Last Week’s Top 5 in DeFi/NFT News — February 14, 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.

LooksRare token drops as rewards drops — The Defiant

• In the last 30 days, LooksRare produced $307M in protocol revenue vs. $110M at OpenSea.
• LooksRare launched with an airdrop of its LOOKS token to past OpenSea users, and it has been growth hacking marketshare ever since by giving more LOOKS to anyone who makes a trade on the platform (also known as liquidity mining). Though much of that volume has come from wash trading done to boost LOOKS rewards.
• LOOKS currently trades at $2.45. Its high point so far was $7.07 on Jan. 20, according to CoinMarketCap. For context, daily rewards in LOOKS are worth roughly as much as trading revenue.
• LooksRare launched on Jan. 10. By the next day, it was already bringing in more protocol revenue than OpenSea, according to TokenTerminal data. Daily LOOKS rewards will dropped in half after the platform has been live for 30 days. The trading volume for
• OpenSea charges 2.5% for every trade, which goes to the company. LooksRare charges a 2% fee, and it looks to people who have staked LOOKS.

• LooksRare is far behind with hourly users. On Feb 13, LooksRare had 60–70 hourly users vs 4000–5000 on OpenSea.

Sources: 1. https://thedefiant.io/looksrare-opensea-protocol-revenue/
2. https://dune.xyz/hildobby/LooksRare-VS-OpenSea

Introducing Lens Protocol by Aave team

• Lens Protocol is a new social media effort from the team at Aave, the money market that first launched on Ethereum.
• “The purpose of the Lens Protocol is to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, decentralized social graph.” says the announcement.
• The Lens Protocol is a permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.

• In other words, the Lens Protocol is a Web3, smart contracts-based social graph on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain designed to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, user-owned social graph.
• Since users own their data, they can bring it to any application built on top of Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer need to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the whims of an individual platform’s algorithms and policies.
• Additionally, each application using the Lens Protocol benefits the whole ecosystem, turning the zero-sum game into a collaborative one. Developers can design meaningful social experiences without needing to turn to feedback mechanisms to lock in a user’s attention.

Key features

• 👤 Profile NFTs — This is the main primitive of the Lens Protocol. Composable, non-custodial, and permissionless, these dynamic NFTs contain the history of all posts, mirrors, comments, and other content you generate.
• 👥 Follow NFT — When you follow someone, you’re granted a follow NFT. Each of these NFTs has a unique token ID that comes with innate rarity & utility.
• 📝 Publication — Pictures, music, videos, a great poetic work of art — whatever masterpiece you want to create and share, you can with a publication.
• 💚 Collect — Like what you see? Like what you see? You can collect publications from people you follow. A new form of self-expression, curate your collection, and show off what you love.
• 🔄 Mirror — Some things are too good to keep to yourself. Re-share a post using the mirror feature!

Read more: https://mirror.xyz/lensprotocol.eth/YG9iFIs2emVFRtj3JqY95Dk6opNqM0aC9YoM-Ppp5as

Scramble for Spots on Lucrative NFT Whitelists Sparks Grind-to-Earn Trend — The Defiant

• Getting on the whitelist for a hyped NFT drop can mean tens of thousands of dollars in profits.
• A search for “NFT whitelist” on popular freelancing website UpWork shows over 1,000 job postings offering $3-$5 an hour. Here’s an example.

• Whitelists are lists of blockchain addresses that are given early access to an NFT mint, sometimes at discounted prices.
• NFT projects want to show that their Discords are vibrant and filled with active community members, which helps them to attract and retain new members. A popular method is to whitelist users based on their Discord rank, which increases with the number of messages posted.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/nft-whitelists-outsource/

Silicon Valley is no longer the edgy tech frontier as workers flee Google and Amazon for crypto and Web3 startups, recruiters say — Business Insider

• Eight tech recruiters told Insider that they’re seeing a significant trend of high-profile executives and developers leaving established firms to cryptocurrency and other decentralized tech ventures as the once-fringe startups elbow their way to the forefront of the industry.

“We are unquestionably seeing some of the best and brightest of Silicon Valley, or tech, move over to crypto,” Scott Fletcher, whose firm Intersection Growth Partners has pulled several “very senior folks” out from Amazon, Meta, and Google, told Insider.

• The former CMO of Meta’s digital wallet project, Novi, took the same position at the blockchain-focused payments company Circle in January; the former GM of Amazon’s AWS Edge Services is now CTO of Gemini, and Lyft’s former CFO and Uber’s ex-director of corporate development have joined OpenSea.
• Then there’s Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s former SVP of policy and comms, leaving for a crypto VC fund, while YouTube’s former head of gaming left for Polygon Studios, which caters to Web3 developers. The list goes on and on.
• “Coinbase, in my view, was really the first one to get some very big hires from places like Google and LinkedIn and Lyft,” Zakupowsky said. “And now you’re seeing some very former senior people at the Ubers and Amazons and Pinterests and Atlassians and SpaceXs that have jumped into this, and they’re going to be recruiting from their networks.”
• That’s largely because people want to work on what is most exciting in technology, recruiters said. Right now, that’s crypto and Web3. With a scarcity of engineers focused on the space, it’ll likely also pay off to take the risk and get in early.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-workers-leaving-for-crypto-web3-startups-silicon-valley-recruiters-2022-2?r=US&IR=T

Anchor reserves fall to 13.8m — Spenser Noon

• Anchor is a protocol with $9.5B in TVL and is the most popular destination for Terra’s native stablecoin, $UST (explore $UST here). 38% of outstanding UST supply is currently held in Anchor, where lenders are earning a yield of 19.5% APR on their deposits.
• Anchor’s reserves have been dwindling, leading to a recent recapitalization. For the past 180 days, Flipside community analysts butcherbrainard, anduril, and jxboi have analyzed reserve dynamics. The decline began in December and was exacerbated by a declining market and the popularity of Abracadabra’s Degenbox.

• Anchor uses reserves and income from borrowers to pay Anchor Earn rewards. As this imbalance grew, Anchor’s ability to maintain ~20% yield came into question. If the reserves go to zero, Flipside analyst jxboi found that yield would fall to ~7.4% APY — still a fairly competitive rate for stablecoins.

• Net deposits saw a downtick with the recent Wonderland drama, but Anchor still attracts significant liquidity, leaving it with options including increasing reserves, raising max LTV for borrowers (they did both recently), addressing DegenBox, and adjusting reward mechanisms.

Source: https://ournetwork.substack.com/p/ournetwork-issue-108?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta