defi

Crypto’s Barren Wasteland: A Look at What’s Left of Terra’s Defi and Token Ruins

21/05/2022 by Idelto Editor

Following the Terra blockchain fallout and the great UST de-pegging event, the Terra network ecosystem is now a wasteland of almost worthless tokens and protocols. While both UST and LUNA were top ten crypto market cap contenders, Terra’s decentralized finance (defi) presence was second to Ethereum in terms of total value locked. Today, the remaining Terra-based token holders and defi protocol operators seem to be waiting for a miracle.

Terra’s Token Economy Has Lost 96% of Its Value

There’s been an abundance of news surrounding the Terra blockchain fiasco and how the team handled the terrausd (UST) implosion. A lot of people know that UST and Terra’s native token LUNA have lost considerable value over the last two weeks. UST has had a 24-hour price range between $0.068 to $0.054 per unit, which is a lot less than the $1 parity it held before the fallout.

LUNA too is down a great deal as it was trading for $72 per coin on May 7, and is now down 99.999849% at $0.00010853 per LUNA. But Terra also had a whole ecosystem of tokens like ANC, MIR, ASTRO, MARS, and more.

Anchor (ANC) the governance token for the defi protocol is down 96% over the past two weeks, and Astroport’s ASTRO token is down 98%. Mirror Protocol’s MIR lost 80.4% while Pylon Protocol’s MINE has shed 96.9% in the last 14 days.

Similarly, Mars Protocol (MARS) has lost 97.6% and the Loop Finance token LOOP is down 98.3% over the past two weeks. Statistics show on March 7, 2022, the Terra ecosystem of tokens was worth $44 billion and today its down 96.70% to $1.45 billion.

From the 2nd Largest in Defi to the 33rd — Terra’s Defi Presence Has Been Eradicated

Terra’s presence in decentralized finance was once very large as it held the second-largest total value locked (TVL) out of all the blockchains in existence. On April 5, 2022, Terra’s TVL in defi was $31.21 billion and today, it’s down to $118.81 million.

Every single Terra defi protocol has suffered from 90-99% losses in terms of TVL per protocol. The applications are ghost towns and block explorers like finder.terra.money show extremely low activity for every Terra defi protocol.

The same can be said for applications like Terra Name Service (TNS) and non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces like Random Earth, Knowhere, Talis, Luart, Curio, and One Planet. While name service domains on TNS were once $16 per name, they now cost $0.91 to register a name.

As far as NFT marketplaces built on Terra, some markets are still selling NFTs that were once quite expensive, but now the tokens are selling for bottom-of-the-barrel prices. Some NFT collectors removed their listings and are possibly waiting for a Terra re-birth. Most Terra NFT marketplaces are ghost towns in terms of activity.

The Hope for Terra’s Rebirth

A revival is likely the hope for many Terra community members, as the project’s founder Do Kwon and many other Terra supporters have put forth a revival plan to resurrect Terra from the ashes. The plan is to fork the chain at a snapshot before the UST de-pegging event and airdrop new tokens to UST and LUNA holders.

Presently, the rebirth proposal vote has four more days but the number of “yes” votes has passed the threshold at 62%. 21.10% have abstained from voting, 0.42% have voted “no,” and 16.48% voted “no with veto.”

What do you think about what’s left of the Terra blockchain ecosystem? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Coinbase Leads Users Astray By Recommending Everything Besides Bitcoin

21/05/2022 by Idelto Editor

Coinbase capitalizes on the altcoin craze to profit off users. Their “Top 10 Picks” omits bitcoin and everything else on the list has performed poorly.

The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1212: “Save a friend, tell them to get out of the Coinbase casino.” Sign up for the newsletter here.

You’ll often hear “Bitcoin maximalists” derided for being anti-free market when cautioning newcomers to stay away from altcoins and the exchanges that push them. Those snake oil salesmen who hiss at Bitcoiners often say that they are simply afraid of competition and don’t want to admit that “Bitcoin has stagnated” and “the devs have gone elsewhere.” In reality, many Bitcoiners warn newcomers to stay away from shitcoins and the casinos that list them for trading because they have seen hoards of people led to slaughter by the siren calls of opportunists who care not about human freedom, sound money or decentralization, but being able to make as much money as possible. No matter how unethically it is acquired.

I highly recommend you freaks — especially any of you who have fallen prey to the siren calls of “a better Bitcoin” — to read through this thread from Sam Callahan, which dives into the overtly predatory tactics of Coinbase and their penchant for listing pre-mined altcoins that are utter trash and get auto-dumped on an unsuspecting retail market. Not only that, but Coinbase tends to hide bitcoin deep in the app so their customers overlook it or simply never find it. They are much more incentivized to siphon off fees from shitcoin trading than actually educating individuals about bitcoin and helping them acquire as much as possible.

