Weekly DeFi/NFT News — November 2, 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.

Nigeria becomes first African nation to roll out digital currency — Al Jazeera

Nigeria becomes first African nation to roll out digital currency

• “Nigeria has become the first country in Africa, and one of the first in the world to introduce a digital currency to her citizens,” President Muhammadu Buhari said in televised speech at the launch in Abuja, the capital.
• “The adoption of the central bank digital currency and its underlying technology, called blockchain, can increase Nigeria’s gross domestic product by $29 billion over the next 10 years.”
• The issuance of the digital currency, called the eNaira, comes after the central bank earlier in February outlawed banks and financial institutions from transacting or operating in cryptocurrencies as they posed a threat to the financial system.
• Since the launch of the eNaira platform, it’s received more than 2.5 million daily visits, with 33 banks integrated on the platform, 500 million c ($1.2 million) successfully minted and more than 2,000 customers onboarded, central bank Governor Godwin Emefiele said at the launch.
• “The eNaira and the physical naira will have the same value and will always exchange at one naira to one eNaira,” Emefiele said.
• Nigeria joins the Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank in being among the first jurisdictions in the world to roll out national digital currencies. China launched a pilot version of its “digital renminbi” earlier this year

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/10/25/nigeria-becomes-first-african-nation-to-roll-out-digital-money

First tokenized lawsuit fund goes live on Republic, will distribute on Avalanche — The Block Crypto

• The “initial litigation offering,” or ILO takes its inspiration from initial coin offerings, but instead opens up retail investment in litigation finance, a primarily private field that some expect to reach $20 billion in revenue in a matter of years.
• The plaintiff says that Kern County’s Sheriff Department destroyed Apothio’s crop land in 2019, with officials alleging that the Apothio’s hemp crop had exceeded its legal THC limits. The suit seeks up to $1 billion in damages.
• The ILO, which begins its sale today, seeks $5 million in investment from retail users on Republic’s platform, which is known for tokenizing previously inaccessible investments for such users. Users will have to create Avalanche wallets to receive the tokens, which Ava Labs is helping to program.
• A core of many of Republic’s offerings involves exemption from full SEC registration. This ILO is operating under the crowdfunding exemption, which allows public investment up to a fairly low funding threshold.
• If the court dismisses the lawsuit, investors get 80% of their money back. Beyond that point, they either lose their investment if the plaintiffs lose the case, or they get between 2x and 3.5x returns, depending on the timeline of a settlement or judgment.

Source: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/122044/first-tokenized-lawsuit-fund-goes-live-on-republic-will-distribute-on-avalanche

DeFi 2.0 Pionner OlympusDAO’s Success Inspires Dozens of Forks — The Defiant

• OlympusDAO’s protocol-owned liquidity model has been a catalyst for the DeFi 2.0 movement, and its success is inspiring copycats. At a $4B market cap, the project’s OHM token has vaulted into the 50th slot among digital assets as of Oct. 25 after going up over 200% in the last 30 days, according to Coingecko.
• Leading the pack of forks in terms of market cap is Wonderland, whose TIME token has gained over 340% in market cap the last 30 days. That has landed it in the 131st spot in terms of market cap among all digital assets as of Oct. 26.

• Wonderland is on the Avalanche blockchain and is basically a one-to-one fork of Olympus, a contributor to OlympusDAO who wished to remain anonymous told The Defiant.
• Some, like Ryan Watkins, senior research analyst at Messari, the data and research company, doubt any of the forks have a real purpose.
• “OlympusDAO forks don’t make any sense to me,” the analyst said on Twitter. “The difference is about means and ends. OlympusDAO accumulates assets to bootstrap a new currency — OHM is the end.”

Source: https://thedefiant.io/olympusdao-forks/

Paradigm Bets on a Cross-Chain Future With $21M Round for Cosmos’ Osmosis DEX — The Defiant

• Osmosis, a decentralized exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem, today announced a $21M sale of tokens from the Osmosis Foundation treasury, in a round led by Paradigm. Other investors included Robert Leshner’s scout fund, Robot Ventures, Nascent, Ethereal, Figment and Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon.

