Colony, an early Ethereum project aimed at building decentralized governance tooling, announced today that it is preparing for a relaunch that’s been five years, multiple missteps, and a few half-starts in the making. If successful, however, the new app could be a boon for the dozens of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols currently struggling with the clumsy mechanics of DAO governance — a nearly universally-acknowledged problem in dire need of a solution. Almost a half-decade ago, the Colony blog first laid out the organization’s vision for “The Future of Work”: “By aligning the incentives of the workforce around productivity, people anywhere …

Amid a wild market-wide bullrun for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), an ultra-rare “alien” CryptoPunk has sold today for 605 Ether, worth over $750,000 at today’s prices. CryptoPunks are widely considered to be the original NFT project, released even before Cryptokitties, the blockchain-based collectibles project that propelled NFTs to mainstream consciousness. CryptoPunks developers Larva Labs report that Punks have accounted for $26 million in lifetime sales on their native marketplace, and the average sale price for Punks over the past year has been $6,199. Each Punk has unique attributes, such as background color, accessories, and even some ultra-rare features, such as an …

Active decentralized finance (DeFi) users woke up yesterday to yet another “airdrop” of governance tokens, this time courtesy of self-described “multi-service platform” Stake DAO — but, due to the unique distribution method and some bugs in the rollout, eligible users might want to claim their tokens sooner rather than later. In an introductory post to the project, Stake DAO laid out the parameters for the SDT token distribution, which set aside an initial 1.5% of tokens for “active members” of a long list of popular DeFi projects. Among those members, the two largest allocations at 39% and 45% respectively were …

After a week of at times rancorous debate, an 11-author team of Yearn.finance core contributors and community members have submitted today a proposal to increase the supply of YFI by 6666 tokens — a quantity worth roughly $225 million at today’s prices. The proposal is the culmination of a wider discussion about developer incentives for decentralized finance’s (DeFi) original yield vault project. While the Twitter discourse revolved around memes and namecalling, on Yearn’s governance forum debate of the pros and cons of a mint were far more sophisticated. Community members analyzed team token allocations for popular DeFi platforms such as …

Over the past two weeks the entire DeFi sector has been in a strong uptrend and many of the top market cap tokens rallied by double and triple-digits. Curve DAO’s governance token CRV has been a standout performer, coming off a low at $0.54 on Jan. 11 to a 2021 high at $1.78 on Jan. 17. Three reasons for this latest surge in volume and price for CRV are a new collaboration with the Yearn.finance (YFI) ecosystem, positive regulatory developments in the U.S. and an increase in engagement boosting the total value locked on the platform. Yearn.finance collaboration The noticeable …

It’s been a rough week for the Aragon governance platform where philosophical differences have brought about a long list of resignations. Aragon co-founder Jorge Izquierdo announced on Jan. 11 he would no longer be working as CEO of the for-profit Aragon One, a company dedicated to building tools and services related to Aragon. Aragon is an Ethereum-based platform involved with decentralized governance. The announcement took place just hours after news broke that Aragon had purchased Dvote Labs, the company behind blockchain voting protocol Vocdoni. Today I resigned as Aragon One's CEO. Leading this team has been the privilege and adventure …

Aragon, a platform specializing in managing decentralized autonomous organizations, announced a merger with the Vocdoni protocol, a blockchain voting and governance solution provider. Unlike the Yearn.finance mergers, this acquisition has a much more traditional nature. Aragon has acquired Dvote Labs OU, the company behind the Vocdoni protocol. Its 11 team members will be hired into a new company controlled by Aragon and Vocdoni members. The teams will work on building an integrated solution to boost the Aragon ecosystem. Vocdoni technology uses zero-knowledge cryptography to enable anonymous voting, in addition to leveraging decentralized technologies like the Interplanetary File System and Libp2p, …

In a largely celebratory community call devoted in part to commemorating lending protocol Aave’s January 8th “Aaveversary” — a full year of Aave on Ethereum mainnet — there was also a look into Aave’s possible future: a proposal from Delphi Digital seeking to fundamentally alter Aave’s Safety Module and create a new insurance product offering. Currently, $aave governance token holders can stake their tokens in the Safety Module, a pool of liquidity designed to help insure the protocol against a “shortfall event” such as a smart contract exploit. Stakers risk up to 30% of funds they lock in the Module, …

When the history books are written about cryptocurrency, 2020 will be remembered as the year decentralized finance exploded in popularity. A powerful illustration of how this young, often misunderstood space has grown comes from DeFi Pulse. At the start of January, the total value locked in DeFi protocols stood at $675 million. Since then, records have continued to be smashed — and at one point in December, this figure hit a staggering $15 billion. That’s a surge of 2,100% in less than 12 months. Even though there have been signs of a bubble, crypto heavyweights such as Binance CEO Changpeng …

The team behind the DeFi platform 1inch is releasing a governance and utility token, according to a Dec. 25 announcement. The 1INCH token will be used for both the platform’s automated market maker protocol and its decentralized exchange aggregator service. The “Aggregation Protocol” governance module will allow stakers to vote on the distribution of Spread Surplus coins. These are created when the final rate for a transaction undertaken through the aggregator service is greater than that confirmed by the user. The proceeds are split between the referrer and the governance reward, with the proportion going to each decided by the …

A report on Friday from Ethereum metrics website Dune Analytics showed that the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem now counts over 1 million unique Ethereum addresses as participants — an over tenfold increase from the 91,000 addresses on Dec. 6, 2019. But while the growth has been undeniable, some experts caution not to interpret the milestone as a sign of widespread adoption. In fact, in order for DeFi to truly break mainstream, many of the emerging vertical’s proponents may have to rethink their communication and outreach strategies. The Dune Analytics report, compiled by aggregating the total number of addresses which have …

Gnosis, an Ethereum-based platform that facilitates betting on events and other metrics, revealed plans for its own decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, called GnosisDAO. “This will have the effect of progressively decentralizing Gnosis as a project using a native governance framework powered by their token economy, bringing governance to the coming internet of value,” according to a public statement Monday sent to Cointelegraph. In addition to its prediction markets wing, Gnosis has a multisignature Ethereum-based digital asset storage platform. GnosisDAO involves Gnosis’ prediction markets and its multisig wallet operation. Essentially, DAOs run ecosystems automatically, based on a set of rules. …