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DeFi Saver is one of the OG DeFi projects that came to fruition before Black Thursday and even before Aave v1 launched. The crew working on the project started with a lesser-known name – CDP Saver, in 2019, when there was only MakerDAO with their Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs) and later rebranded. The story of DeFi Saver started with a liquidation. While on a team retreat in Thailand, a personal, close-call experience with a potential liquidation of a DeFi position in Maker led one of the founders to think of a simple idea. He took a small part of the collateral to pay back part of his debt, increasing the collateral-to-debt ratio on which many DeFi protocols rely in providing overcollateralized loans, thereby reducing his risk of liquidation. The team went a long way from providing manual DeFi loan repayment and leveraging features in a single transaction – a DeFi first, for that matter, to becoming a go-to solution for automated liquidation protection and leverage management for the most trusted protocols. Over time, various on-chain automated strategies were introduced that can either automatically unwind (partially “self-liquidate”) or fully close out (Stop Loss) a position if it becomes too risky. 

In the years that followed, as DeFi grew, DeFi Saver continuously expanded support for various lending and borrowing protocols, creating dedicated dashboards for Compound, Aave, Liquity, and Reflexer. Alongside continuous polishing and UI improvements, the team developed several powerful tools evolving into an impressive DeFi protocol aggregator with advanced DeFi asset management features.  

Today DeFi users have all of their needs covered in one comprehensive app, including borrowing, lending, leveraging, and yield farming. They can rely on the Smart Savings dashboard that enables an easy supply of stablecoin assets to vetted yield farming protocols like Yearn, mStable, and Convex. There is also a convenient and easy-to-use tool that allows users to move their collateral and debt between integrated protocols called the Loan Shifter. And then there is the Recipe Creator. A transaction builder intended to abstract the smart contract technical intricacies. Users can mix different actions, multiple protocol interactions, token swaps, and utilize the famous DeFi flash loan functionality in a single transaction. It allows for the cross-interaction of all the protocols mentioned above as well as Uniswap and Lido. Lastly, the much-praised Simulation mode feature enables anyone to take the application for a spin and test its powerful suite of features. 

At times, DeFi can be daunting. The number of protocols and apps serving a particular function is mind-boggling. DeFi Saver has made a name for itself in the Ethereum ecosystem, saving thousands of users from liquidation while handling over 100,000 transactions and over $6 billion in trade volume. While you may haven’t heard of it because the team stayed out of marketing schemes and focused on building instead, the DeFi Saver app has provided excellent tools in a conveniently packaged UI for years. It is worth checking out. 

This post is commissioned by DeFi Saver and does not serve as a testimonial or endorsement by The Block. This post is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment, tax, legal or other advice. You should conduct your own research and consult independent counsel and advisors on the matters discussed within this post. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Cosmos staking protocol Stride announced the closing of a $6.7 million seed round co-led by investors North Island VC, Distributed Global and Pantera Capital. 

Vishal Talasani only set up Stride with the help of Riley Edmunds and Aidan Salzmann in March of this year. They aim to bring liquid staking — the process of staking tokens to secure a network without losing access to the funds for a set period of time — to the Cosmos ecosystem. 

Cosmos is a layer 1 blockchain on which apps and services are connected by the inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC). There are over 30 blockchains within the Cosmos ecosystem, such as Osmosis and Juno, according to the announcement.

App chains in the Cosmos ecosystem offer high yields across the board, often to incentivize engagement with the ecosystem, Talasani told The Block.

However, users typically have to make a choice between either earning rewards from staking, or earning yield from participating in protocols, Talasani said. Stride will try to give them a way to do both through liquid staking.

Cosmos recently launched Interchain Accounts (ICA), which enable blockchains to control accounts on other chains, paving the way for liquid staking between chains.

“We were really excited by IBC and ICA and wanted to start building and this was the biggest pain point we felt,” Talasani said. “So, we looked into what solution would look like [and] realized we have all the tools we need to build it.” 

What is liquid staking?

Liquid staking alleviates the pain point outlined by Talasani, in that users can lock up funds to earn rewards for securing the network while still maintaining access to the funds through a derivative of the token.  

Staked derivative tokens are often identified by having “st” prefixed to the token name, for example “stETH”. 

Lido popularized liquid staking on the Ethereum network by offering participants a derivative of ether in return for their tokens for staking. 