• Paradigm, the fund led by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, is making its first automated market maker (AMM) investment outside of Ethereum in Osmosis, a DEX on Cosmos that very much has that cross-chain orientation in its DNA.
• This is an important moment of validation for the Cosmos ecosystem, which has been pushing the idea of interoperable blockchains since long before it became fashionable recently, as blue chip apps port themselves to every Layer-1 with a liquidity mining program.

How does it work?

• Like most Cosmos applications, Osmosis runs on its own blockchain, an application specific chain (or appchain), following the Cosmos philosophy that every use case should have its own sovereign blockchain.
• “We’re making a bet on vertical integrations here. When you build a DEX on another chain, you are limited to what it says you can do. With Osmosis, not only do we control the application, but we control the blockchain itself,” Sunnny Aggarwal, a co-founder of Osmosis Labs, told The Defiant in an interview. “If you want the best UX for trading, I think Osmosis will provide that best experience.”
• AMMs are particularly important for Cosmos, because getting Cosmos tokens added to centralized exchanges is a little trickier than adding ERC-20 tokens, Aggarwal explained in an interview. Precisely because each Cosmos application has its own appchain, it requires more developer work by an exchange.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/paradigm-backs-cosmos-dex-osmosis/

CREAM Finance Exploited for $130M in DeFi’s Third-Largest Hack — The Defiant

• The attack would be the third-largest in DeFi according to Rekt. It may be the latest example of hackers using flash loans (loans that are executed without the need of collateral as long as they’re paid back in one blockchain block) to exploit every last loophole they can find in the open source code across decentralized finance.

• Peckshield tweeted that the attacker had made a $117M gain on the exploit. According to data from the Defiant Terminal, CREAM v1 had $302M in it before the breach.
• According to the CREAM app, there is hardly anything left inside the v1 vaults. The app shows a little under 1,000 USDT, roughly 8,000 USDC, 622 YCRV and 351 CREAM. The ETH, YFI, LINK and other notable tokens all show zero balances.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/cream-finance-third-largest-exploit/

Anubis DAO Descends Into the Underworld After $60M Exploit — The Defiant

• Anubis DAO, a recently launched fork of Olympus DAO, is engulfed in chaos after 13.6K ETH ($60M) was drained from the protocol today.
• Launched on Oct. 28, the project aimed to capture the current “dog-coin” craze with its branding. Anubis was an ancient Egyptian deity represented as a canine-headed man. And the plan was to combine the liquidity bonding mechanism popularized by Olympus with a treasury that would consist of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens.
• The sale started on Oct. 28 and attracted substantial interest from investors, who contributed $60M worth of ETH in under 24 hours.
• With just hours left until the sale closed, 13,597 ETH was removed from the token sale pool and sent to this address. ANKH tokens are now essentially worthless since liquidity was also withdrawn from the ANKH/ETH pool, leaving investors with no way out.
• Crypto Twitter was quickly on the scene with some users pointing to a rug-pull, as the Twitter account connected with the suspect’s address was deleted shortly after the funds were drained.

• However, the purported owner of the account has since tweeted using an alternate account, where they shared a screenshot of an email they claim contained a malicious PDF attachment.

• By opening the attachment, the user in question may have compromised his private keys, allowing the exploiter to access the funds raised in the token sale, according to the tweet.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/anubis-dao-60m-exploit/

Abracadabra aiming to overtake DAI

• Abracadabra money is a lending protocol allowing users to borrow a stablecoin (MIM) with interest bearing assets, the value proposition being you can unlock liquidity from yield-baring assets and leverage positions for further yield.
• The MIM market has surpassed $2.3B and is on track to overtake Terra’s UST. Total value locked in Abracadabra is at ATH ($4B) — a 4x increase over October — 23% of MakerDAO’s TVL. Overall this would indicate a clear PMF for yield bearing asset-based lending protocols.

• MIM peg mechanics rely on arbitrage. The MIM has been able to relatively maintain its peg since inception despite a 3x in its monetary supply over just 1 month. MIM has a slightly higher peg standard deviation (0.0079) than its peers but this is still impressive given the network is in its infancy.
• SPELL holders can stake to receive 75% of protocol fees. There are now over 7K sSPELL holders vs. 10K SPELL holders with this ratio increasing — a higher proportion of SPELL holders are now staking. This has been driven by the higher protocol fees which totaled $1.7M over the past week (ETH only).

Source: Spencer Noon Newsletter Issue 95