I would call it a shame, but it’s really worse than that. It’s quite disgusting actually and Coinbase and its backers should be utterly ashamed of themselves for engaging in this type of bucket shop activity. A once somewhat respectable brand has completely turned itself into a contemptible bad actor that should be avoided at all costs.

Save yourself, your family and friends. Get your bitcoin off Coinbase and advise your network to do the same.

Crypto Custody Firm Fireblocks Launches Web3 Services Suite

20/05/2022 by Idelto Editor

Fireblocks, a crypto custody service provider, is expanding its services with the launch of an institutional suite of Web3 services. This suite will allow customers to leverage liquidity from different exchanges, and mint NFTs. The service, which has already onboarded several names in the industry, also includes gaming asset management for blockchain games on Ethereum and other smart contracts-enabled blockchains.

Fireblocks Debuts Web3 Services Offering

Fireblocks, a cryptocurrency custody company, is seeking to expand its suite of services to onboard different kinds of customers. The company announced the release of its new Web3 suite, which will offer new capabilities to customers in the decentralized finance, NFT, and blockchain gaming areas. The objective of this product is to provide institutional-grade services to companies that are developing solutions in these fields.

According to reports, the company has already onboarded several companies to the service, including Animoca Brands, Stardust, MoonPay, Xternity Games, Griffin Gaming, Wirex, Celsius, and Utopia Labs. These partners and others will have access to the liquidity offered in decentralized finance exchanges and NTF markets like OpenSea, Rarible, Uniswap, and Dydx directly.

The suite had some time in development, and the company gave an early peek at these services, adding support for decentralized finance apps on top of the now-defunct Terra blockchain, that at the time was the second largest protocol in terms of assets locked. Now, the full suite offers support for these services on 35 different blockchains, including EVM and non EVM projects.

Expanding to New Fields

While the company already has a massive portfolio of customers, which includes 1,200 different institutions — having secured more than $2.5 trillion in digital assets — the release of these services aims to access a field of customers that Fireblocks would be unable to reach otherwise.

Fireblocks’ CEO and co-founder Michael Shaulov declared:

The goal is to essentially bring all the security arsenal and capabilities that we’ve built for empowering financial firms to operate with crypto to this new group of players.

The company had previously remarked on the importance of play-to-earn, one of the fields that this suite seeks to serve, for the future of the gaming industry. In a blog post published on May 4, Fireblocks stated:

The next generation of gaming will likely involve NFTs and crypto on some level – the question is when and how, not if.

What do you think about Fireblocks’ new Web3 suite of products? Tell us in the comments section below.

Billionaire Investor and Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz Addresses the Terra LUNA and UST Fallout

18/05/2022 by Idelto Editor

Billionaire Investor and Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz Addresses Terra LUNA and UST Fallout

On May 18, the billionaire investor and crypto proponent Mike Novogratz published a post about the recent Terra blockchain fallout. Novogratz and his firm Galaxy Digital were big believers in the Terra project, and the investor even got a LUNA-centric tattoo on his arm. Despite the recent events and losses, the crypto economy felt this past week, Novogratz stressed that he still firmly believes the “crypto revolution is here to stay.”

Novogratz Reflects on Terra’s Demise: ‘It’s Time to Talk About Last Week’

Just recently, Bitcoin.com News reported LUNA and UST’s implosion and the big name backers that invested in Terraform Labs. One of the investors mentioned in our report was the billionaire investor and crypto proponent Mike Novogratz. For quite some time, Novogratz and his firm Galaxy Digital were big believers in the Terra ecosystem. On January 26, 2021, Bloomberg quoted Novogratz and the investor called the Terra blockchain project one of “the canaries in the coal mines of what else is going to happen.”

Novogratz also got a LUNA-themed tattoo and said he was “officially a Lunatic.” After the UST de-pegging incident and the entire Terra ecosystem getting obliterated, Novogratz was not as talkative as he usually is on Twitter. On Wednesday, May 18, Novogratz tweeted for the first time since May 8, 2022. “After much thought, it’s time to talk about last week and, more importantly, the weeks ahead,” Novogratz said. In addition to the tweet, Novogratz left a link to a blog post that discusses the Terra fiasco in detail.

“There is no good news in what happened in markets or to the Terra ecosystem,” the investor detailed in his blog post. “In Luna and UST alone, $40bn of market value was destroyed in a very short amount of time. Both large and small investors saw profits and wealth vanish. The collapse dented confidence in crypto and [decentralized finance]. Whenever money is lost in such an abrupt fashion, people want answers. I am going to try to add some insights to the ongoing discussion.”

