the project’s data. Uniswap Rival Sushiswap Hits $30m Daily Volume with Yield Farming Play This isn’t just another liquidity-pool based DEX that’s popped up to compete with Un...
NewsCoins
6 min read
The DefiantAug 31, 2020
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Yam Finance: Yield Farmers Show They’re Not Just Degen Gamblers
Yam Finance, a yield farmers paradise which aggregated $600M in TVL in less than 48 hours, will direct 1% of its future treasury to Gitcoin Grants’s public goods funding upon its forthcoming V3 migration. Inspired by a community tweet, Gitcoin CEO Kevin Owocki took to the governance forum to propose that Yam’s bountiful treasury, which had previously aggregated $500k in V1 before being lost to a bug, “pass it along” to the Tech Grants category. It wasn’t obvious that the community would decide...
NewsCoins
3 min read
The DefiantAug 27, 2020
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Fed Chair Says Money Printer Will Go Brrr Faster. Bitcoiners Not Surprised
What every Bitcoiner warns against happened today: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. monetary authority will let inflation shoot above its 2% target to privilege the labor market. The obvious argument to make is that “this is good for Bitcoin.” It’s a tired meme, but right now it seems to be especially appropriate. And sure enough, Bitcoin jumped 2% after Powell’s speech to ~$11,550. Traditional markets also reacted, with the S&P 500 rallying to new highs, while yields on long...
NewsCoins
3 min read
The DefiantAug 27, 2020
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DeFi Die-Hards Call Time Out With 'Fair Launch Capital'
Here's the problem that Fair Launch Capital is trying to solve: In the past few weeks the broad sentiment in DeFi has gone from anti-token; to tokens only when it’s absolutely necessary in a tried and tested platform; to tokens designed to drive (crazy) activity which results in (crazy) speculation; to tokens before there’s even a platform. Aave's Price Rose 20,000% in Ethereum's DeFi Explosion While this has attracted a flood of capital and traders to the space, it’s also spurred a fair amount...
NewsDeFi
3 min read
The DefiantAug 26, 2020
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DeFi teams accused of hoarding tokens and voting power
A common theme in DeFi this year has been to increasingly decentralize governance, with teams giving up an increasing share of control over their project to their communities. The boom in governance tokens, which are used as incentives for traders to add liquidity to these protocols, has accelerated the trend. Curve's CRV token launches early, benefitting anonymous 'Chad' But as this nascent ecosystem of decentralized governance systems evolves, with protocols holding hundreds of millions of dol...
NewsDeFi
7 min read
The DefiantAug 24, 2020
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