Category Archive

Since DeFi’s summer ‘20 peak, the general crypto narrative has indisputably shifted away from DeFi, to Web 3.0 and gaming. Granted, the next billion users to crypto are more likely to onboard through gaming than the 69th fork of Uniswap. Yet, many still rely on core DeFi principles to innovate continuously. NFT projects are incorporating airdrops and collateralization of NFT …

Although ETH remains the dominant Layer 1 for most on-chain activity, alternate Layer 1s have demonstrated product-market fit throughout the bull market run of ‘20/’21. Solana ($SOL) emerged as the ‘high-throughput chain’ focused on complex DeFi / gaming, BNB Chain ($BNB) offers easy fiat on/off-ramps through Binance CEX, while Avalanche ($AVAX) and Cosmos ($ATOM) are building application-specific blockchains that focus …

Correction: In the first distribution of ‘DeFi Digest 14: A Reflection on Liquidity Dynamics Through the Contagion & GHO Stablecoin’, we incorrectly referenced Voyager instead of Celsius as having a 1.2b hole in its balance sheet. The amount lent to 3AC by Voyager was $350m in USDC and 15,250 BTC, with their current asset-liability mismatch unknown. In last week’s DeFi …

Seeing the CeFi realm blowing up around us, it is perhaps pertinent to reflect and hammer the lessons into our collective crypto consciousness. Drawing from CeFi, DeFi and Everything in Between, it is clear now that Celsius, BlockFi, and Voyager Digital function as ‘CeDeFi,’ similarly to TradFi banking entities and are prone to the same weaknesses such as position opacity …

Everyone in crypto has heard of airdrops. Anyone who’s anyone, however, has actually received them. Upon receipt of a highly anticipated airdrop, the pang of dopamine from the financial implications and being rewarded for participating in the digital economy does urge one to wonder: “Rekt pepe, what exactly are airdrops? Are they free money? Where do they come from? What …

Over the past two weeks, we have seen the bear markets bringing out the worst in digital asset markets. Rumors of insolvency flew rampant in the face of volatility, affecting behemoths that were previously deemed ‘too sophisticated/large to fail.’ Celsius, which we covered in detail in The Tide Pulling Out, was one of the first to waver, fueling fears of …

Fellow DeFi Enthusiasts, We hope this week’s  DeFi Digest finds you well. Evidently, these market (weather) conditions have shown to be inconducive to the strategies (crops) we’ve cultivated throughout the last 18 months. Like farmers adapting to changing seasons, we humble (yield) farmers need to pay close attention to our crops, leaning into robust strategies (crop species) that can weather …

Closing Thoughts on Terra Earlier readers of DeFi Digest will remember our initial primer on Anchor Protocol and the update we published when Anchor introduced the Dynamic Earn Rate. While we attempted to quantify the runway LFG had before they needed to replenish the Yield Reserve, $LUNA’s sudden death spiral was difficult to predict. Instead, as detailed in last week’s …

Finding Stability Stablecoins (‘stables’) are cryptocurrencies that aim to peg their prices to another cryptocurrency, fiat money, or commodities. For the stables primer below, we specifically refer to stablecoins pegged to currencies, the most widely adopted of which is the U.S. Dollar. Many stablecoin projects try to maintain the peg to their respective currencies, but few prevail. Learning from previous …