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CollectionsDecrypting DeFi

Decrypting DeFi

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi newsletter, led each week by this essay. Subscribers to the email get to read the essay first, before it goes on our site. Subscribe here.

CollectionLast updated Oct 7, 2023
Oct 7
Uranium is a key component to fuel nuclear power plants. Image: Shutterstock.

Uranium-Backed Stablecoin? Maker Proposal Goes Nuclear

The so-called Endgame Plan is evolving quickly–and weirdly–over at Maker. Now, after adding vanilla t-bills and accounts payable to the blockchain, a new proposal is looking to add tokenized uranium. “Our goal is to democratize ownership of uranium by providing stability value, and easier access to exposure to a commodity that is growing in importance,” reads the proposal penned by Uranium3o8. The element is growing in popularity of late as various nations either restart their nuclear ambitions...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Sep 30
Earning interest on holdings is sometimes called yield farming in crypto. Image Shutterstock

Rising Rates Gives New Life to Interest-Bearing Stablecoins

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Though inflation finally appears to be on its way down, interest rates are still soaring. This is painful for several reasons, but for crypto bros, it basically means risk-on assets like Bitcoin and Dogecoin aren’t as attractive as, say, conservative bonds issued by the U.S. government. But it’s not a total wash. In fact, the DeFi sector–specifically stablecoin providers–is finding unique moves to make the most of the curr...

NewsDeFi
4 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Aug 26
Coinbase and Circle launched the USDC stablecoin. Image: Shutterstock

USDC Market Cap Plummets to 2-Year Low–Here's 4 Reasons Why

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) The market’s second-largest stablecoin has been taking a beating, with the market cap of Circle’s USDC hitting a two-year low. Per CoinGecko, the market cap is now hovering just under $26 billion. This is a far cry from its high of $56 billion last June. As for the competition, Tether’s USDT just a new high along the same metric, recently reaching $83 billion. Experts weighed in, suggesting there are four key reasons for t...

NewsDeFi
4 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Aug 19

Crypto's Oldest Use Case Is Back in the Spotlight. But Why Now?

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster). For some reason, tokenization, one of the crypto industry’s original promises, is again making headlines. “It’s so funny because people that had been around from 2018 have all these scars from pitching this stuff and believing it and nothing happened,” Polygon’s tokenization lead Colin Butler told Decrypt. Tokenization basically refers to the transfer of more traditional financial assets like stocks and bonds onto a block...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Aug 12

A Loan Is Still a Loan Even in DeFi

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Despite the fancy financial rails, a loan in DeFi is still a loan. This has been seen time and again, with last week’s debacle from the Curve Finance founder offering up yet more coursework on the subject. Goldfinch, a crypto startup aimed at issuing loans to companies in emerging economies, has now taken center stage, with this latest example impacting the ever-trendy real-world asset sector. The protocol issued a $5 mill...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Jul 29

What Makes a Blue-Chip Stablecoin?

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) With the non-profit stablecoin rating agency Bluechip off to the races, so too are concerns around how legit its rankings are. After all, how has BUSD, a stablecoin that the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) recently halted, earned the top ranking, while USDT, the market’s largest stablecoin by market cap, is at the bottom of the barrel? It all boils down to something called SMIDGE, the six qualities...

NewsDeFi
4 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Jul 16
Launching a token before finding PMF is often the end for projects. Image: Shutterstock.

Come for The Token, Stay for The Product. Right?

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Launching a token is a delicate task. On the one hand, you’ll thrill your die-hard audience of early adopters, rewarding them for sticking it out for so long. On the other, you invite hungry whales to come and harvest your project for its incentives, often hogging the lion’s share of the tokens being dished out (before flipping them for a profit shortly after). This latter outcome is especially bad if these tokens also ser...

NewsDeFi
5 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Jul 8

A Fraction of its Former Highs, What's Next for DeFi?

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) It’s been a pretty dull bear market of late. Bitcoin has flirted with $30,000 for some time, and Ethereum has only briefly managed to get out in front of that pesky $2,000 mark. It feels like a lot of the same in DeFi. Derivative changes lead different projects to temporarily swap TVL for a period; a week later that same money flows back into the first project. Even Uniswap, one of the niche’s defining projects, barely reg...

NewsOpinion
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Jun 3

Hop Protocol's 'Sybil Hunter' Payout Unveils Powerful New Airdrop Tool

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Sybil farming ahead of alleged airdrops has become commonplace in crypto. At the first whiff of a new token, hordes of wallet addresses get to work randomly interacting with a new project in hopes of generating loyalty signals and raking in the yet-to-be-launched cryptocurrency. Airdrops typically retroactively reward a community’s “most loyal users.” Loyalty, though, can mean a lot of different things. Is it measured by t...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
May 27

When DAOs Self-Execute—What Could Go Wrong?

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) This past week we got two examples of when self-executing proposals go wrong for DAOs. One proposal on Aave resulted in roughly $110 million in assets freezing after the proposal passed, and another on Tornado Cash saw a crafty proposer make off with roughly 372 ETH, worth over $670,000. The Aave proposal has been fixed, and a new proposal executed the fix. As for Tornado Cash, the proposer has made a new proposal to retur...

