The DefiDollar Newsletter #02
The Ethereum chain split and musings on Loot
A fork in the road
Ethereum faced an unexpected late last month, when certain nodes failed to upgrade to the latest patch. Trouble began last month when developers discovered a security flaw, and released an update, called “Hades Gamma”, to overcome it. However, a significant number of nodes, did not upgrade, and hence the chain split .
Implications
As the news spread about the split, people started upgrading their nodes to the latest version, indicating that the split was largely due to poor communication regarding the update, and not over philosophical differences, such as those that caused the famous Ethereum Classic fork. As of the time of publishing, nearly 86% of the nodes have updated to the latest version. You can check out the latest updates on the nodes here: https://www.ethernodes.org/client/geth
For the loot, honey, for the loot
The cryptoverse has been abuzz about the Loot project for the past few weeks. It is a completely new take on project development powered by NFTs that brings about lots of interesting potential applications.
On the surface, it is so barebones as to be contemptible. It is billed as “completely randomised adventure gear”, each bag full of items such as the Divine Robe of Enlightenment, or the Chronicle of the Twins. Heck, the creators haven’t created beautiful artwork or built in some stats and lore for the items.
It is just how it looks — A wall of text! But when you dig a little deeper, you realise the absolute genius of the idea beneath.
Like most things in crypto, the community can now come together to make what they will of the project. The community builds the lore, the community creates the artwork, and the community decides the value of the items. And they are already doing that.
A cynic may argue that intrinsically these items are just text on a screen and practically worthless. Be that as it may, they are now selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So why should one be excited about the Loot ? As someone who grew on a steady sustenance of RPGs during my teenage years, the parallels are unmissable. Building shared worlds on top of trade-able reference points is a very powerful idea. Remember the heady days of World of Warcraft in the late 2000s? Now imagine an open marketplace where you can trade your items, and oh, those items can be plugged into multiple storylines within the metaverse — all subject to the flavour of development that happens centred around Loot.
We’ve seen people starting to unbundle their bags and trade individual items.
I’ll end this post with a confession. Until last week, I was one of those who believed that NFTs were largely a fad. While the potential remained enormous, I believed that the current mania of artists selling digital artwork would soon fade away into obscurity. Loot made me think on this a lot more and changed my perspective. With a bottoms-up approach and community focus — Loot has made me realize how drastic a shift this is from the status quo.
Marvel, Star Wars and Disney are billion dollar franchises not because they show colourful pixels on screen, but because they tell stories that resonate. Nike and Adidas don’t just make overpriced shoes, they inspire you to achieve your best. Apple doesn’t just sell you expensive and slightly outdated tech, they embolden you to be different.
With Loot, crypto now has another degree of freedom to create its own experiences, stories and art. And stories and art builds culture. Culture creates civilisation. This is who we are.
DefiDollar is a Multi-Chain DeFi Protocol Lab. We currently have 3 products live — DUSD, ibBTC, and Opeth.
You can learn more about us here.
Last month, we launched Vault 2 for $DFD staking, and we are pleased to see that over 7.1 million $DFD has already locked into v2, and is earning fees in form of ibBTC. This staking mechanics ensures a healthy token ecosystem and rewards the most ardent supporters of DefiDollar.
You can stake your $DFD at https://app.dusd.finance/staking
