Last Week’s Top 5 in DeFi/NFT News — April 11, 2022

Weekly DeFi/NFT news is a collection of major weekly events/announcements brought from the most trustworthy data sources, such as The Defiant, Spencer Noon, Week in Ethereum News etc. with comments and extra insight from the Bulldax DeFi labs.

DeFi Kingdoms Goes Live On Avalanche Subnet — The Defiant

• DeFi Kingdoms (DFK), which originated on the Harmony One blockchain, has deployed to an Avalanche subnet, a scaling solution that involves “a dynamic set of validators working together to achieve consensus on the state of a set of blockchains.”
• Synapse, a bridge protocol, has seen volumes surge as users move assets to DFK’s new subnet. Prior to Mar. 31, Synapse had never seen volumes top $157M. After DFK’s subnet launch, it more than doubled to a record $330M and accounted for 82.5% of the total bridging volume on Synapse.

• DFK’s iteration on Avalanche is called Crystalvale and will get its own token, called CRYSTAL, according to the GameFi’s project’s Medium blog. DFK already has a JEWEL token which can be bridged over to the Avalanche subnet to be staked and earn CRYSTAL when paired with xJEWEL, a staked version of the token which grants its holder access to fees and governance rights.
• While the CRYSTAL token will have use cases like purchasing in-game NFTs and paying for other in-game actions, JEWEL will be used to pay gas fees on the new subnet chain, according to DFK’s Medium.
• With the launch, the DFK has made good on its Dec. 6 promise to ship Crystalvale. Major players are taking notice — Coinbase Wallet announced an integration with the new Avalanche-based iteration of DeFi Kindgoms on Mar. 30, in anticipation of the subnet’s launch.

• Crypto influencer critized the new token issuance and farming as ponzi which drives the demand for JEWEL in another token for promising high APY, which is 95% locked.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/dfk-crystalvale-avalanche/

Most of trading on LooksRare LOOKS like wash trading — CoinTelegraph

• The second biggest NFT marketplace by transaction volume LooksRare looks as if it‘s still generating most of its volume through wash trading.
• Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that NFT tracker CryptoSlam data shows that about $18 billion, or 95% of the total trading volume on the platform is from wash trading.
• Wash trading is when the operators or users of a trading platform create a series of back-and-forth trades in order to inflate seemingly organic trading volume. In the case of LooksRare, traders are incentivized to wash trade due to the platform’s rewards structure.
• Investors who stake tokens on LooksRare are rewarded with LOOKS tokens and wrapped Ether (wETH) proportional to the amount of transaction volume in the marketplace. The high volume of wash trading appears to be masking a drop off in the overall NFT market. Dune Analytics data shows that leading NFT marketplace OpenSea’s volume has been dropping every month since January.
• DappRader senior analyst Pedro Herrera said that organic trading was slowly starting to rise on LooksRare, however.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/nifty-news-solana-nft-sales-pass-1-6b-wash-trading-on-looksrare-and-more

Near Protocol is set to launch a stablecoin called USN — The Block

• Near Protocol is bringing out its own stablecoin called USN, The Block has learned, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

NEAR is up 13.4% in the last 14 days while the market was down.

• According to one source, the stablecoin is on the way but no timeline has been shared internally so far.
• Rumors surrounding the stablecoin first surfaced when Zoran Kole, founder of Zorax Capital, claimed in a Substack post that Near Protocol was launching a stablecoin that will offer 20% yield.
• Sleuths on Twitter further noticed that a testnet version of Ref Finance — the second-largest decentralized exchange on Near — showed the stablecoin. The user interface on Ref Finance’s testnet website displays USN under its stableswap section along with other popular stablecoins like USDC, USDT and DAI. This implied that the stablecoin was being tested out, but was not necessarily indicative of the official team.
• Near Protocol is a scalable blockchain that recently raised $350 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global, with participation from Republic Capital, Hashed, FTX Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, and others.

Source: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/141274/near-protocol-is-set-to-launch-a-stablecoin-called-usn-source

Stealth NFT Drop Triggers Record ETH Burn — The Defiant

• On April 5, Ultra Sound Money, an Ethereum network data aggregator, reported that the number of Ether burned within a single block hit record levels twice. Two separate blocks destroyed more than 106 ETH.
• The record-breaking blocks have been attributed to a stealthy NFT drop from social media influencer and entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuck.
• Vaynerchuck reportedly teased an NFT drop called VaynerSports Pass (VSP) drop to his VeeFriends blog before deleting the post. Primary sales for the VSP NFTs were priced at 0.155 ETH plus gas.
• Tokenholders will receive access to Vaynerchuck’s network of athletes and NFT collectibles, providing access to members-only streams, tickets to live sporting events, and whitelisting for future NFT drops from the influencer. With 15,500 tokens in the collection, Vaynerchuck would have netted close to $10M from the drop.

• Screenshots captured at the time of the drop indicate it drove gas prices up to a whopping 4,000 gwei per transaction.

• The spike in activity comes after Ethereum’s burn rate was in a steady decline since posting all-time highs in January. While the weekly burn was destroying an average of 12 ETH per minute in mid-January, just 2.5 Ether was being removed from supply every minute as of late March — the lowest level it had ever been since EIP-1559 was implemented.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/ethereum-record-burn-nft-drop/

Azuki floor price increases by >250% MoM — Spenser Noon

• Azuki floor price increased from just over 7 ETH to just under 27 ETH in the past 30 days. Volume this past week rivaled Jan/Feb peaks. Volumes and floor price have been increasing steadily since mid-March, which tracks promotion activity and a podcast leading up to the garden party.

• There are 10k Azukis. ~41% of these are held one-per-wallet. There is a sharp drop off in the number of Azuki’s held by the average owner: 62% of the supply is owned by wallets holding 3 or fewer Azukis. There are a couple of owners with 70+ Azukis. This distribution has not changed much since mid-January.

• Certain traits trade at a premium (such as spirits, elementals, golden accessories, etc). The majority of listings and trades have been on OpenSea. Sell order liquidity is deepest around the 75th percentile of price, so listings trend higher than sale prices. ~10% of supply is listed on OpenSea or LooksRare.

Source: https://ournetwork.substack.com/p/ournetwork-issue-116