Weekly DeFi/NFT News — December 13, 2021

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.

Chainalysis Report Shows Tiny Minority of OpenSea Users Scoop Up Most NFT Profits — The Defiant

• Only 5% of OpenSea users are scooping up the bulk of the profits in secondary trades executed on the NFT platform, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain intelligence firm.
• That small minority of users are raking in 80% of profitable trades, Chainalysis says in its 2021 NFT Market Report. Two-thirds of the secondary transactions on OpenSea were profitable. “20% of user addresses on OpenSea account for 80% of secondary NFT sales, while just 5% of all addresses account for 80% of profits made on secondary sales,” the authors wrote.

• The report also found that the NFT market remains robust. At the end of October, 81% of NFT transactions were valued at less than $10K, down from 94% at the start of March. Roughly 500 NFT transactions worth $100K or greater are executed each week.

• Chainalysis said that 250 NFT collections account for eight out of every 10 secondary sales.
• Chainalysis estimated that whitelisted NFT minters, who earn special access to assets, were profitable in three quarters of the transactions on OpenSea, with more than half of the trades pocketing returns of 100%.

• By contrast, 71.5% of transactions involving non-whitelisted NFT mints resulted in a loss on the platform.

Source:
1. https://thedefiant.io/nfts-investors-profits-opensea-whitelisted/
2. https://go.chainalysis.com/nft-market-report.html

Ubisoft Becomes First Major Gaming Company to Launch In-Game NFTs on Tezos — Decrypt.

• On Dec 8, the publisher behind Assassin’s Creed and Just Dance revealed Ubisoft Quartz, a platform that lets players earn and purchase in-game items that are tokenized as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain.
• Quartz will launch first in the PC version of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the latest online game in the long-running tactical shooter series.
• Ghost Recon Breakpoint players who have reached XP level 5 in the game can access the NFT drops. Ubisoft’s release says that players must be at least 18 years old to create a Tezos wallet for use with the game.
• Ubisoft is referring to its NFT drops as “Digits” and plans to release free NFTs for early adopters on December 9, 12, and 15, with further drops planned for 2022. An infographic shows items such as weapon skins and unique armor and apparel, along with a message that teases future initiatives: “This is just the beginning…”

• Much of Ubisoft’s announcement today highlights the difference in environmental impact between the proof-of-stake Tezos blockchain and the energy-intensive Bitcoin.

• Tezos claims that a single transaction on its network uses “more than 2 million times less energy” than Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency.

Source: https://decrypt.co/87752/ubisoft-first-major-gaming-company-launch-in-game-nfts

Enso Finance Plans Vampire Attack on Six Major Index Projects — The Defiant

• Enso Finance, a social trading platform, is planning a vampire attack on six major index products in the crypto space.
• Enso’s intended victims are Index Coop, Tokensets, PieDAO, dHEDGE, Powerpool, and Indexed. The attack began on Dec. 9, according to a teaser video released on the protocol’s Twitter.

• There’s $1.2B worth of index tokens which users could potentially migrate, Connor Howe, Enso’s co-founder, told The Defiant.
• The attack boils down to Enso offering its ENSO tokens to users who deposit the index tokens of the six protocols as rewards for users migrating. ENSO will be used for staking, governance, protocol fees, and aspects of gamification.

A diagram of the attack.

• after users stake the index tokens for three weeks, Enso will burn them. The protocol will then withdraw the index’s underlying assets and put them into an essentially identical product, while also adding ENSO rewards on top as well as NFTs.
• For example, Enso would burn DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), produced by Index Coop, and wrap the 18 tokens which make up the index into something called EnsoDPI. So a user enters the attack with DPI and exits with EnsoDPI, ENSO tokens, and also NFTs.

• Enso is a social trading platform. “Create social strategies for yield farming, indexes and arbitrary calls as a person, community, or DAO.”

Source: https://thedefiant.io/enso-finance-plans-vampire-attack-on-six-major-index-projects/

EOS community halts payments worth $250 million in EOS to Block.one and Brock Pierce — The Block

• The EOS community elected to stop ongoing payments to Block.one — the company that originally designed the network — over claims that it is no longer acting in the network’s best interests.
• Those running have stopped the issuance of 67 million EOS ($250 million) that was set to be distributed over the next six to seven years.

“Through a super majority consensus, the EOS network has taken its future in its own hands by voting to fire Block.one and stop vesting tokens to them. This begins a new era for EOS and highlights the power of the blockchain to enable a community to stand up against corporate interests that don’t align with theirs,” said Yves La Rose, leader of the EOS Network Foundation.

• Over the following years, the EOS community has been somewhat disappointed by Block.one’s commitment to the EOS blockchain, in terms of providing use-cases for it, according to the EOS Network Foundation (ENF).
• While it did a big reveal for a social media platform called Voice, it later turned out that it wouldn’t run on EOS (and largely turned into an NFT platform anyway).
• Block.one then announced plans to build a decentralized exchange called Bullish — but this wasn’t to run on EOS either.
• “ EOS had been let down by Block.one and needed to find a new way forward.” — Told La Rose running EOS members and block producers called the ENF.

Source: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/126801/eos-community-halts-payments-worth-250-million-in-eos-to-block-one-and-brock-pierce

Sudoswap to Test a DEX for Swapping NFTs — The Defiant

• In a plan that may advance the idea that NFTs are tradable assets, Sudoswap, a marketplace for nonfungible tokens, plans to launch an automated market maker (AMM)-based decentralized exchange for swapping NFTs.

• The design for the AMM was first articulated in an August blog post from 0xmons, where the developer described providing a means for the “financialization” of NFTs without relying on fractionalization through “LSSVM” pools
• The AMM will host “many individual pools of NFTs,” with each pool managed by a single liquidity provider. Individual pools are set up to function in three modes, allowing liquidity providers to choose whether they wish to operate “sell-only” pools, “buy-only” pools, or pools supporting both purchases and sales.
• Buy-only pools contain just ETH and exclusively offer quotes to purchase NFTs for Ether, while sell-only pools solely hold NFTs and offer quotes for their sale in exchange for ETH. Pools offering both NFT sales and purchases hold both assets.
• Traders can select a single pool to trade against, or use an aggregator to trade across multiple pools. Price quotes are created using simple, linear, or exponential bonding curves, depending on if a pool is buy-only, sell-only, or both.
• Liquidity providers can also use automated orders to trade NFTs at specific price ranges and take advantage of price spreads.
• Sudoswap describes its protocol as reducing slippage and increasing the overall efficiency of NFT markets.
• Sudoswap expects its exchange will predominantly be used to trade floor NFTs — tokens that are more common and do not possess unique characteristics.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/sudoswap-nft-swaps-dex-amm/