Category: DeFi

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Crypto News DeFi NFTs

Capital Raising May Have Changed Forever as New DAO is Formed to Buy an NBA Team

Another decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), Krause House, is hot on the heels of ConstitutionDAO, though aiming to buy something a little bit more extravagant – a National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise. The leaderless internet group is aiming to raise 1,000 ether (ETH) in the hopes to pool enough money to buy an NBA team, according to its website.

Only One Goal in Mind

Krause House, a community-run internet group named after late Chicago Bulls manager Jerry Krause, launched earlier this year and has only one goal in mind, that of buying an NBA team. The DAO began its funding drive last week by selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Thus far, the DAO has successfully raised 411 ETH, or about US$1.7 million. The group hit its goal of 200 ETH in the first 15 minutes of launching the sale via Mirror:

Krause House contributor Adam Soffer said: “I’ve been following the news around ConstitutionDAO, and it occurred to me there’s a high probability a DAO will attempt a bid on a professional sports team within the next 10 years.” He added: “I tweeted this and someone responded, ‘There’s a DAO for that’, and pointed me to Krause House DAO.”

DAOs offered them a solution. The co-creators have said they have both been involved in crypto since 2017 and were “very excited” by what DAOs could offer them. To date, more than 1,300 people have joined the Krause House Discord server. The duo is quoted in saying:

We decided to create a DAO focused on achieving our lifelong passion, and it turns out a lot of folks have the same dream too.

Krause House was co-created by friends Flex Chapman and Commodore (both opted for pseudonyms) who had dreams of playing in the NBA as children but were unable to do so. They later instead readjusted their dream to owning a team. It comes, however, at a notoriously astronomical price. In December 2020, the Utah Jazz team sold for US$1.6 billion and the Brooklyn Nets for US$2.35 billion in August 2019.

NFT Craze Drives Fundraising

In order to raise the vast amounts of money needed to realise the dream, Krause House is selling NFTs in three membership tiers:

Three NFT membership tiers available for purchase. Source: krausehouse.mirror.xyz

Courtside is selling at 10 ETH apiece, Club Level at 1.0 ETH and Upper Level at 0.1 ETH apiece. Each of the three different tiers grants different levels of access to $KRAUSE tokens. Additionally, a limited-edition NFT will be awarded to the top three donors of the campaign.

DAOs Generate Astronomical Amounts of Money

DAOs are showing us exactly what a community of people can do when they choose to achieve a collective goal. Krause House is on its way to raising some serious capital, following in the footsteps of ConstitutionDAO’s US$47 million.

Earlier this year, Australian trading platform Tracer DAO managed to raise US$4.5 million in a strategic round of funding, backed by various cryptocurrency companies. Tracer is an Ethereum-based decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol that introduces a derivatives marketplace, which is owned by a DAO.

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Australia Blockchain Crypto News DeFi

Australian Senator Says ‘Crypto is Here to Stay’

Many in the Aussie crypto world may not have heard much about Liberal Senator Jane Hume, the Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy. That is until she voiced her views on crypto at the Australian Financial Review Super & Wealth Summit held in Sydney this past Monday.

Australia, Crypto is ‘Here to Stay’

Hume, who also serves as Minister for Women’s Economic Security, spoke of embracing innovation and “encouraging personal responsibility and informed consent”. This she saw as important as driving Australia forward from an innovation and economic perspective.

Referring to the Senate Committee’s report, she noted that 17 percent of Australians are investing in cryptocurrency.

This is an asset class that has captured hearts and minds, but beyond that ‑ whatever you might personally think ‑ it’s a technology that’s not going away any time soon.

Senator Jane Hume

One of the key areas she identified as having “huge opportunities” was decentralised finance (DeFi). After commending industry for embracing blockchain specifically, she stressed the role of government in encouraging innovation. Hume also added “as an industry, and as a government, we need to acknowledge this is not a fad. We should tread cautiously, but not fearfully”.

The Senator’s Personal View

Speaking to her personal views, Hume cautioned against being left behind the curve.

Don’t be the person who thought the iPhone would never take off because people would prefer to have their music and telephone on separate devices. Don’t be the person who was still doing their financial models by hand in 2001, rather than using Excel. Don’t be the person in 1995 who said the internet was just a place for geeks and criminals and would never become mainstream. And don’t be the person who argued that email was a passing fad.

Senator Jane Hume

Hume commented that if the past two to three decades had proved anything, it was that “innovation begins as disruption and ends as a household name”.

Overall, the response from the crypto community has been very positive:

Blockchain Australia CEO Steve Vallas shared the industry’s sentiments when he commented that the speech sent a “very strong signal” to both the market and policymakers, that treasury was taking the industry seriously.

