Bitcoin Price: US$ 45,497.55 (-2.32%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 3,406.99 (-3.20%)
CowSwap Slides, ENS Revamps, & DAO Disruptors
- CowSwap and ParaSwap are DEX aggregators that gave their early users airdrops. Although similar in concept, CowSwap is fundamentally different from Paraswap due to their use of “coincidence of wants,” or COWs, which pairs up users who hold an item the other desires. The design enables peer-to-peer order matching while providing MEV-protected trades.
- Paraswap launched its PSP token in November 2021, but it serves as a good measuring stick for CowSwap’s airdrop last week. Here we compared key trends immediately following their respective launches.
- Interestingly, the two platforms’ userbases and price action look nearly identical in their first week. Initially, both protocols started with a price of around $1.55. But as users claim their airdrops, selling pressure remained high.
- Perhaps more concerning is users of both platforms dwindled post-airdrop, falling by half over the launch week. This highlights how hard it is for protocols to retain users.
- ENS: Proposed by Nick.eth, this forum post suggests a radical change to how ENS operates as a DAO. Nick feels that DAOs are often run as committees, which, in his estimation, are operationally cumbersome. He cites issues within ENS where good ideas remain unexecuted, lack of specific accountability stalls projects or small teams, and individuals bypass the DAO model completely.
- DAOs are the next step in collective development, slated to transform life and work as we know it. We are now at the very beginning, and what we’ve seen is only the tip of the iceberg.
- Our second DISRUPTORS guest, Tracheopteryx, gives a new definition for DAOs, laying out their anatomy, and contextualizing their value. Being a core contributor at Yearn and Coordinape, Tracheopteryx sits right at the frontier of the most decentralized DAOs on the planet.
Yield Insights – Airdrops, Boosted Stablecoin Farm, Lending Market & NFT Staking
- Element Finance has announced a 10% retroactive airdrop to 15,870 addresses. 7.5% goes to 9,989 Element users and 2.5% goes to Element community members and Ethereum ecosystem contributors. You can see find the distribution list here.
- Pudgy Penguins has been acquired by LA-based entrepreneur Luca Netz in a 750ETH deal. This had led to speculation of an airdrop to NFT holders.
- Crypto Unicorns airdrop claim deadline is on April 7, 4 PM Pacific Time. Unclaim rewards will be returned to the treasury.
- Tatsumeeko will have a one-time airdrop of MKLN to Meekolony NFTs holders. There will be seasonal airdrop bonuses that include furniture, cosmetics, pet crates and other valuables.
- DeFi Kingdoms will do an xCRYSTAL snapshot once every day between April 4 and ends at 11:59 PM EST on April 25th. Each 10 xCRYSTAL held will earn 1 ticket for the Gen 0 Hero raffle. 100 Crystalvale Gen 0s will be given away in this raffle.
- Ovix Protocol is a recently launched open-source lending and borrowing protocol on Polygon. Early users may receive retroactive rewards.
- LendFlare allows Curve investors to borrow against their LPs for a certain amount of period with a fixed borrow rate and no concerns for assets being liquidated due to price fluctuations. Curve LPs will not be lent out again but reinvested in Convex to ensure the maximum profit and give all back to borrowers. Investors who supplied loan liquidity will gain one of the highest supplied interest rates compared to current lending platforms.
- Echidna Finance is a yield boosting protocol for Platypus Finance. Echidna aggregates PTP and stakes them into Platypus permanently to build a vePTP treasury. Anyone can leverage the treasury to maximize their stablecoin yield on Platypus without owning PTP. There is no private sale or allocation to any individuals or organizations. This arrangement engineers a fair starting point for all Platypus community members.
- Tatsumeeko is a multi-chain modern fantasy play-and-earn role-playing game (RPG) for IOS, Android, Discord and Web. In Tatsumeeko, you play as an otherwordly stranger summoned by forces unknown to help deal with an imminent threat in a world where magic and technology intertwine. Together with other adventurers, you battle monsters, explore the world of lelia, build your own communities and carve out your own destiny as you grow stronger and meet new friends and foes alike.
- Meekolony Passes are a series of 10,000 unique NFT passes for Tatsumeeko. Each NFT was minted for 0.5 SOL. Although the mint has concluded, you can still purchase them on secondary markets here. Meekolony’s are an official partner of the OpenSea Solana launch project. Soon you will be able to find and purchase Meekolony NFTs on OpenSea.
