Coinbase and BlackRock Announce Partnership
Market Movers
The largest coins by market cap faced turbulence this week, with Ethereum having the only positive movement.
Trust Wallet Token (TWT), our pump coin of the week, rose 24.62%.
TWT is a BEP-20 token that provides incentives and benefits, such as discounts on in-app crypto purchases, to Trust Wallet users—Binance’s native crypto wallet.
First Sip
If you’re already a crypto native, feel free to skip to “Table Talk.”
WHAT’S UNISWAP?
Back in February, when we discussed Decentralized Exchanges (DEX), we mentioned Uniswap as a popular example of one. In fact, Uniswap is the largest DEX on Ethereum, with over $500M in daily volume (via Coinbase, Uniswap).
Uniswap launched in November 2018 and has since become a mainstay of the Ethereum ecosystem, undergoing 2 version upgrades and incorporating new crypto features as it has evolved like a DAO governance model (via Coinbase).
The Uniswap DEX is effectively summarized by the following graphic (via Uniswap). Let’s break each piece down.
There are effectively two kinds of users that interact with the Uniswap application: liquidity providers and traders.
Liquidity providers are those who contribute their Ethereum-based crypto assets to the pool of tokens that Uniswap manages and offers up to traders. Liquidity providers are rewarded for surrendering their assets to the pool and are able to withdraw them at any time (via Orbs DeFi). Individuals who move their assets around looking for the best places to be liquidity providers are yield farmers. We discussed yield farming in May.
Traders pay a 0.3% set fee for exchanging their tokens for a crypto asset in the pool via the “swap” part of Uniswap. This fee is then given to liquidity providers for surrendering their assets to the pool.
Flash swaps are equivalent to flash loans which we’ve discussed in this section previously. Oracles are simply algorithms that give the current price of an asset so that Uniswap can serve this up for traders. All of these processes are governed by “un-upgradable” smart contracts—meaning that they cannot be changed and live on in perpetuity. This gives Uniswap a layer of security against attacks and allows them to be truly decentralized.
Uniswap was one of the first true DeFi protocols, and its dedicated user community and team have helped it become the DEX powerhouse it is. You can learn more about Uniswap here.
Table Talk
$8M SOLANA HACK
$8M dollars worth of Solana, currently the world’s 9th largest cryptocurrency popularized for its cheap and quick transactional power, was stolen from approximately 8,000 hot wallets this past week (via Business Insider).
The hack can be traced back to Slope Finance, a popular Solana-supported hot wallet, due to the fact that most of the compromised wallets were “at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications” (via BusinessInsider).
Other hot wallets such as Phantom, Slope, and Trust Wallet were also drained, with the common denominator being that those affected had connected their wallets to Slope at some point (via Twitter).
The exact nature of the breach is still being investigated.
In response to the attack, Slope has placed a 10% bounty for the hackers if they return the funds and has promised not to take legal action against the criminals (via Twitter).
The stolen assets represent yet another event of illegal activity in the web3 space and serve as a reminder to place your assets offline and in cold storage to ensure their security.
Our thoughts go out to all of those affected.
NFT Buzz
MAGIC EDEN ADDS ETHEREUM
Magic Eden, the world’s leading Solana-based NFT platform, announced on Tuesday that they would be integrating Ethereum into their platform sometime this month (via Decrypt).
The company, which is less than a year old and was valued at $1.6B in June, seeks to offer the same go-to-market benefits they currently offer for Solana to Ethereum, and become a multi-chain platform (via Decrypt).
Following the move, Magic Eden cofounder Zhuoxun Yin stated, “We don’t think winning on ETH will happen overnight. We are entering the market with humility and are prepared to build for a long while” (via msn).
Yin’s preference for a long-term outlook is more than rational.
OpenSea, the world’s largest Ethereum, and NFT marketplace in general captured 96.3% of the total global Ethereum NFT transactions in July (via coingape).
DeFi Demographic
BLACKROCK + COINBASE PARTNERSHIP
BlackRock, the largest global asset manager with over $10T+ under management, has announced a partnership with Coinbase Prime to offer users of its Aladdin trading platform access to crypto investments (via WSJ, Coinbase). Aladdin is BlackRock’s institutional trading platform which sees over $21T in volume (via Business Insider).
To understand the scale of this agreement and what it means for crypto and Coinbase, take this: the two largest funds after BlackRock—Vanguard and State Street Global Advisors—as well as a whole host of other firms, use Aladdin, and now all have access to offer crypto investments for their clients (via FT). Coinbase has said they will begin by offering Bitcoin via Aladdin (via Coinbase).
Crypto is definitely not a fad that’s on the outs because of market turbulence.
Final Cup
$8M worth of Solana was stolen from innocent people that can be linked to a breach in Slope Finance’s wallet protocol. Keep your assets offline and in cold storage to prevent situations like this.
Solana-based NFT leader Magic Eden to try and capture some of OpenSea’s dominant Ethereum-based NFT market share (96% in July) by adding support for the coin to their platform sometime in August.
Coinbase and BlackRock partner to offer BTC to institutional users of BlackRock’s trading platform, marking the beginning of massive crypto exposure to institutional inventors. Bullish.
Meme of the Week (via cryptomkg)
Soon Mario, soon.
Pat + Ari ✌️
Disclaimer: None of this is investment advice, financial advice, or trading advice. CRYPTOPONG does not endorse any of the cryptocurrencies, DeFi applications, or NFT collections mentioned in this article. Perform your own due diligence and/or consult a financial advisor before investing. All of the opinions expressed here are our own unless cited otherwise.