Yield Strats #30 – Gaming/NFT Staking, Stable Farms and Airdrops
- Axie Infinity is a Pokémon-inspired universe where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem. Players can battle, collect, raise, and build a land-based kingdom for their pets. Axie Infinity has announced the launch of their AXS staking program. By staking your AXS you’ll be able to earn AXS rewards when you lock up your tokens through the staking dashboard.
- Illuvium is an open-world RPG game under development and NFT collection of battle pets. Illuvium recently announced its next flash pool, dedicating a LINK pool to the community for their support.
- Hundred Finance is the successor to Percent Finance, a community-owned fork of Compound Finance using Chainlink Oracles. Hundred Finance is now multi-chain with the release of Arbitrum integration for its decentralized lending and borrowing platform. The first phase of their initial incentive program to reward early adopters has begun.
$160M At Risk Due to Bug in DeFi Lending Protocol Compound
- A week ago, Compound founder Robert Leshner called a bug in his lending protocol’s smart contract a “moral dilemma.” Perhaps for some, but for others today the smart contracts became a vending machine full of free cash.
- Today, someone exploited a bug in Compound’s Controller contract, which is the part of the protocol that distributes yield farming rewards to users. By calling Compound’s drip() function, they transferred $68 million, or 202,472 COMP, from Compound’s reservoir to its Comptroller.
- Since Banteg, a core developer at Yearn.Finance, tweeted about the exploit earlier this afternoon, four major transactions have drained the Comptroller pool of 64,997 COMP, or $21.4 million. One of those transactions withdrew 37,504 COMP, or $12.3 million. Banteg said that only “addresses with the buggy state can drain” and that there are another five addresses that could claim $45m, “emptying the Comptroller.”
SEC rolls decisions on four bitcoin ETF applications to end of 2021
- The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) punted on four bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications today, shifting deadlines into late November and December.
- Issuers Global X, Valkyrie, WisdomTree and Kryptoin all received extension on their proposals today. The proposals are now slated to receive their decisions on Nov. 21, Dec. 8, Dec. 11 and Dec. 24, respectively. Kryptoin, WisdomTree and Valkyrie, have all faced previous extensions.
Grayscale Adds Solana and Uniswap to $495M Investment Fund
- Crypto investment house Grayscale has added Solana and Uniswap to the $495 million Digital Large Cap Fund in its latest quarterly rebalancing. The allocations mark the first time the New York-based company has added Solana to an investment vehicle.
- The fund bought Solana and Uniswap by selling some of the other assets in the fund. Grayscale has decreased its Bitcoin allocation by about 5% since the last rebalancing. Other holdings changed by small amounts. The fund’s ADA holding, only introduced last quarter, has increased from 4.26% to 5.11%.
Crypto Market Cap Swells to $2.1 Trillion as ‘Uptober’ Continues
- The entire crypto market swelled under the success of the top two coins, and now the global market cap is about $2.1 trillion, according to metrics site CoinMarketCap.
- “Uptober” may have its roots in a couple of key developments.
- First up is China’s latest blanket ban on crypto, which forced a lot of Chinese traders to brush up on decentralized finance. According to Chinese crypto-journalist Colin Wu, a lot of them moved money into DeFi protocol dYdX, whose coin has increased by about 90% in the past week.
- The second major bit of news comes from the United States. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told Congress on Thursday that, unlike China, he has “no intention to ban” cryptocurrencies.
6,000 Coinbase Users Robbed in Phishing Attacks, Company Says It Will Reimburse
- Cryptocurrency giant Coinbase revealed that “at least 6,000 Coinbase customers had funds removed from their accounts” as a result of a recent phishing campaign that saw hackers get around an SMS-based authentication feature the company used to secure many accounts.
- News of the phishing campaign was first reported in August, but the scope of it only became clear after a letter the company sent to affected customers began to circulate.
Biden admin weighing bank-like regulation for stablecoin issuers
- The Biden administration is reportedly considering a new legal framework for stablecoin issuers that would put them in the same category as banks, raising questions about the future of crypto regulation in the country.
- Policymakers have been sounding the alarm over stablecoins in recent months because they believe these dollar-pegged assets aren’t properly regulated. Earlier this week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told the Financial Services Committee that stablecoins like Tether (USDT) and USDC Coin (USDC) should be regulated within the same parameters as money market funds like bank deposits. Nevertheless, he remained steadfast in stating that no blanket ban on Bitcoin (BTC) or other digital assets was in the cards.