Twitter debates the role of renewable energy in Bitcoin mining
- It all started with a tweet by Dennis Porter, podcast host and self-described Bitcoin advocate, that led to a heady discussion about renewable energy and the role of Bitcoin miners. Porter asserted that Bitcoin (BTC) creates incentives to build out renewables, but environmental scientist Peter Gleick rebuffed the statement as a “self-serving lie.”
- The comments section got heated when Nic Carter, Castle Island Ventures general partner and Coin Metrics co-founder, entered the chat and called out Gleick for allegedly not knowing anything about energy.
- Carter proceeded to explain how energy markets work and defend cryptocurrency use in a thread of tweets. He first refuted Porter’s claim that every kilowatt-hour, or KWh, of renewable energy is “already being put to use productively, and bitcoin diverts that use.” He argued that Porter is wrong in saying that every unit of energy is being used, citing market reports that show negative energy prices or curtailed energy that has “no economically productive use.”
- He pointed readers to initiatives led by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, organization that operates most of Texas’ electrical grid with an excess supply. In a presentation he gave at the Texas Blockchain Summit last year, he said that Bitcoin mining can improve the economics of renewable energy projects.
Survey: More than a quarter of U.S. millennials plan to use crypto to fund retirement
- According to a recent survey published by Investopedia, 28% of the U.S. millennials polled said they expect to use cryptocurrency to support themselves in retirement — a figure that was higher than those who said they would use savings (25%) and stock investments (27%) to fund their retirement. Meanwhile, 20% of Gen X and 17% of Gen Z respondents said the same. The survey, conducted in the spirit of Financial Literacy Month, was administered to 4,000 U.S. adults ages 18 to 76.
- In other fields, approximately 50% of respondents of all ages rated their financial knowledge in consumption, paying taxes, savings, debt management and insurance management as “advanced.” However, only 27% of those surveyed said that they understood a lot regarding cryptocurrencies, the lowest score among the eight concepts listed in the questionnaire.
- Nevertheless, a significant portion of millennials (41%) said they had advanced knowledge of digital assets, followed by Gen X and Gen Z, at 30% and 29%, respectively, and finally, baby boomers at 8%.
- According to the report, the younger the participants, the lower their expected median retirement age. While most unretired baby boomers plan to stop working at 68, most Gen Z surveyed wish to retire at 57. To combat financial illiteracy in the country, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has recently launched a new initiative to raise awareness of the risks involved in investing in digital assets.
US lawmakers introduce companion bill to ‘mitigate risks’ from El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law
- Two members of the House of Representatives have introduced legislation aimed at mitigating the risks to the United States financial system due to El Salvador adopting Bitcoin (BTC) as legal currency.
- In a Monday announcement, California Representative Norma Torres and Arkansas Representative Rick Crawford proposed legislation that would direct the State Department to create a plan to mitigate the potential risks to the U.S. financial system based on an analysis of the risks to El Salvador’s “cybersecurity, economic stability and democratic governance” following the country’s recognition of Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender in September 2021. The Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador Act is a companion bill to bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate in February.
- The Senate bill aimed to have the Secretary of State as well as federal department and agency heads report to Congress within 60 days on a plan to “mitigate any potential risk to the United States financial system posed by the adoption of a cryptocurrency as legal tender” in El Salvador and other countries that accept the U.S. dollar — seemingly including Ecuador, Micronesia, Palau, East Timor, Zimbabwe and the Marshall Islands. Torres cited the International Monetary Fund’s reports that the use of Bitcoin as legal tender carried “large risks” related to financial stability, financial integrity and consumer protection.
Biggest future BTC whale explains why Bitcoin was chosen for ‘decentralized Forex reserve’
- Terra has made waves inside and outside the crypto community in recent weeks thanks to its massive Bitcoin buys.
- Currently at just over 30,000 BTC, the reserves of Terra nonprofit the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) are due to expand to the equivalent of $10 billion.
- In his latest comments, however, Kwon went even further, saying that as long as UST is minted, Terra will keep buying BTC to back it.
- “One important thing to remember about what we‘re going here is that this is not a corporate treasury decision in the sense that I am not buying Bitcoin,” he told Bloomberg TV.
- “The easy way to understand this is that we‘re using Bitcoin to create a decentralized Forex reserve for the Terra stablecoin,” he summarized.