Stride is planning to bring a similar mechanism to the Cosmos ecosystem. The protocol already offers liquid staking support for Cosmos Hub, which was the first blockchain to be launched on Cosmos and is powered by the ATOM token. 

Participants using Stride for liquid staking on Cosmos Hub will receive stATOM tokens in return, which can then be used on other apps within the ecosystem or sold immediately for liquidity. 

Stride is aiming to support multiple IBC-compatible assets by the end of the year, according to the announcement. 

What makes Stride different?

The team has experience in derivatives. Talasani previously founded a hedge fund that was later acquired by Dark Forest Technologies. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates as a quant researcher alongside his co-founder Edmunds, who worked within the crypto division as a machine learning and macroeconomic researcher. Co-founder Salzmann previously led product and engineering teams at Humu. 

Other players like pStake and Quicksilver are also launching liquid staking services on Cosmos. To compete, Stride aims to have differentiated features like redemptions from the outset. 

“I think a lot of the players are planning to be these DeFi hubs from day one, which is really exciting and really good for innovation,” Talasani said. “And I think we operate in a slightly separate niche, which is people who just want liquid staking and want it done well.” 

Other investors in the seed round include 1Confirmation, Cerulean Ventures, Node V as well as Cosmos ecosystem validators Imperator, Cosmostation and Everstake. 

“A safe liquid staking solution will be crucial to the future of Cosmos and IBC,” said Paul Veradittakit, partner at Pantera Capital, in a statement. “Stride’s focus on safety and UX is addressing real user needs, and we believe this will make them the ecosystem-defining liquid staking product.” 

Certik and Oak Security provides audits for Stride, per the release. 

Liquid staking in a bear market

The current bear market environment hasn’t fazed the Stride team even as risk appetites shift. The 6-person team aims to use the funds to continue to grow the operation.  

They anticipate that Cosmos IBC will support over 200 blockchains by the end of the year, which will create a significant addressable market for the protocol. 

“Staking I don’t think is going anywhere,” Talasani said. “We are definitely in a bear market, but I think the staking market is so large and everyone has to stake that I don’t think we will see a lack of demand.” 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

BlackRock, the worlds largest asset manager, will offer its institutional clients access to crypto though a deal with exchange giant Coinbase.

BlackRock, which manages around $9 trillion of customer funds, will use Coinbase Prime to provide the service, according to a blog post from Coinbase on Thursday. Clients using the asset manager’s Aladdin portfolio management software will soon be able to get direct access to crypto through the partnership — initially bitcoin. 

Coinbase’s Prime product will give Aladdin clients — who are also clients of Coinbase — access to crypto trading, custody, prime brokerage and reporting capabilities.

Speaking about the announcement, BlackRock’s global head of strategic ecosystem partnerships, Joseph Chalom, said the firm’s clients are increasingly interested in getting exposure to digital asset markets. Chalom went on to say “this connectivity with Aladdin will allow clients to manage their bitcoin exposures directly in their existing portfolio management and trading workflows for a whole portfolio view of risk across asset classes.”

According to Coinbase’s announcement, both firms will work to progress the integration and roll out functionality on a phased basis. Access is available for institutions using both Aladdin and Coinbase. 

BlackRock didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional comment from The Block. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Security researchers at Otter claim they have pinned down what may have caused the widely publicized breach, targeting nearly 8,000 crypto wallets in the Solana ecosystem.

On Thursday morning, Otter, a security firm focused on Solana, reported that the Slope’s wallet app sent out users’ seed phrases to a centralized server. Slope hired this server from a company called Sentry. 

It added that seed phrases passed to Slope’s server were saved in the form of readable text. Since the phrases were not encrypted, anybody with access to this specific Sentry server could potentially access users’ private keys. The low security standard likely led to the breach giving hackers the ability to acquire the seed phrases and drain funds.

“We have independently confirmed that Slope’s mobile app sends off mnemonics via TLS [Transport Layer Security] to their centralized Sentry server,” Otter researchers wrote in a tweet.

Meanwhile, Slope has made a statement saying it didn’t have a firm answer to the cause of the breach. “We have some hypotheses as to the nature of the breach, but nothing is yet firm,” it said.

Slope did not immediately respond to The Block’s request for comment.

As a security measure, Slope has advised all of its past users to transfer funds out by creating other wallets with unique seed phrases.

