It’s that time again to talk a peek into
what’s making a buzz in the crypto-sphere
and this week did not disappoint.
From new all time highs for Chainlink, a cautionary
tale about yield farming yams, to a renewed
debate about how much ETH is actually out
there, plus the newest institutional player
to double down on bitcoin, all on deck for
this edition of Exodus Crypto news.
Welcome back everyone, it’s Friday Aug,14th nd and first at bat this week is the seemingly
unstoppable Chainlink.
At the time of recording Link has passed the
$18 mark and is up 153% in the last 30 days.
It now sits now at #5 in the overall market,
flipping BCH, as the demand for DeFi increases
across the board with over 4.7 billion dollars
locked up in the DeFi space with an overall
combined 13.4 Billion marketcap.
Chainlink has also been very busy this past
year making deals with external partners which
has also helped fuel its ascent.
And, here’s why Chainlink is so important
to the DeFi space.
Oracles,
No, not the Oracle of Delphi, the Oracles of DeFi
Chainlink is perfectly positioned because
of the way it connects real-world data to
smart contracts using a decentralized network
to audit and verify the inputs and outputs
of the data it processes.
This data is then connected to smart contracts
to verify, in this case, prices for Fiat to
crypto or crypto to crypto exchange rates
such as USD/BTC pairs or Stablecoins to ETH.
A blockchain itself does not know any of this
data.
It only knows about itself.
An oracle is a trusted source which connects
this real world price information to smart
contracts.
An Oracle is expected to tell the truth so
the smart contract can do its thing.
Without this Link between real world data
and the blockchain, DeFi would not be possible.
Of course Chainlink has implications beyond
DeFi, but this is exactly what’s propelling
the price of the LINK crypto token into space
Moving on with a Linked story, this week saw
some insane action in the Defi space when
in less than 90 mins, over 90 million dollars
were poured into a yield farming scheme called
YAM and in less than 24 hours later the cap
was over 400 million dollars
Yam was launched as a meme token without a
code audit.
Users quickly poured millions in because of
the 6 figure yield.
Because of this popularity and whale activity,
YAM needed to update its governance model
and proposed a change in the way YAM was minted.
When the governance proposal was submitted
a flaw in the code was found preventing the
execution of the proposal, leaving any future
governance changes impossible, basically turning
YAM into a Brick and any of the assets which
we’re locked up, are now lost and worthless.
When is the last time you saw a token go from
zero value to and over $400,000 market cap
then back to zero value in less than 72 hrs?
Is this a cautionary tail we should all be
worried about?
My personal take away here is simple, greed
and FOMO
took over the common sense of auditing code.
Leave your thoughts in the comments.
This YAM crop failure did not just affect
the farmers, it had a rippling effect across
the whole Ethereum space by increasing network
fees across the board.
The Ethereum network is only able to process
about 15 transactions per second and when
the markets heat up so does the load on ETH
causing massive transaction backups, when
this happens fee estimating software starts
adjusting fees upwards and transaction fees
could end up costing more than the amount
of transactions itself.
"If you're an Exodus user who was transacting
ETH or ETH tokens, you may have felt this
sting as well."
This scenario is like a snake eating its own
tail posing risks to the whole ecosystem by
turning people away from the network.
Almost everyone is now thinking of ETH scaling
and how it has not come fast enough for the
advent of DeFi which shows no sign of slowing
down.
When ETH 2.0 and 2nd layer scaling solutions?
or, will wee see the entire ecosystem migrate
to a new smart contract network which already
has scaling solutions built in?
We would love to hear your thoughts so please, leave them in the comments.
The opportunity to highlight shortcomings
of the Ethereum network was not lost of the
bitcoin community and a new debate, started
by Pierre Rochard who is the Bitcoin strategist
at Kraken, was kicked up this week when the
total supply of Ethereum was called into question.
Rochard, while speaking to Morgan creek digital’s
co -founder Anthony Pompliano, said that Kraken
was having difficulty auditing the total supply
of ETH.
This is important because if the actual supply
is not known then how do you know your ETH
really exist.
Rochard commented:
“Are you actually receiving legit ETH or
is this fractional reserve ETH that was kind
of created out of thin air?”
The current and total supply amounts mean
a great deal to some in the bitcoin camp who
would argue that ETH cannot be a good store
of value if you can’t actually tell how
many are in existence, this along with the unlimited
supply cap as opposed to BTC with a supply
cap of 21 million and all network nodes agreeing
on the current minted supply.
On the other side of the fence, there are
those in the opposite camp who question whether
it’s a big deal or not because of the fundamentals
of how the ETH network works.
What camp are you in?
Do you agree with the Bitcoin point of view
or is this really not a big deal?
One thing is for sure, this is not the end
of the debate and theirs a lot of work to
do on both side if we’re ever going to see
mass adoption of crypto and if you would like
to help speed that process, share Exodus with
your friends and family.
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desktop or mobile device.
Home to more than 100 cryptocurrency wallets
and other crypto apps, with Exodus you can
safely store, send, receive and exchange your
crypto assets.
Click the link above to start sharing Exodus
today!
We’ve come to the end of another exciting
week in crypto and before we go I wanted to
share the lates in adoption news.
This week, A traditional investment company
named Micro strategy was the first listed
company to buy BTC as part of its capital
allocation strategy.
This means that Microstrategy is buying BTC
as a store of value and to protect their investments
against a grim economic outlook fueled by
massive inflation and it’s a pretty big
deal from a company who’s CEO declared,
in 2013, that Bitcoin would die out.
This my friends, is the beginning of a wave.
Where will you be when Bitcoin and crypto
wipe out traditional finance and people worldwide
have greater access and control over their
financial well being?
Exodus will be right here, helping build this
future and walking with you side by side.
Until next week - HODL ON!
