August 31, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • Cream Finance was involved in a $25M flash loan attack on Sunday. 
  • Sushi paid a $1M bug bounty to Paradigm’s Sam Sun for catching an error on its Miso platform. 
  • Centre, the consortium created by Coinbase and Circle to oversee USDC, announced a new team to help it expand globally.  
  • NFT trader Vincent Van Dough is raising a $100M funding round to invest in NFTs through a partnership with Three Arrows Capital. 
  • DeFi Education Fund released information on its first round of four grants. 
  • Polkadot’s Parallel Finance raised $22M at a valuation of $150M. 
  • Billionaire John Paulson thinks cryptocurrencies are a bubble.

What Do You Meme?


What’s Poppin’?

Celo, a mobile-first blockchain protocol, announced a new $100M+ budget for grants, education, and token rewards via a program dubbed “DeFi for the People.” Built on Celo, the new project has partnered with DeFi stalwarts Aave, Curve, Sushi, 0x, PoolTogether and more to help expand Celo’s crypto offerings. Education will be handled through collaborations with Chainlink, RabbitHole, The Graph, and Wrapped.com. 

Starting yesterday, rewards are already available for PoolTogether on Celo, with incentive pools for other DeFi projects planned for the coming weeks and months. DeFi for the People has already allocated $20M in incentives for Aave liquidity providers, $14M for Curve liquidity providers, and $10M for Sushi liquidity providers, which will be dealt out on top of the normal yield accrued from interacting with a DeFi protocol in the first place. 

Since the announcement early yesterday morning, Celo’s native token, CGLD, has climbed over 60%, from $4 to about $6.90 at publishing time. 

Fantom also published plans to launch a liquidity mining program. The layer 1 smart contract blockchain announced its intent to use $320M in FTM tokens to lure DeFi protocols to its network. Instead of partnering with already instantiated DeFi platforms, Fantom has decided to open up its liquidity mining program to the masses — with one major requirement. Any protocol is eligible to join Fantom’s incentive program as long as it holds $5,000,000 in total value locked into the application. 

Price action for FTM, Fantom’s native token, was positive following the announcement, shooting up 36% on the day, as of publishing time late Monday night. 


Recommended Reads

  • Real Vision’s Raoul Pal on the Fed’s money printer:

  • Economist J.P. Koning on decentralized stablecoins:

  • Messari’s Ryan Watkins on Ethereum DeFi:


On The Pod…

How Pplpleasr Helped Fortune Magazine Sell More Than $1 Million in NFTs

Pplpleasr, the artist behind Fortune magazine’s recent crypto cover and Uniswap’s V3 announcement animation, talks about her crypto journey and how NFTs are changing the game for creators. Show highlights:

  • how not getting a job at Apple changed her life forever
  • how the Pplpleasr-Uniswap collaboration came about
  • what goes into her creative process
  • how Pplpleasr got hired for the Fortune magazine cover
  • why she chose to represent anon-avatars on the Fortune cover
  • why Pplpleasr was surprised by Fortune’s response to her artwork (and crypto in general)
  • what sort of crypto personas are represented on the Fortune cover and why
  • how NFTs are changing the paradigm of monetization for creators compared to the traditional art world
  • what pplpleasr is looking forward to in future NFT smart contracts
  • why NFTs are still limited right now
  • why institutions, like Budweiser and Visa, are suddenly interested in NFTs
  • what Fortune is doing to grow its NFT collection
  • how DAOs are changing art curation and collecting
  • why Pplpleasr was surprised that a DAO (bearing her name) purchased the Uniswap V3 animation
  • where Pplpleasr thinks the NFT space will go in the next year or so

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Jan. 18. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians