Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter. As the crypto community filled its crypto stockings for the holiday season, the Grinch emerged to gift a grimacing fate to two DeFi platforms, stealing their festive spirit and a whole lot of dollars. Reading this article, you're only receiving a portion of the content from our DeFi newsletter. Drop your email below for the full copy. Binance VC arm leads $60M round in cross-chain protocol Multichain Binance Labs, the venture capital side of global crypto exchange Binance, facilitated a $60-million capital funding raise for cross-chain router protocol Multichain. Other …

Most people might not remember that websites once had icons that said, “This site has been optimized for Internet Explorer,” but, two decades ago, it wasn’t uncommon. Just like today’s battle between Web 2.0 monopolies and Web 3.0 communities, at the beginning of the early consumer internet, there was a similar battle waged over who would own the portal to it: A closed-source global monopoly, or an open-source nonprofit. A battle for the soul of the internet Long before Web 3.0, the browser wars defined the early internet. Netscape Navigator was the first consumer browser in the market and the …

Yaniv Tal of The Graph Yaniv is the co-founder and CEO of Edge & Node and a co-founder of The Graph, a decentralized indexing protocol used by blockchains such as Ethereum. Mass awareness of crypto and Web3 has already started. Celebrities, mainstream media and even the U.S. government are all talking about crypto. The next stage is for usage to exceed speculation, which we see coming very soon. As the Web3 stack solidifies, better applications will become possible with network effects around composable data that will launch Web3 into widespread use. These quotes have been edited and condensed. The views, …

Nonfungible token, or NFT, became such a tech buzzword in 2021 that even Collins Dictionary declared the abbreviation its word of the year and Google searches for NFTs spiked to record levels. Behind the term is a market that approaches $17 billion, according to Cointelegraph Research. And the NFT marketplace OpenSea is responsible for processing most of these transactions, with a trading volume that recently surpassed $10 billion. NFTs’ potential reaches far beyond art to include music, sports collectibles and video games, while its utility encompasses ownership as well as exclusive access to unique functions and features. From CryptoPunks and …

Yat Siu of Animoca Brands Yat is the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, which delivers digital property rights to the world’s gamers and internet users, thereby creating a new asset class, play-to-earn economies and a more equitable digital framework contributing to the building of the open Metaverse. “2021 was the year of NFTs, and in the second half of the year, we saw a growing emphasis on GameFi. This trend will continue well into 2022. Real mass adoption of DeFi will happen via GameFi, which will explode in growth during 2022 as the potential for mass financial inclusion …

Events and concerts are sucking artists and organizers dry through an archaic and ineffective ticketing system. This inflexive system is dominated by three players hogging up to 80% of the generated revenue. Its failure to evolve with the times has created loopholes for unscrupulous individuals to exploit artists and organizers. First off, it has enabled the emergence of an uncontrolled secondary market. Here, bad actors make a killing reselling tickets exorbitantly to clueless fans, and obviously, they don't share profits with the creators and planners. Further, the inefficiencies of the current ticketing systems have given rise to scalping. Unethical parties …

Enterprise blockchain has come a long way since its inception in 2017. Blockchain for enterprise use initially began as a technology built on private, permissioned networks, primarily used for supply chain management. As blockchain matured overtime, enterprises began to leverage public, permissionless networks like Ethereum to conduct business. Fast forward to 2021 — enterprises are now applying decentralized concepts to create more efficient workflows in the Metaverse. William Herkelrath, head of business development at Chainlink Labs — a decentralized oracle network — told Cointelegraph that while the Metaverse is hard to define, he believes that it’s a collection of ecosystems …

DFG Capital has led a $6.5 million investment in the interoperability start-up Interlay, which is building infrastructure for decentralized finance applications across major blockchains such as Ethereum, Cosmos and Polkadot. As per the announcement, the new funds will be used by Interlay to scale its operations and bring more developers on board with its open-source platform. In a statement, James Wo, DFG Founder and CEO, said Interlay's solution will "expand the cross-chain possibilities for Bitcoin." Interlay aims to integrate cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) with DeFi platforms such as Polkadot and Ethereum. InterBTC, the company's main product, is a fully crypto-based …

The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Grim Finance reported $30 million in losses due to a reentrancy exploit of the platform’s deposits. Grim Finance officially announced on Dec. 18 that an “external attacker” had exploited the DeFi platform, stealing “over $30 million” worth of cryptocurrencies. According to Grim Finance, the hack was an “advanced attack,” with the attacker exploiting the protocol’s vault contract through five reentrancy loops, which allowed them to fake five additional deposits into a vault while the platform is processing the first deposit. Grim paused all vaults after the attack to minimize the risk for future funds: “We …

Yat Siu of Animoca Brands Yat is the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, which delivers digital property rights to the world’s gamers and internet users, thereby creating a new asset class, play-to-earn economies and a more equitable digital framework contributing to the building of the open Metaverse. “Although we are still at a relatively early stage of the blockchain adoption curve, we are well on the way to reaching the early majority category sometime in 2022. This is being led by NFT gaming and the GameFi movement. As more game developers get involved and higher-quality game projects become …

The state of banking and finance today presents a complex labyrinth that even seasoned bankers struggle to navigate. Despite appearances, there is a method to this madness. As Nobel Prize winners like Muhammad Yunus and Joseph Stiglitz have cautioned in the past: central banking, in particular, has morphed to keep the status quo in check. Or, in the words of Mike Maloney, an expert on monetary history and economics: It is “the biggest scam in the history of mankind.” Maloney reasons that giving a small group of unelected individuals the keys to the monetary printing press will undoubtedly rot away …

Yaniv Tal of The Graph Yaniv is a co-founder and CEO at Edge & Node, and co-founder of The Graph, a decentralized indexing protocol used by blockchains such as Ethereum. “Many people and institutions got started with DeFi in 2021, but we haven’t even started mass adoption yet. As more and more retail and payment systems start integrating with crypto, people will be able to keep their money in crypto, bypassing the traditional banking system, and benefit from high interest rates made possible by the productive use of protocol tokens.” These quotes have been edited and condensed. The views, thoughts …