On Wednesday, the decentralized exchange (DEX) Beethoven X sent $300,000 in treasury stablecoins from Fantom to Ethereum; protocol builder Byte Masons did the same with ether (ETH) and USD coin (USDC) it used in trading pools. Earlier this week, DeFi yield farm Beefy sent $200,000 in tokens owned by Binance from Fantom to BSC at the request of the world’s largest exchange.
Author: Danny Nelson
Binance, Other Crypto Players Shun Multichain as Bridging Rumors Swirl
Like most bridges, Multichain uses a mint-and-lock mechanism to move assets between the 92 blockchains it interacts with. For example, if a holder of USDC stablecoin bridges the asset from Ethereum to Fantom via Multichain, the token gets locked up in a smart contract on Ethereum and then issued anew on Fantom – in this case, as a “wrapped” token called anyUSDC.
Bitcoin’s Hot Ordinals Economy is Getting a Dollar-Backed Stablecoin
The company’s first bitcoin-linked stablecoin will have to fare better than its other stablecoin products if it wants to succeed in the long term. Stably’s stablecoin in the ethereum ecosystem, called StableUSD (USDS) has only 752 holders and a market cap of $264,000, per etherscan – basically irrelevant when compared to market leaders Tether and USDC.
Coliving Project Cabin Wants to Put Digital Nomads in Nature
The project, Cabin, escalated that effort Tuesday with plans for the first “network city,” a global alliance of self-governing neighborhoods accessible to “citizens” who hold NFTs. Project backers say living in these neighborhoods will be cheaper, and more accessible, than the status quo.
Seeking Grants Deal with Osmosis, Privacy Blockchain Namada Proposes Airdrop
“It would be pretty boring if you only had assets and couldn’t do anything with them,” explained Goes. “So we expect that people want to go to Osmosis” and decentralized exchanges on other chains to trade their assets, he added.
Hector Network Fight Centers on Efficacy of DAO Governance
For more than an hour, members peppered the lawyer, who identified himself as Dali from the tech law firm Sparring, with questions about HIP 40, a proposal to wrap Hector Network within an offshore corporate structure that includes directors, supervisors and a management board. In other words: an organization with many of the centralized facets DAOs are supposed to replace.
DeFi Must Get Easier to Use to Win Over Retail Customers, Uniswap Survey Finds
The survey indicates permissionless DeFi trading still has a ways to go if it is to succeed in mass adoption. In order to trade on a service such as Uniswap, crypto users must have a wallet, sufficient ether (ETH) to execute and a willingness to pay sometimes-exorbitant gas fees. And that’s if they understand what they’re doing to begin with.
Balancer Proposes ‘Permissioned Arbitrage’ to Rescue Inverse Finance’s Frozen Crypto
DeFi’s lego bricks lock together in complicated ways, and the Balancer situation offers another example. It has already gotten the green-light from three other protocols: TempleDAO, which will loan Balancer specialty stablecoins that it needs to conduct the arbitrage; Euler, who patched the smart contract; and Inverse, which wants its money back.
DeFi Project Hector Mulls Legal Wrapper to Shield DAO
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/05/15/defi-project-hector-mulls-legal-wrapper-to-shield-dao/
Zeus, the pseudonymous creator of Hector, did not immediately comment on the setup of the steering committee. In a private message on Discord he said “nothing will change to the token holders governance btw, it’s just more legal protection in corporations, taxes and possible regulatories.”
GREED Token Is Not a Crypto Scam, but a Lesson on How to Get Scammed Amid Meme Coin Mania
In S**tcoin Spring, any pointless cryptocurrency with a Twitter account can enchant thousands of traders into playing meme coin musical chairs. Throwing money at the wall and reason out the window, they let greed get the best of them. Sometimes literally.
This past week a social experiment called GREED got the best of would-be speculators on the Solana blockchain. Instead of wealth they’re getting bupkis – with a side of public shaming to boot.
It’s a story that showcases the dark psyche encouraged by those one-off tales of meme coin riches. For every lucky speculator up 5,000,000% on pepecoin (PEPE), there are thousands of gamblers losing money to insiders and trading bots. Some fall for malicious tokens designed to steal all the money in their wallets, not just the poker chips they’d anted up.
GREED could have been one of those. To get GREED, over 43,000 Twitter accounts this week authorized one man in Croatia to tweet on their behalf. A further 55,306 wallets signed an intentionally sussy-looking transaction that, in theory, might have let him drain their wallets.
But the creator of the GREED experiment doesn’t plan to steal their money (nor can he; his developers never built that code). Even so, Ivor Ivosevic, better known as Voshy to the Solana community, very much will shitpost from those Twitter accounts.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Voshy said he wants to teach crypto traders a lesson, one that focuses on internet security – with maybe a dash of morality and sensibility, too. The thing’s called GREED, after all.
Voshy didn’t set out to write a parable of crypto’s dark side.
For five days he watched in crypto chat rooms as people conjured up complete garbage tokens – “dollar sign in front of fruit name” garbage – sold it to their friends and released it, at which point “everybody apes in and the token goes to zero.”
A week ago, disenchanted by this parade, he wrote an ironic tweet.
He went to bed that morning (Voshy’s first tweet was a light-on-sleep 6 a.m. s**tpost) planning to post a follow-up calling out the handful of people dumb enough to buy his nonsense.
“I woke up with 2,000 more followers,” he said of a Twitter account that previously had only 2,700. One person had told him “nice joke,” but the rest seemed eager to invest. “I’m like, f**k, this didn’t go as I had planned.”
Disturbed but unfazed, Voshy leaned in. He told his growing flock to spread his gospel and tweet the message “doing it because of $GREED” to get the token. He went back to sleep; his tweet went viral.
Voshy woke up to hundreds of direct messages from Twitter friends asking to buy GREED before he released his nonexistent coin to the public.
The allure of meme coin presales
The so-called “presale” is one way speculators try to make money on meme coins. By buying a token before it goes into wide circulation, they hope to ride its initial pump high and dump it for profit. They’re willing to pay big money for their GREED; Voshy said he got offers for his nonexistent token that added up into the seven figures.
“Nobody asked me what the token was or what it was going to be. Everybody just f**king threw out a number that they were ready to send me right away,” Voshy said. He wasn’t going to take their money, but he decided to make GREED real.
Over the following days Voshy dropped occasional hints on Twitter about a token unlike any other. GREED would have no insider allocations or presales. It would be bot-proof. It would be free. Meme coin traders began paying attention and adding GREED to the hot lists of tokens to watch.
As the hype grew for GREED, so did Voshy’s Twitter following; it topped out at nearly 33,000. He fed them declarations of how greed was driving people to do stupid things.
“I started retweeting and writing things along the lines of, ‘The only people getting rich from tokers are founders.’ ‘Be careful of your greed; Greed can consume you,’” he said. It didn’t work.
“People became way more bullish the more I s**t on it.”
Behind the scenes, Voshy began building GREED. Critically, it would have a freeze mechanism to prohibit holders from ever moving it out of their wallets, making speculation impossible. He worked with developers Marcos Collado Martín and Petar Podbreznicki, an employee of Voshy’s crypto consulting business, BlstCtrl.
It worked perhaps too smoothly, so he asked them to “make it look more red flaggy” in an attempt to dissuade people. Indeed, some became concerned with the questionable security concessions they’d need to make to get their GREED, like handing over their Twitter.
Voshy said he was asked, “Why would I give you all these permissions? Would you give those permissions?’” His answer: “No, never.” but his warnings were not enough.
“If you have the FOMO in your head then doing something that would put your Twitter account in danger is less of your worries since you want to be part of something that is going to be big without even researching it,” said a GREED owner who goes by Abyss on Twitter.
The crescendo came with the Greed airdrop on Friday. When speculators pressed the claim, two things happened: They got airdropped 8,007,320,330 GREED, and their Twitter account automatically tweeted an embarrassing warning to others.
Voshy’s Twitter API dragnet caught some wild accounts, including that of Slope Finance, the Solana mobile wallet service whose social media went silent last August after leaking critical user data to hackers. Whoever runs that Twitter account apparently used it to try and claim their GREED. The result: They spread Voshy’s message (and later deleted it).
Voshy plans to continue tweeting warnings about being greedy from the accounts of people who have authorized him to do so. (He’s also circulating information about how to revoke permissions, and encourages people to do so).
“I always feel like if I have the chance to teach them about something, maybe at least few people benefit and I tend to think it’s worth it. And people were telling me that I’m going to get a lot of hate for this, and that people are never going to forgive me. So far, so good. Everybody f**king loves it.”