NewsDeFi
4 min read
Liam J. Kelly
May 20
Lido Finance is a popular staking platform for cryptocurrencies. Source: Shutterstock

DeFi Heavyweight Lido Finance Mulls LDO Staking, Token Buyback

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Liquid staking giant Lido Finance is finally looking to shake up its tokenomics. Specifically, as alluded to in a new proposal, members of the community are looking to add a staking feature to LDO. Remember: In order to stake directly to the mainnet, users need 32 ETH or nearly $60,000 at today’s prices. Given the high barrier to entry, liquid staking services like Lido have emerged, letting users deposit any amount of ETH...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
May 13
Image: Shutterstock.

Eigen What? How EigenLayer Is Putting $34B in Staked Ethereum Back to Work

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Crypto Twitter has been awash the past few weeks with talk of a strange new protocol called EigenLayer. Some are going as far as calling it the next Ethereum Meta, while others are already whipping up speculative airdrop guides. And at least one person is doing God’s work, helping us all pronounce the project’s name. So, what in the hell is EigenLayer? Well, think of it as being like blockchain security-as-a-service. Inste...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
May 6
Ethereum has merged. Image: Shutterstock

Ethereum Staking Deposits Outpace Withdrawals by $189M in ETH

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) With Ethereum’s historic Shanghai upgrade completed and the dust (more or less) settled, it's time to revisit some of the key staking takeaways. The Shanghai upgrade allowed Ethereum stakers to finally withdraw their funds from the mainnet. Some had been waiting to do so since the staking feature was first introduced in December 2020. Perhaps the most important development revealed by the event is that Kraken U.S. staking...

NewsDeFi
2 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Apr 15
ERC-20 tokens are the standard token built on Ethereum. Image: Shutterstock.

$598M in Ethereum Still Waiting on Updated Withdrawal Credentials: Nansen

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Ethereum defied the odds again. With the latest Shapella upgrade executed, developers have again demonstrated that it’s possible to swap out key parts of a $252 billion rocket mid-flight. The last time they pulled off such a feat was last September with “the merge.” Unfortunately, the same can’t necessarily be said for the 18.5% of Ethereum network validators that don’t have the correct validator credentials. Per data draw...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Apr 8
A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. Image: Shutterstock.

3 Ways DAO Treasuries Will Hit $100B in Balances

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) The cumulative dollar amount across all DAOs hit a new milestone last week of $25 billion, per data from DeepDAO. That’s some serious cash, with this figure pegged at only $10 billion at this time last year. The new milestone was certainly helped along by the launch of Arbitrum’s whopping $4.4 billion DAO two weeks ago. Taking a closer look at the largest treasuries, in fact, reveals that three of the top five projects are...

NewsDeFi
4 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Apr 1
Rollup technologies have become quite popular in crypto. Image: Shutterstock.

An Arbitrum Airdrop and Two zkEVM Launches: Welcome to Rollup Season

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) A layer-2 airdrop and two mainnet launches has the market clamoring for more scaling action. On March 23, Arbitrum finally distributed its highly-anticipated ARB token, decentralizing its inventory into the hands of its most dedicated users. The hype was so fierce, though, that it took down the project’s main website as well as that of Arbiscan—Arbitrum’s Etherscan equivalent—because eligible wallets could claim their aird...

NewsDeFi
4 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Mar 25
It ain't easy comparing DAOs. Image: Shutterstock.

All Centralized Firms Are Alike—But Every DAO Is Decentralized in Its Own Way

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Just as DAOs find more traction in the industry, so too have a series of different tools to measure how decentralized autonomous organizations stack up alongside one another. Now the question emerges: What makes one DAO better than another? Sure, you can use the size of their treasury as a metric, but it’s also important that an autonomous organization is also decentralized, something one may crudely measure by determining...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Mar 18
DeFi: Money Legos?

How Damaging Was the Euler Hack to DeFi's 'Money Legos' Promise?

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) DeFi faced its very own contagion event this past week after Euler Finance was drained of nearly $200 million via six flash loans and a vulnerability. It was a major blow to the sector; Euler had been seen as the next great building block after Compound and Aave. Beyond flinging long-tail assets into the protocol and gambling risk à la Cream Finance, the popular crypto lender created isolated lending pools to help silo col...

NewsDeFi
5 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Mar 11
Base is Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network. Image: Coinbase

Coinbase's Plan to Go 'On-Chain Native' Is a Smart Play for Fees

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Founded in 2012, Coinbase used to just be a simple market to buy and sell Bitcoin. A lot has changed since, and the decade-old firm is working to keep up with the times. Last month, Coinbase announced the launch of its native layer-2 scaling solution called Base. It’s built using the OP Stack, which is to say the new product is using a lot of Optimism’s technology. It’s an interesting play, especially for a highly-centrali...

NewsDeFi
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
Mar 4
Shanghai is an upcoming Ethereum upgrade slated for April 2023. Image: Shutterstock.

Just 16% of Ethereum Stakers Are in Profit Ahead of Shanghai Upgrade

Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster) Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade is just around the corner and that means users are starting to place their bets. All of the attention on this specific upgrade revolves around one thing: withdrawing staked Ethereum. Since staking launched back in December 2020, the network just embarking on its journey to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, those who locked up their funds haven’t been able to withdraw those funds. That’s expe...

NewsCoins
3 min read
Liam J. Kelly
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