Select NFTs Shine, RAI Proves Stable, DAO Updates
- Crypto has been in the green for two consecutive days now. Unlike yesterday, today’s bounce on majors actually looks somewhat convincing. Axie Infinity announced AXS staking today, and Terra successfully upgraded to Colombus-5 (Cosmos interoperability) a few hours ago. Macro concerns continue to loom as the S&P 500 opened the day in the red.
- RAI, a pegless stablecoin, has proved to have an effective design, as evidenced by its diminishing volatility and convergence to the redemption price. The amplitude of price has reduced dramatically since it launched a little over six months ago, making RAI an ideal medium of exchange — and potentially a low-risk store of value.
- Badger is currently voting on its Q4 BADGER and DIGG emissions across three separate votes. This effects the amount of BADGER and DIGG tokens emitted through their various Setts.
- The Balancer community is voting on deprecating Balancer’s tiered liquidity mining structure on Polygon, and replacing it with their “Flexible BAL” program. This will be administered through their liquidity mining committee and would allow the committee to adjust the BAL rewards of pools to better manage incentives.
- dYdX is voting to drop the market maker threshold from 5% of dYdX volume to either 2.5%, 1% or 0.5%. Currently, if an address accounts for 5% of dYdX volume they receive market maker incentives. If this passes the threshold will drop, allowing smaller market makers to benefit from incentives.
- Index Coop is asking their community to vote on researching a potential product, the Polygon Diversified Index [PDI]. If passed, this would signal community commitment to researching and developing an index based on a basket of Polygon assets.
- Yam Finance is taking the first steps to create a profit sharing model with their token holders. This proposal presents a model where protocol profits are used to buy YAM on the open market. This YAM would then be used to pay contributors to the protocol.
What Terra’s Columbus-5 Upgrade Means for LUNA
- On Thursday, the red-hot Terra blockchain, which has a mission to improve the efficiency of the global payment system, completed its Columbus-5 upgrade.
- The upgrade has major ramifications for the Terra ecosystem, its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), and Terra’s utility token LUNA, which has surged more than 10,000% this year to become the No. 11 cryptocurrency by market cap.
- Columbus-5 may stimulate demand for Terra and UST by opening it up to new networks and decentralized projects. The deflationary aspect of LUNA should also pump the price, if all goes according to plan.
DeFi and DEX volumes soar amid China’s crypto ban and ongoing US regulation
- Last week China’s heavy-handed crackdown on crypto trading crypto briefly sent shockwaves across the market as Bitcoin and altcoin prices saw a sharp drop following the announcement, but as is the case with all things crypto-related, the market bounced back as resilient traders found other ways to participate in the market.
- Activity on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and the decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX has been on the rise as traders in China seek out a safe haven for their crypto activities.
Fed Won’t Ban Bitcoin Like China, Says Jerome Powell
- Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell today told Congress he has “no intention to ban” cryptocurrencies as China has done.
- Powell’s response came after questioning from Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) during a hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services on the response of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to the COVID pandemic.
TikTok embraces NFTs with creator-led collection
- Social media platform TikTok has announced its first foray into the nonfungible token, or NFT, market with a new collection inspired by its leading trend-setters.
- On Thursday, the company unveiled TikTok Top Moments, a new program that allows creators to be recognized and rewarded for their content. The NFT drops will be launched on Ethereum and powered by Immutable X, a new scaling solution for layer-two NFT protocol Immutable.
Ethereum bears look to score on Friday’s $340M weekly ETH options expiry
- Derivatives data shows bears have sufficient incentives to keep ETH price below $3,000 heading into the $340 million options expiry on Oct. 1.
- The 1.74 call-to-put ratio represents the slight difference between the $215 million worth of call (buy) options versus the $125 million put (sell) options. Although favoring bulls, this broader view needs a more detailed analysis because some of those bets are implausible considering the current $2,800 price.
Ethereum Game Axie Infinity Rewards Early Players With $60M AXS Airdrop
- Developer Sky Mavis announced that it has launched the long-awaited staking capability, which lets AXS holders lock the governance token within the network in exchange for gradual rewards. A governance token is essentially a type of crypto token that grant its holders certain rights and privileges. During the first month, Axie plans to give out 2 million AXS worth of staking rewards, or about $150 million worth at the token’s current value.
