Re-read­ing our time­ly DeFi Guide remind­ed me of how much sim­pler things were back then. After all, lend­ing some­one mon­ey or swap­ping one token for anoth­er isn’t exact­ly rock­et sci­ence. DeFi builders do an invalu­able job lift­ing finance into the dig­i­tal age, but the prod­ucts they cre­ate fall into a well defined and well researched design space — with occa­sion­al blockchain...

Val­ue locked in DeFi on Ethereum explod­ed from 1B US$ in May 2020 to almost 4B in July. The DeFi craze put so much pres­sure on the Ethereum blockchain that we’ve con­stant­ly seen gas prices above 60 Gwei over the past few weeks.  Ethereum users are cur­rent­ly burn­ing more than 5,000 ETH in fees per day (more than 1.6M US$) A sin­gle project, led by one man, has grown from...

Ren (for­mer­ly Repub­lic Pro­to­col) has been a sta­ple of our alt­coin port­fo­lio since incep­tion of the Moun­tains and Val­leys strat­e­gy. At the time of writ­ing, the price of $REN is on a run and impor­tant parts of the project made it to main­net. A good time to explain our con­tin­ued fas­ci­na­tion with this project. On a quest to make the project’s promis­es more tan­gi­ble, Ren have...

Origin’s whitepa­per is a bleed­ing heart cry for unstop­pable mar­kets. The “Why?” sec­tion that takes up a good quar­ter of the paper even men­tions peo­ple cook­ing Meth in Airbnb homes (yukk), and Airbnb refus­ing their ser­vices to KKK mem­bers (dou­ble yukk).  A good argu­ment can be made for an unstop­pable glob­al mar­ket­place. With the advent of the www, con­tent and human...

Kava is a cryp­to lend­ing and sta­ble­coin plat­form with strong sim­i­lar­i­ties to Ethereum’s Mak­er DAO. Once launched, the plat­form will allow users to deposit cryp­to and mint sta­ble­coins in return.  Like on Mak­er, the under­ly­ing finan­cial vehi­cle is called a CDP, a Col­lat­er­al­ized Debt Posi­tion. The user will deposit cryp­to assets worth more than the sta­ble­coins he...

Mat­ic helps improve dApp usabil­i­ty by bring­ing scaleable and near-instant blockchain trans­ac­tions to Ethereum. Blockchain scal­ing is a com­plex sub­ject, and Matic’s ambi­tions even go beyond help­ing scale Ethereum. We’ll need to unrav­el sev­er­al con­cepts until we can ful­ly under­stand what Mat­ic does and why the project is important. Understanding Matic Plasma Plas­ma is a...