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Blockchain Crypto News Cryptocurrencies DeFi

Elrond Up 60% in a Week Amid Liquidity Incentive Program Announcement

Elrond Gold is inarguably one of the best performers in crypto this year, especially in the past few months, the EGLD token has seen tremendous growth amid the company’s latest announcements with Maiar DEX.

The big price rally began on November 19 after the announcement of a US$1.29 billion liquidity incentive, launched by Maiar Exchange – Elrond’s native decentralised exchange. EGLD pumped from US$300 all the way to record a new all-time high of $545.64.

CoinGecko

Elrond Gold the New King of DeFi

Elrond is set to make its mark in DeFi with one of the largest incentive programs to date. The Maiar DEX will use its utility and governance token – MEX – to transfer funding to users of the exchange who provide liquidity in EGLD, MEX and USDC.

By distributing Maiar DEX ownership to the next billion users, we [are laying] the foundation for a truly global financial system that is accessible to everyone, everywhere.

Beniamin Mincu, founder and CEO, Elrond Gold  

Maiar DEX is a fully community-owned DeFi platform that has already distributed ownership to more than 60,000 accounts in the form of claimable MEX tokens.

In the first month of distribution the exchange will distribute US$282 million. The project will then have follow-up programs “aimed at the users of the largest DeFi platforms in the ecosystem”, according to Elrond CEO Beniamin Mincu. Customers could “claim MEX tokens proportionally to their activity involving products such as Uniswap, PancakeSwap or SushiSwap”.

Can Maiar DEX Drive DeFi Adoption and Bring Crypto to the Mainstream?

Maiar DEX has also released a highly intuitive, well-designed and extremely easy-to-use app that allows you to get a secure crypto wallet instantly with just a phone number. Perhaps this will be the product that will drive DeFi adoption and bring crypto to the mainstream?

Elrond Gold is incredibly fast: the PoS (proof-of-stake) network uses an adaptive state sharding technology that helps to improve speeds by slicing blocks into smaller pieces, or “shards”. The high throughput blockchain can scale beyond 100,000 transactions per second.

In February, Crypto News Australia reported on Elrond’s CEO tweeting at Elon Musk, explaining the technology of Elrond’s blockchain and how it could improve transactions for self-driving Teslas.

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Crypto News DeFi NFTs Tokens

Music NFT Token OPUL Up 785% in a Month, the ‘Biggest Thing Since Streaming’?

Opulous (OPUL), a protocol focused on the tokenisation of the music industry, has set fire to the crypto charts with a 785 percent breakout in a single month on the back of a partnership with “market maker” Jump Trading.

The OPUL project aims to empower artists to the extent that music rights can be utilised as value-backed assets in decentralised finance (DeFi).

Since its low point of US$0.635 at the end of September, the OPUL token ballooned 1,095 percent to a new all-time high of US$7.60 on November 15 as its 24-hour trading volume spiked 564 percent to US$11.67 million.

Why OPUL Is On Fire

There are three underpinning reasons for OPUL’s breakout:

  • the successful completion of its first security NFT (S-NFT) sale;
  • the token’s cross-chain capabilities, which have enabled support from multiple centralised (CEXs) and decentralised exchanges (DEXs); and
  • the rising popularity of the NFT ecosystem as a whole.

The first of these factors saw a special token standard created in conjunction with Republic Music, an investment product that claims to offer “an entirely new way to create, produce and share royalties”. Opulous partnered with rap artists Lil Pump and Soulja Boy to conduct the S-NFT sale for their song Mona Lisa, which last month raised its goal of US$500,000 in less than two hours.

How Opulous Works

Once the investment process is finalised by Republic, contributors can go to the Opulous website and mint the S-NFT tokens, which will be distributed on the Algorand blockchain. As the song accumulates streams on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, or attracts other publishers such as radio or television shows, movies or video games, royalty shares are distributed quarterly in the form of USD Coin (USDC) directly to wallets holding the S-NFTs.

The second factor working in OPUL’s favour has been the level of support from several large CEXs and DEXs, which have helped increase traders’ access to the token. OPUL was also able to launch on two of the largest DEXs in the crypto ecosystem – Uniswap and PancakeSwap – thanks to its cross-chain capabilities, which currently include Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as well as Algorand.

As for the third factor, the explosion of the NFT ecosystem in 2021 is a given. Recent keyword data on Google shows that searches for “non-fungible tokens” and “NFTs” are at all-time highs. No surprises there.

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Crypto News DeFi Metaverse NFTs

TIME Magazine to Hold ETH on its Balance Sheet as Part of Galaxy Metaverse Deal

American media giant TIME Magazine this week revealed a partnership with Mike Novogratz’ Galaxy Digital and, as part of the deal, TIME will hold ETH on its balance sheet.