Otter’s on-chain analysis has estimated that, so far, $4 million has been stolen by hackers. Previous estimates from security firms such as Elliptic and Anchain had ascertained the exploit sum to be at least $5 million. These funds can be located sitting in four Solana wallets.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Mining infrastructure firm Tomorrow Crypto has laid out a proposal to go public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) merger with Nasdaq-listed Globalink Investment Inc.  

Tomorrow Crypto, which is based in the US, is looking to establish infrastructure at facilities for clients to mine bitcoin and ether, according to a filing dated Wednesday. The combined company will be named Tomorrow Crypto Group Holding Inc. and is expected to be listed on Nasdaq. 

The transaction values Tomorrow Crypto at approximately $310 million and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2022, subject to approvals by stockholders and regulators. 

“Tomorrow Crypto will be able to seize more growth opportunities in the constantly evolving blockchain market,” Mingliu Wang, CEO of Tomorrow Crypto, said in a statement.

“In addition, we believe that through our combined teams and expertise, Tomorrow Crypto can better position itself to become one of the world’s leading professional crypto mining players and a significant supporter of the global blockchain ecosystem,” he added. 

The filing comes at a difficult time for SPAC deals. Many that were meant to close over the past year have either stalled or been cancelled completely. It was reported earlier in June that eToro, an online brokerage offering crypto trading, had halted plans for its SPAC merger. Media company Forbes canceled plans in early June and SeatGeek, a ticketing app, did the same in May.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Frax Finance co-founder Sam Kazemian has submitted a proposal for the project’s stablecoin to be redeemable solely on the Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) mainnet following the network’s forthcoming switch from proof-of-work (PoW) consensus.

This proposal was published to the Frax governance page on Thursday and comes amid concern that some Ethereum miners might stage a hard fork of the Ethereum chain during the move from PoW to PoS — a shift known as “the merge.” A hard fork is a network split that results in the creation of two different chains. As previously reported by The Block, one influential Chinese crypto miner Chandler Guo has already pushed plans for a hard fork to create what he called “ETH PoW.”

Kazemian’s proposal calls for Frax’s DAO to choose PoS Ethereum (also called Ethereum 2.0 or ETH2) as the only recognized Ethereum network for its frax stablecoin post-merge.

“Frax is the 5th largest stablecoin in the world and 20%+ of Curve’s TVL, a Uniswap top 10 token, and a critical piece of the Ethereum ecosystem. Thus, it makes sense to clearly make FXS holders’ desire public knowledge through governance,” the proposal states, referring to the frax share governance token by its ticker FXS.

If passed by the DAO, Frax will liquidate all tokens on any Ethereum PoW forks and keep the funds in its treasury to honor stablecoin redemptions by users.

The proposal also marks Frax as the first decentralized stablecoin issuer to offer public support for ETH2 — although Tether chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino has stated that its centralized stablecoin will support ETH2.

The potential for the Ethereum merge being contested via hard forks has significant implications for stablecoins — because such forks typically double the number of tokens as the chain splits. This situation is especially concerning for fiat-backed stablecoins as the supply increase would affect their ability to maintain their US dollar peg.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The domain name NFTs.com has sold for a reported $15 million – a price tag that makes it one of the most expensive domain name sales of all time. 

According to a press release, the deal, announced on Wednesday, was brokered for an undisclosed buyer by teams at URL brokers Domainer and GoDaddy.com, and facilitated by Escrow.com. The sale size is second only to the sale of domain name Voice.com, which was bought by a crypto firm in 2019 for $30 million. 

No formal plans have been announced about what will be hosted on NFTs.com, Domainer said, adding that the buyer has “associations with other web3 projects, such as DigitalArtists.com, which offers a curated web3 service to artists.”

The news comes as the market for so-called web3 domain names hots up. While no sale has yet matched up to the dizzying heights of web2 domain names, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names routinely sell for tens of thousands of dollars. In July, sony.eth sold for $72,000 to sunnybay.eth, a pseudonymous ENS collector. Earlier that month, the domain 000.eth was purchased for 300 ETH (worth $315,000 at the time), making it the second-largest sale measured in both ether and dollars.

The biggest sale so far of an ENS domain was for paradigm.eth, which was purchased in October 2021 for 420 ETH (about $1.5 million at the time). Despite the name, crypto investment firm Paradigm reportedly denied that it made the purchase. Plus there were a few other indicators that suggested it might be a prank — albeit a rather expensive one.