Novogratz then got into Galaxy’s principal investments in LUNA starting in Q4 2020, and how the team noticed that the project had “more than 1.8m users and was a top 5 finance app in South Korea that we considered had significant growth potential.” Galaxy was “intrigued” by the Terra ecosystem, and thought of it as “an example of crypto finding a real-world use case.” Then the investor noted that the global macro backdrop did a number on many risk assets this year, and he believes the “macro backdrop put pressure on Luna and the reserves held to back UST.” Novogratz added:

UST’s growth had exploded from the 18% yield offered in the Anchor protocol, which eventually overwhelmed other uses of the Terra blockchain. The downward pressure on reserve assets coupled with UST withdrawals, triggered a stress scenario akin to a ‘run on the bank.’ The reserves weren’t enough to prevent UST’s collapse.

Novogratz Highlights the ‘Core Tenets of Investing’ — Galaxy Founder Says ‘It’s Important That Less Experienced Market Participants Only Risk What They Are Comfortable Losing’

Novogratz said that the LUNA and UST incident shined a light on some core tenets of investing which include diversification, taking profits along the way, risk management, and an understanding of investing under a macro framework. The billionaire investor said that Galaxy Digital kept to these core tenets when it came to its investments in LUNA.

“Reading the stories of retail investors who lost their savings in one investment is heart- wrenching,” Novogratz’s blog post explains. “A core tenet in the crypto belief system is equal access to markets. But it’s important that less experienced market participants only risk what they are comfortable losing. I’ve often said people should allocate 1%-5% of their assets to the space.”

The Galaxy Digital founder concluded by noting that he’s still a firm believer in the crypto space but that does not mean the bottom is in and the market will be going straight up after this. “It will take restructuring, a redemption cycle, consolidation, and renewed confidence in crypto. Crypto moves in cycles, and we just witnessed a big one,” Novogratz added.

What do you think about the reflection blog post Mike Novogratz wrote about his belief in Terra and the LUNA and UST fiasco that took place this past week? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Trust in Decentralized Finance Rattled After $100 Billion Left the Defi Economy

15/05/2022 by Idelto Editor

The effect of Terra’s demise continues to shine a light on the fragility surrounding the decentralized finance (defi) ecosystem. Things have changed a great deal following Terra’s aftermath, as the total value locked (TVL) in defi has plummeted from $231 billion to today’s $112.29 billion, losing 51.38% in 42 days.

Defi TVL Plunges More Than 50% Since April 3, Terra Implosion Impacts Defi Economy the Most

The total value locked in defi today is just above the $100 billion mark at $112.29 billion. While the TVL has been sliding since almost reaching an all-time high on April 3, last week’s Terra chaos removed most of the TVL held in decentralized finance protocols.

In addition to commanding a $231 billion TVL 42 days ago on April 3, the Terra blockchain held $30.45 billion or 13.15% of the $231 billion aggregate at that time. Terra held the second-largest TVL in defi and today, Terra is in the 14th position with only $500.38 million.

Out of Sunday’s $112.29 billion, Ethereum dominates the TVL in defi with 63.63% of the aggregate in defi or $71.09 billion. The second-largest TVL in defi is tethered to Binance Smart Chain (BSC) with 7.71% of the $112.29 billion or $8.62 billion held on BSC.

Another significant change this week that occurred was the downfall of Curve’s defi dominance, as Makerdao is now the largest defi protocol in terms of TVL size. Makerdao dominates by 9.40% with its $10.56 billion TVL and Curve now holds $8.76 billion.

Curve’s current TVL is a lot different than it was on April 3, when it was $21.17 billion roughly 42 days ago. The top 28 defi protocols today have seen significant TVL reductions during the past seven days. While Makerdao leads it is still down 13.73% this week and Curve is down 49.18% this past week as well. Lido has shed 46.37% and the defi application Aave has lost 21.94% this week.

After being the third-largest defi application in terms of TVL a week ago, Anchor has dropped to the 58th position after losing 97.76% this week. Stats show that Anchor has $309.78 million total value locked in the lending protocol today.

17 defi protocols have at least $1 billion or more as far as TVL size is concerned. There’s still $419 billion in smart contract protocol tokens today with ethereum leading the pack. Terra now holds the 18th position in terms of smart contract platform token market capitalizations.

While Terra’s issues rippled across the entire crypto-economy, the carnage affected decentralized finance the most. Not only was trust shaken to the core, but well over $100 billion was removed from defi in less than a week’s time.

It’s likely going to take some time before trust is regained, and the $100 billion lost is added back to the defi ecosystem. Out of all the defi chains, Ethereum benefited the most as dominance has increased a great deal since last week. Although, Ethereum still felt the impact, as the chain lost 31.53% during the past seven days.

What do you think about the state of defi today? What do you think about the trust that’s been lost and the $100 billion wiped away from the defi space? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.