Everyone who is a human, that is. While Voshy’s “social experiment” cost next to nothing for regular users, the bots who tried to game the system lost more, and contributed to the 120 SOL that will be forever lost because of it.
Part of the lesson is knowing how to react. That number (just over 8 billion) of tokens people seem to get? It’s the phone number for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“So GREED actually has more utility as a token than most others,” Voshy said.
Danny is CoinDesk’s Managing Editor for Data & Tokens. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL.
Learn more about Consensus 2024, CoinDesk’s longest-running and most influential event that brings together all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3. Head to consensus.coindesk.com to register and buy your pass now.
Danny is CoinDesk’s Managing Editor for Data & Tokens. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL.
Polychain Snubs Lucrative Crypto Arbitrage, Prepares to Trade $6M of ROOK Token on Uniswap
In doing so, Polychain, one of the oldest and richest crypto hedge funds, seemingly thumbed its nose at a slightly risky arbitrage trade that could end up paying millions of dollars more. It is forgoing the opportunity to redeem its ROOK tokens via the “rage quit” smart contract, where it could at most yield $8.7 million. That’s because those ROOK tokens give it the right to a guaranteed slice of ROOK’s treasury, plus the possibility of even more upside if other ROOK holders forget to do the same.
Aragon’s ANT Rallies After Cofounder Proposes Token Buybacks to End Activist Crisis
“The Aragon Association’s mandate is to spend its treasury on Aragon’s mission. That mandate also applies for transferring the funds to the DAO. So whichever proposal the AA decides to go with, it will need to be reviewed by the legal team. This is usually slow, painful, and requires a lot of back and forth,” Cuende wrote.
Aragon Cancels Planned Community Control of $200M Treasury Amid Battle With Activist Investors
The Association, a Swiss entity that oversees Aragon, said it “acted on its fiduciary duty to secure its treasury and mission by repurposing the Aragon DAO as part of a new grants program” after undergoing a “51% attack” from activist investors betting on the price of ANT.
Heavyweight Hedge Fund Arca Joins Activist Fight Against DAO Builder Aragon
The open letter escalated a fight already being waged between Aragon, a crypto governance project building tools for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and a tight-knit group of activist investors critical of project leadership and demanding they give disenchanted investors an exit ramp.
Aragon Fires Back at Activist Investors in Early Stages of DAO Governance Fight
A DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, is a method of governance in which crypto investors vote over how a project is run. Aragon builds tools to help other DAOs operate and is itself partially governed by a DAO. This week it began moving its multi-million dollar treasury toward community control, an effort nearly a year in the making.
Judge Upholds Freeze on SpartacusDAO’s $35M in Lawsuit Served Via Discord, NFT
Judge Victor Marrero upheld his previously signed restraining order against Wei Wu, allegedly the man behind Spartacus, in a hearing in the Southern District of New York on Thursday. Marrero said the order will remain in place until Wu, who has been a no-show, starts to work with the court, said Diogenes Casares, CEO of the investment company suing Wu.
Aragon Bans at Least 6 DAO Members During Treasury Discussion, Alleging ‘Coordinated’ Assault
Their banishment from Aragon’s Discord for asking “probing questions” and using “inappropriate language” highlights the disconnect between the censorship-resistant ideals of crypto governance and the reality that insiders hold considerable sway.
Coinbase Opens Offshore Crypto Derivatives Exchange
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/05/02/coinbase-opens-offshore-crypto-derivatives-exchange/
“Rest assured that Coinbase is committed to the U.S., but countries around the world are increasingly moving forward with responsible crypto-forward regulatory frameworks to strategically position themselves as crypto hubs,” Coinbase said in a blog post. “We would like to see the US take a similar approach instead of regulation by enforcement which has led to a disappointing trend for crypto development in the U.S.”
Russian Bitcoin Wallets Allegedly Exposed by Apparent Hacker
The unknown individual used a feature in how the bitcoin blockchain documents transactions to identify 986 wallets controlled by the Foreign Military Intelligence Agency (GRU), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Federal Security Service (FSB), Chainalysis, which works closely with the U.S. government, said in a post shared with CoinDesk. Written in Russian, the vigilante’s messages accuse the wallets of being involved in hacking activity.
Circle Unveils New Method for Moving USDC Between Blockchains
“With CCTP, developers can simplify the user experience and their users can trust that they are always transacting with a highly liquid, safe and fungible asset in native USDC. This milestone makes USDC a natively multi-chain digital dollar,” Joao Reginatto, VP of Product said in a press release.
USDC Stablecoin Was Strengthened by U.S. Banking Crisis in March, Allaire Says
“We’ve successfully navigated this crisis, and have actually upgraded the market infrastructure behind USDC to be by far the strongest, safest digital dollar on the internet today, hands down, there’s no question,” Allaire said onstage at CoinDesk’s Consensus conference in Austin.
Solana’s Annual Carbon Footprint Equals 8 Flights from London to New York
Solana’s servers emitted 10,651 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the 12 months prior to April 1, 2023, according to the dashboard built by footprint calculator Carbonara. That’s roughly equivalent to eight flights from London to New York, based on CoinDesk estimates derived from data showing that route would produce about 1,300 metric tons.
Heavy Demand For Madlads NFT Breaks Internet, Delays Mint
https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/04/21/heavy-demand-for-madlads-nft-breaks-internet-delays-mint/
The delay came after a day of electric interest in Ferrante’s and Yver’s custom take on NFTs. They’re called xNFTs, and they’re more than just a JPEG on a blockchain: they also represent “tokenized code representing ownership rights over its execution,” according to the website of Blue Coral, Inc., the duo’s startup that focuses on Solana development.
Decentralized Wireless Project Helium Begins Move to Solana Blockchain
The transition aims to make it faster and cheaper to operate on Helium, a project attempting to globally deploy decentralized wireless infrastructure that relies on cryptocurrency as an incentive mechanism. Until Tuesday its tokens lived for nearly four years on the Helium blockchain, a custom layer 1 that lacked the broad appeal of Solana, Ethereum and other smart contract platforms
PancakeSwap Leaders Propose Cutting CAKE Token Inflation Target to 3%-5%
The “version 2.5” tokenomics proposal would move CAKE toward a “deflationary model” by slashing the token rewards paid to traders and stakers by over 68%. The so-called CAKE “emissions” on Syrup Pool, PancakeSwap’s main liquidity pool on BNB Smart Chain, would drop by 94% under the proposal.
New AI Chatbot Plugs Into Your Crypto Wallet
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/04/18/new-ai-chatbot-plugs-into-your-crypto-wallet/
To start, Omni’s crypto functionality can interact only with marginFi. It’s not yet able to generate transactions between wallets. Pavlovsky said he’s in talks with other Solana teams, including Drift and Backpack, about utilizing Omni on their respective protocols. He wants the tool to become a virtual assistant for navigating Web3.
Olympus DAO Votes to Buy More ETH for Treasury Backing OHM Token
Relwyn said the treasury operations team “agrees” with community members’ bullishness, but cautioned the protocol can’t just YOLO everything into ETH without incurring a hearty dose of risk. Number may go up right now, but “number can go down too,” said Relwyn,
ROOK Investors Begin Swapping Tokens for $25M Crypto Treasury
“This has been a dynamic, collaborative process, designed to accommodate the community’s wishes for the ROOK token and the new Incubator DAO.” Rook Labs’ pseudonymous CEO Hazard told CoinDesk in a Discord message. “We’re grateful for the enthusiastic participation of ROOK holders and community members, and are happy to see the tokenholders of Incubator DAO exercising their new autonomy. From here, Rook Labs will move forward with our objective of building innovative MEV infrastructure, operating within the bounds of real-world legal and regulatory frameworks and business imperatives.”
Solana’s Crypto-Ready ‘Saga’ Smartphone Goes on Sale May 8
What makes the Saga different, according to Solana, is the “Solana Mobile Stack” (SMS), a lineup of custom add-ons that integrate crypto usefulness into the phone’s hardware and software. SMS has ingrained security features to provide for sending, receiving, trading and storing crypto on the device.
Top DeFi Insurer Paid Millions to Euler Hack Victims. Now, Nexus Mutual Wants Its Money Back
Nexus Mutual, one of the largest insurance platforms covering high-risk decentralized finance (DeFi) deposits, is waiting to get paid back by five clients who filed claims after the March incident, according to on-chain data. Together, those clients represent about $2 million in crypto of the nearly $2.4 million in total claims Nexus Mutual paid.