Cash App, the peer-to-peer payments service from Square, is giving select users a way to get short-term loans. The company said it’s only testing the feature with around 1,000 users for now. But it could become more broadly available — and there are probably plenty of people who could use the money, given the state of the U.S. and global economy, not to mention the current uncertainty about further stimulus plans.
More on TechCrunch• 2020-08-12
Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol, has hit a record high for user growth. According to The Block Research, Uniswap added 57,976 new users in July as compared to 24,963 in June, i.e. growth of 132%. In August thus far, the exchange has added 27,253 unique users.
More on The Block• 2020-08-10
yearn.finance describes itself as a yield aggregator. I like to think of it as a fund where anyone can invest and then a human manager (or set of managers) directs this capital to the highest-yielding opportunities in DeFi. Since launching its governance token YFI in mid-July, yearn.finance has exploded in popularity. While the token was lauded for its fair launch and wide distribution, there was a popular misconception that user funds are controlled by YFI token holders or at least a multi-signature wallet that represents their interest.
More on Deribit Insights• 2020-08-07
Dharma is the gateway to DeFi, making DeFi accessible to anyone with internet access and a smartphone. But Dharma isn’t just for DeFi newcomers. Even DeFi natives will appreciate the additional features we built on top of Uniswap. First, Dharma is the first mobile wallet with native support for Uniswap V2. So if you ever want to make a trade on the go, use Dharma
More on Dharma Blog• 2020-08-01
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has exploded in popularity in recent months, and Automated Market Maker Decentralized Exchanges (henceforth, AMMs) have become an integral layer of the emerging DeFi ecosystem. For most of this past year, total liquidity of AMMs was well under $100 million. That figure has grown to almost $700 million in a matter of weeks.
More on Deribit Insights• 2020-07-31
Hardware wallet maker Ledger suffered a breach of 1 million customer emails and e-commerce documents in June. No user funds were affected.
More on Decrypt• 2020-07-29
In one week since it launched, it’s gone through a parabolic price increase, eye-popping returns for yield farmers, hundreds of millions deposited into the platform’s liquidity pools, and seven on-chain votes.
More on Decrypt• 2020-07-25
The US Department of Justice comes down hard on a man who admitted to illegally exchanging some $15-25 million in cash for crypto.
More on Decrypt• 2020-07-23
The former chief operating officer at Wirecard, a payments firm that “lost” €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) in June, recently fled to Russia and has a “significant” cache of Bitcoin there, according to a report by German news outlet Handelsblatt on Sunday. Jan Marsalek is said to have “brought significant sums to Russia in the form of bitcoins from Dubai, where Wirecard had dubious operations,” the newspaper noted.
More on Decrypt• 2020-07-20
Polkadot is a long-awaited protocol of protocols set to be among the largest mainnet launches of 2020. Its mission is interoperability, shared security, development via WebAssembly, and user-driven network governance. Today we first explain the idea of on-chain governance more broadly and then examine the recent community-driven attempt to redenominate DOT, the native token of Polkadot. It is an interesting showcase of the power of onchain governance as well as the inherent tradeoffs.
More on Deribit Insights• 2020-07-15
This is a post i hoped to never make but the foundation of Versus is honesty and transparency to our members. As of today, July 10th, we were hacked and a majority of bitcoin held in escrow was stolen. We immediately took down the market and confirmed that no sensitive has been compromised. We are committed to identifying the vulnerability that was exploited and will not go back online until this is solved.
More on Darknetlive• 2020-07-10
We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the DeFi space could evolve and how it could follow trends from the broader tech industry. If you have read Ben Thompson’s Stratechery blog, his aggregation theory defines the difference between platform companies and “aggregators”.
More on Deribit Insights• 2020-07-09