The partnership, announced by the magazine on November 18, will seek to educate its readers about the advent of the metaverse.

TIME Joins the Metaverse

The metaverse is a digital landscape where users can interact socially and economically. Many successful projects have created their own virtual reality world using blockchain technology and tokenomics. Two examples are Decentraland (MANA), which recently soared after the Caribbean island of Barbados announced it would build a digital embassy in its metaverse, and Sandbox (SAND), which also hit an all-time high this week after the announcement of a Play-2-Earn (P2E) metaverse event.

TIME will launch the TIME 100 Companies list, followed by a weekly newsletter titled ‘Into the Metaverse’. Galaxy will manage the list, which will feature the most promising projects and developers.

TIME‘s decision to jump into the metaverse was probably propelled by the fast-paced advancement of this technology. Two weeks ago, Crypto News Australia reported that Microsoft was set to follow Facebook (now called Meta) and will launch Mesh, its own version of the metaverse, focused on the corporate world.

Over the next decade, the metaverse will become an increasingly important part of the world economy; our physical and digital realities are already becoming hard to distinguish. We look forward to partnering with TIME, an iconic brand driving innovation, as we seek to bring readers, creators, and the curious into the metaverse and demystify the tremendous amount of transformation happening.

Mike Novogratz, CEO, Galaxy
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Crypto News Cryptocurrencies DeFi Payments Stablecoins

RBA Discusses Future of Payments in Australia and Cryptocurrency ‘Risks’

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has discussed the need to regulate stablecoin usage in the application of DeFi for payments, and also noted the “considerable risks” associated with meme coins during its November monetary policy meeting.

In the meeting’s minutes, the RBA acknowledged innovations such as distributed-ledger and smart contracts could change the face of the financial sector but that it would likely rely on the use of stablecoins or CBDCs rather than cryptocurrencies. The RBA said:

… if stablecoins were to be used widely, they should be subject to regulation that ensured they were safe for users and promoted financial stability.

Reserve Bank of Australia members

In considering the future of digital assets in payment, the RBA hit out at cryptocurrencies, which it described as having “numerous shortcomings as stores of value or means of payment”. 

The central bank said the risks and speculative nature of crypto investment was especially obvious when it came to “meme coins”, and noted warnings that investors caught up in the recent boom could experience large losses. 

Crypto Risks a Focus Even As Regulators Explore CBDCs

Australia’s financial regulators continue to warn investors about cryptocurrencies, even as they tentatively consider the possibilities of CBDCs. 

In August, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) reiterated its warning for Aussies to be wary of investing in unlicensed companies – that is, companies that do not hold an Australian financial services (AFS) licence or an Australian market licence (AML).

The RBA also used its November meeting to express its support for CBDC-related initiatives including developing a proof-of-concept of a wholesale CBDC in 2019 and the recently completed Project Atom, which explored the potential use of a central bank CBDC using distributed ledger technology in collaboration with blockchain company ConsenSys.

In addition, the RBA recently advertised it was seeking to hire people for a new cross-disciplinary “CBDC Research Team” to support the evolution of payments in Australia.

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Crypto News Crypto Wallets DeFi Institutions

Crypto Adoption Rate is Mirroring Internet Adoption of the Late 1990s

Crypto adoption from 2014 to 2020 is resembling that of the internet from 1990 to 2000, the same years when the online boom was considered a scam and a bubble that would eventually burst.

The speed at which cryptocurrencies have taken off has been surprising. On one hand, detractors had to sit back and watch how crypto assets reached the mainstream mostly driven by institutions and renowned wealthy investors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Mark Cuban, collectively highlighting the benefits of crypto and blockchain technology. 

But the crypto community could not have predicted the speed and extent of crypto adoption this year. In August, Crypto News Australia reported that global adoption had surged an incredible 880 percent over the past year, and the number of active addresses reached its peak on November 10 – the highest level since May.

At the beginning of November, the number of active bitcoin addresses stayed above 1 million for five days in a row. This, according to analytics firm Santiment, signals that prices will flirt with further all-time highs (ATHs) in the future.

Cryptocurrency adoption in Australia has advanced markedly. Earlier this month, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) allowed users to buy, sell and hold crypto on its CommBank mobile app. However, Australia still has many challenges ahead with crypto adoption in terms of education and regulation.

Number of Users Engaging With Crypto Products Skyrockets

The number of users and institutions engaging with crypto and DeFi-related products has risen as well. According to Coinbase’s Q3 2021 Shareholder Letter, the number of users on the exchange earning yields on their crypto assets increased to a total of 2.8 million.

Meanwhile, crypto-native institutions have been keener to explore the DeFi space as the sector has experienced a boom. More institutions are using Ethereum to borrow and lend across several DeFi apps, as per a report from digital assets broker Genesis.

