Reno, the closest major city to the famous art festival Burning Man, is developing its own decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, and a token in partnership with TQ Tezos, a tech firm building Tezos-based solutions. Mayor Hillary Schieve announced the city’s plans to create the Reno DAO in a Thursday Tez Talks podcast hosted by the Tezos Commons Foundation. The city will build its Reno DAO and Reno Coin on top of the Tezos blockchain network in order to monetize art objects and pieces as well as further explore the potential benefits of blockchain and crypto to solve some of …

Some major venture capital names are ‘sett’ to join the Badger DAO community. Bitcoin on Ethereum-focused decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Badger DAO announced today a $21 million sale of DAO treasury assets to four major investors: Polychain Capital, Parafi Capital, Blockchain Capital, and noted whale wallet 0xB1. The sale was made as part of a wider “Treasury Diversification through Strategic Partnerships” plan first outlined in Badger Improvement Proposal (BIP) 37. The Badger treasury, currently worth over $600 million USD, is primarily allocated in $BADGER, the DAO’s native governance token, and $DIGG, a synthetic rebasing Bitcoin. According to Badger DAO founder …

Shortly after culling its community of inactive members, one of decentralized finance’s (DeFi) strangest experiments is launching a new stablecoin lending product. On Wednesday Inverse Finance revealed the Anchor Protocol, a money market built around DOLA, a protocol-native synthetic stablecoin. Based on “a modified fork of Compound,” in a blog post Inverse Finance founder Nour Haridy compares Anchor to Synthetix, which issues credit in the form of synthetic assets back by overleveraged collateral, and Compound, which issues credit in the form of crypto asset loans also backed by overleveraged collateral. Ultimately, Haridy sees these models as providing the same utility. …

As part of a wider exodus, the highest-profile Ethereum-native decentralized finance project yet has announced an expansion to Binance Smart Chain. In a press release on Thursday, the 1inch team revealed that it has ported 10 million 1INCH tokens (currently worth over $40 million dollars) to BSC. The tokens will be used as a liquidity bridge between Ethereum and BSC and will seed the 1inch ecosystem on BSC, including the 1inch Aggregation Protocol and the 1inch Liquidity Protocol. “As we at 1inch are always on the lookout for the hottest DeFi projects, the addition of BSC-based DEXes to our aggregation …

Decentralized autonomous organizations — known as a DAO for short — have become a mainstay of the crypto world. The rationale behind DAO is to enable companies and organizations to fully function without the need for a hierarchical management structure. As this Cointelegraph guide explained, it’s like a vending machine delivering a snack in exchange for a bundle of coins — and then automatically using those funds to reorder stock. There’s no need for human involvement in keeping the machine running, as all of the processes it needs to function are pre-written into code. Beyond this real-world example, the possibilities …

No-loss lotteries appear to have found a snug product-market fit. Just a few days after the airdrop of their governance token, POOL, the self-styled “savings game” PoolTogether has cracked $50 million in total value locked with ease, currently sitting above $51 million spread between DAI, USDC, UNI, and COMP lottery pools. PoolTogether aptly 'pools' user funds and deposits them into decentralized finance savings protocols, using the interest as prizes for randomly-selected winners and returning the initial funds to buyers — thus creating a “no-loss” lottery. While the project stalled below $10 million in total value locked for months, growth has …

A major decentralized finance protocol’s SEO metrics just spiked through the roof. In a tweet today, cryptocurrency investment fund Future Fund announced that it had acquired the “sushi.com” domain name on behalf of DeFi platform SushiSwap. Happy to announce we’ve acquired https://t.co/Hjsm7MOIYY for @sushiswap A strong domain will greatly increase internet traffic and exposure to the sushi brand for their forthcoming new projects. 2021 will be a big year for $SUSHI pic.twitter.com/NWWkgTldWq — Future Fund (@FUTURE_FUND_) February 19, 2021 SushiSwap’s online presence is notoriously scattered, including domains like “sushiswap.fi” and “sushiswapclassic.org.” In the announcement, Future Fund noted that the simplicity …

As the attacks launched against popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols grow ever-more complex, the efficacy of audits from major security companies have in turn come under scrutiny — and some members of the DeFi community have already begun building homegrown alternatives. “I think that now, after all the hacks we’ve had, we basically understand that if you have two audits, three audits, it doesn’t mean you’re safe,” said the co-founder of DeFi Italy Emiliano Bonassi in an interview with Cointelegraph. “This does not mean that audits have no value in this moment, but they are not silver bullets.” This new …

The Synthetix DAO has added some new, perhaps surprising voices to its governance. Today the synthetic asset protocol announced a $12 million dollar fundraise led by venture capital firms Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and IOSG. The funds purchased SNX tokens directly from the DAO treasury, and “will contribute where possible by providing liquidity in the form of SNX collateral, and also participate in its rapidly evolving community governance system,” the announcement reads. “We’re excited about supporting the synthetixDAO as it builds the leading synthetic asset platform,” said Paradigm investment partner Arjun Balaji. “Synthetix has one of the best communities in crypto …

In one of the largest exploits of the DeFi era, this morning an attacker successfully drained over $37 million from Alpha Homora by leveraging Cream’s Iron Bank protocol-to-protocol lending platform. Alpha Finance Lab, whose protocol was audited by Quantstamp and Peckshield, announced on Twitter this morning that they were aware of an attack, that the “loophole” that allowed it had been patched, and that the team had a “prime suspect”: Dear Alpha community, we've been notified of an exploit on Alpha Homora V2. We're now working with @AndreCronjeTech and @CreamdotFinance together on this. The loophole has been patched. We're in …

In a post today on their governance and research forums, the team behind decentralized finance (DeFi) DEX protocol 0x announced initial plans to decentralize their governance by creating a “community-owned treasury seed-funded by 0x Labs.” “As we continue our mission to create a tokenized world where all value can flow freely, 0x Labs intends to experiment with seed-funding a community treasury managed by a DAO,” reads the post. “To establish the DAO, 0x Labs will identify a set of bootstrap delegates that will shepherd the initial steps of governance decentralization.” According to Theo Gonella, platform product manager at 0x Labs …

Balancer Labs announced today a $5 million investment round led by DeFi (decentralized finance) mainstays Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital. The two VCs now join Pantera Capital and Alameda Research in investing, bringing Balancer’s series A round to a total of $12 million raised. The investment might come as a surprise to some, given that in a recent podcast Arthur of DeFiance Capital gave a less-than-glowing review of Balancer as an automated market maker (AMM) relative to its peers: “It’s definitely one of the bigger mysteries in DeFi on why, despite the similar features, Balancer is behind Uniswap or …