Meanwhile, Unstoppable Domains announced in July that it had clinched a $1 billion valuation in its latest fundraise. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

PwC’s former global crypto leader Henri Arslanian is launching a crypto asset management firm in Dubai, according to a LinkedIn post on Thursday.

Nine Blocks Capital Management will cater to institutional investors and operate as a “market neutral” fund focused on profiting from inefficiencies in the crypto markets using relative value, arbitrage and quantitative strategies, according to the post.

The company has received $75 million in funding from its main shareholder, Hong Kong-based hedge fund Nine Masts, where Nine Blocks co-founder Andrew D. Goodwin was perviously a portfolio manager. Nine Blocks will also absorb Nine Masts’ existing digital assets trading arm.

Its 10-strong team includes three portfolio managers based in the Cayman Islands, where the company has an office. But it has also received provisional approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA).

Since the launch of VARA in March, high profile crypto brands have been moving to Dubai as the city tries to position itself as a financial center. Among them, VARA has granted provisional approval to the likes of FTX and Binance.

The firms that Dubai gains are firms lost for established Asian financial centers like Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which have cooled on the crypto industry.

Speaking with the Financial Times, Arslanian admitted that Hong Kong would have been a “natural home” for the firm but pointed to regulatory approval times and travel restrictions — quarantine is still mandatory for international travellers — as forcing their hand.

“When we looked at the broader ecosystem . . . Cayman and Dubai made a natural choice,” he said.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

A coalition of US senators have reintroduced a piece of legislation that would clarify reporting requirements for crypto firms set by last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The amendment would exempt miners, network validators and other providers that don’t conduct broker-like activity. 

The passage of the infrastructure bill included a definition for “broker” that could potentially encompass a variety of crypto entities that don’t have access to the necessary information and would be unable to comply with the requirements, like miners or wallet providers. The definition was hotly debated by industry players and lawmakers during the passage of the bill, though the original language ultimately made it to the final version. 

To fill in the gaps for firms caught in the middle, U.S. Senators Pat Toomey, R-Pa, Mark Warner, D-Va., Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, introduced an amendment that would specifically exclude those entities. The text is identical to a version introduced last year, according to the group. The original submission never cleared the Senate due to a procedural issue. 

“This amendment had strong bipartisan support last August, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be signed into law,” Toomey said in a statement. 

While Congress members attempt to provide clarity, the Treasury Department has plans to do the same. After the passage of the infrastructure bill, reports circulated that the Treasury was preparing guidance to define a digital asset “broker.” It also backed the amendment when lawmakers submitted it last year. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

An investigation into Tuesday night’s hack on the Solana blockchain has revealed affected addresses “were at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications,” according to a Twitter account dedicated to Solana blockchain status updates. 

Developers, ecosystem teams and security auditors carried out the investigation, the group, which goes by the handle “@SolanaStatus,” said on Twitter. 

Earlier today the group clarified that it did not believe the breach originated in a bug of Solana core code, and it pointed the finger at the software used by “several software wallets popular among users of the network.” Now, it’s pointing to Slope as one such service.

“While the details of exactly how this occurred are still under investigation, but private key information was inadvertently transmitted to an application monitoring service,” the group said in a tweet. 

Slope Finance published a statement soon after the developer tweets. The firm confirmed that a cohort of its wallets were compromised in the breach, though it did not speculate on how the exploit originated. 

“We have some hypotheses as to the nature of the breach, but nothing is yet firm,” Slope Finance said in a Medium post.

It recommended users create a new seed phrase wallet and transfer all assets to the new wallet. Those using a hardware wallet have not been compromised. The firm is continuing to work with “developers, security experts, and protocols from throughout the ecosystem to work to identify and rectify” the situation. 

“We are still actively diagnosing, and are committed to publishing a full postmortem, earning back your trust, and making this as right as we can,” Slope said.

Reports from users of Phantom and Slope surfaced Tuesday night, claiming wallets had been drained of SOL and SPL in an apparent exploit on the Solana network. As of 5 a.m. UTC, almost 8,000 wallets had been affected, though hardware wallets were not impacted.

The exploit was likely a “supply chain attack” on wallets using Apple’s iOS operating system, Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said on Twitter earlier on Wednesday.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.