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DeFi Economics Hackers Tokens

CREAM DeFi Token Falls 43% Amid News Hack Compensation Will Increase Supply

When Decentralised Finance (DeFi) lending protocol Cream Finance suffered a devastating US$130 million attack two weeks ago, the team decided to compensate users for their losses in CREAM by pushing up the total supply and in return pulling down the price.

Following the hack, the Cream team moved to redistribute 1,453,415 coins from its treasury to the impacted users. In September, Cream also paid back its users for a different attack that cost the protocol US$19 million.

In terms of changes in security, Cream has tightened its token listing strategy to no longer include long-tail assets or tokens that can be wrapped/unwrapped.

Collateral Cap limits are deployed across all markets to increase security, while additional monitoring and alerting solutions are undergoing assessment and implementation.

CREAM Finance

Price Drops as Compensation Inflates Token Supply

While Cream has 9 million coins in its total supply, according to CoinMarketCap only 150,000 of those are in circulation. A rapid increase in supply was bound to have an effect on demand, and therefore the price per coin.

CREAM price chart. Source: CoinGecko

The price of the coin had fallen from around US$88 to as low as $49.80 at the time of writing – a 43 per cent drop, according to CoinGecko. Before the October 27 exploit, Cream was trading above $152, suffering a 66 per cent drop in price since then. This is now the second significant drop in price the protocol has seen in a short span of time, and the mood among users is dark:

Individuals hit by the attack seem to have divided into two camps: some of those seeking recourse also seek to undermine the effort to compensate Cream’s users, while others realise the risk of DeFi and that it’s their responsibility to do their own research and understand the risks associated with the nascent technology.

Most of the time victims of such attacks never see anything in terms of compensation, which makes Cream quite the gift-giver, having paid out its users twice after attacks.

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Crypto News DeFi Tokens

UMA DeFi Token Continues to Soar Following Protocol Launch, Up 63% in a Week

UMA, the native token of Universal Market Access, skyrocketed more than 60 percent over the past three days after the launch of Across Protocol, a bridge from layer 1 to layer 2 on the UMA mainnet. 

Across Protocol is Live

The UMA token’s performance was average at the beginning of the last week but that changed quickly after the announcement of the Across Protocol, which will provide a secure and fast bridge for DeFi users, allowing them to bridge USDC, ETH and UMA from Arbitrum back to the Ethereum mainnet. 

The bridging function works by offering incentives for relayers to offer short-term loans to users on L1, which are repaid after two hours from a liquidity pool on L1. This pool is refilled when the funds arrive from L2 transactions. These transactions are insured by UMA’s Optimistic Oracle.

Across Protocol Medium post

The token has been rallying rapidly since then, up 63 percent to a market cap of US$1.05 billion in the past seven days. Data from Messari shows the token has achieved 100.52 percent in YTD gains, now trading at a range of US$16.50 in most exchanges.

UMA was created in December 2018 as a protocol designed to allow users to create synthetic assets on the Ethereum blockchain. UMA started its bullish rally on December 23, 2020, when the currency broke above the US$9.35 mark, trending upward along with many other altcoins.

Another token that has seen tremendous trading volume is SCRT, the privacy token of Secret Network, a DeFi protocol that aims to be a privacy-centric platform for the community.

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Blockchain Crypto News DeFi Social media

Twitter Launches Crypto Team to Explore DApps

Twitter is building an expert cryptocurrency team focused on bringing crypto, blockchain, and decentralised technology into the social media platform.

Twitter Crypto and DeFi

Twitter has hired Tess Rinearson, dubbed Twitter Crypto, to lead the team in its plans to bring crypto, blockchain, and DApps to the platform for a wide variety of uses not necessarily related to the financial aspect.

Rinearson took to Twitter to explain what Twitter Crypto will bring to the table. The team hopes to enhance the BTC tipping platform and the proof of identity service for NFTs. Both features were announced a month ago after Jack Dorsey highlighted that Twitter could see significant growth with the integration of crypto.

Moreover, the team will seek how it can support DApps development amid growing interest from creators. Twitter Crypto hopefully will allow them to manage virtual goods and digital assets, and support other projects and communities.

Supporting Crypto Communities

Building communities and allowing them to share information has been an important aspect for Twitter, from crypto HODLers to NFT enthusiasts.

As Crypto News Australia reported last month, Twitter has been testing blockchain technology to verify NFT profile pictures.

Looking farther ahead, we’ll be exploring how ideas from crypto communities can help us push the boundaries of what’s possible with identity, community, ownership and more.

Tess Rinearson, aka Twitter Crypto

Rinearson has a solid background in the area of blockchain and consensus development, including engineering the Tendermint Core. She has also worked with the Interchain Foundation, Cosmos, and Chain.com.