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‘Better as friends’: DeFi protocols Yearn and Cover announce cessation of merger

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Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols Yearn Finance and Cover have announced today the end of a protocol merger process initiated in November last year. 

The two protocols were initially linked during a spree of a half-dozen Yearn acquisitions, mergers, or collaborations, the exact term depending on the project. The split comes as a surprise to many, given that Cover, a protocol that provides coverage or insurance for DeFi deposits, was a natural fit for yield vault provider Yearn. The teams had also collaborated in crisis situations in the past, such as when Cover experienced an “infinite mint” hack in late December 2020.

Following the hack of Yearn’s DAI vault earlier this month the team also announced that coverage from Cover would become standard across all vaults. According to Cover core contributor “DeFi Ted”, Yearn will now be moving forward independently with their own insurance offering. 

Both teams confirmed that users can continue to purchase coverage for Yearn deposits, and that current coverage will be unaffected.

Comments from both teams indicate that the cessation was an emotional, potentially snap decision — one rooted in potential conflicts of interest related to Cover’s new protocol, Ruler.

Emotional responses

In a since-deleted Tweet, Yearn founder Andre Cronje weighed in in the split, portraying it as a breach of trust:

“Personally, this was very sad to see. I had very high regard, trust, and faith in the Cover team. Lesson learned. Wont trust them again.” 

He’s since followed up with another, similarly cryptic Tweet: 

DeFi Ted told Cointelegraph that the two teams had recently met to discuss providing coverage for Yearn’s vaults, and the Yearn representatives reached out shortly after to reveal they would be building their own insurance/coverage offering. 

Ted added he was personally “a bit blind sided” by the decision, which he says was given with four hours notice prior to the Yearn announcement on Twitter. On official social channels Cover team members characterized the split as a “difference of opinion,” and likened it to a romantic relationship in which both parties discover that they’re “better as friends.”

“Honestly feel a little lost right now sir,” said Ted.

A core Yearn operations contributor declined to comment.

Can’t fork and be friends

Some community members have speculated that Yearn’s decision is related to the launch of Ruler Protocol, a lending solution from core Cover contributors that kicked off a liquidity mining program this week. The Yearn ecosystem already includes one lending platform, CREAM Finance, and core contributor “banteg” has hinted on Twitter that the team isn’t appreciative of competitive overlap from collaborating teams:

Ted confirmed to Cointelegraph that the split is related to Ruler, but said that there’s “no conflict” between the various protocols, and instead that there was concern from Yearn about the Cover team “running two projects.” 

“In fact, we have a great relationship with Leo and CREAM, don’t be surprised to see us do something with them,” he said.

The price for Cover’s native governance token, $COVER, has plummeted on the news, down 35% to $605 at the time of publication.

Nonetheless, Ted and other team members say they remain resolute in building, and that the split is just another chapter in what has been a tumultuous history featuring multiple forks and re-launches. 

“The COVER journey has definitely been unique.”

‘Better as friends’: DeFi protocols Yearn and Cover announce cessation of merger

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Unslashed Finance raises $2M for crypto insurance platform

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Unslashed Finance, a decentralized insurance protocol built on Ethereum, has raised $2 million to fund its tokenized insurance product, highlighting another positive use case for blockchain technology. 

The funding round, which was led by Lemniscap, P2P Capital and other investors, will aid Unslashed Finance in expanding its decentralized insurance protocol for crypto assets. The protocol works by connecting people willing to buy insurance for their assets and investors seeking to earn an uncorrelated yield.

Unslashed claims that its protocol enables “almost instant liquidity to insurance buyers and risk underwriters,” as well as constant collateralization. By tokenizing coverage, the platform allows the insured to pay as they go or simply offload the coverage if they no longer need it.

The insurance covers exchange and smart contract hacks, validator slashing, stablecoin pegs, oracle failures and other types of risks that traditional firms do not insure.

Since its initial private launch in February, Unslashed Finance has sold $400 million in insurance coverage and collected $90 million in capital deposits. Its clients include ParaSwap, Ethereum Lido Finance, Enzyme, Techemy Capital and others

“The growth was purely organic,” Marouane Hajji, founder and CEO of Unslashed, tells Cointelegraph. He explained that roughly one-third of the covered buyers are protocols protecting themselves, 20% are crypto hedge funds and the remaining are DeFi power users.

Regarding the future of blockchain insurance products, Hajji says the banking and insurance industries “tend to be slow movers with regards to new technology.”

He continues:

“Although some insurance companies were experimenting with public and private blockchains pretty early on (2015/2016), and McKinsey published a report back then explaining how blockchain could have several use cases in the insurance industry, real-life applications on public blockchains are not the focus of traditional industry players.”

The blockchain-based insurance industry appears to be growing in light of the DeFi boom, as more users seek out coverage against centralized exchange hacks. Presently, the coverage is quite expensive, although this could change as the market continues to mature.

Credit card issuer American Express has even commented positively on the cryptocurrency insurance market but noted that major issuers are taking a very cautious approach. The concern stems from the fact that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) are effectively a bearer asset like cash, which entitles the possessor to the underlying value of the asset.

“Consequently, when someone’s bitcoins are stolen, it’s difficult to establish rightful ownership without actual possession of that bitcoin,” Justin Grensing of American Express said.

Unslashed Finance raises $2M for crypto insurance platform

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The reformed Bitcoin Maxi who saw the light: Erik Voorhees

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“We felt like we were doing God’s work,” explains cryptocurrency payments pioneer Erik Voorhees as he recalls trying to convert the unbelievers in the early days of Bitcoin.

The man whose gambling platform SatoshiDice was once responsible for half of all Bitcoin transactions, is now an elder statesman of crypto and the CEO of the ShapeShift exchange.

He remembers Bitcoin being written off as a joke at the Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas back in 2012. At the time he was working for BitInstant, one of the first Bitcoin exchanges, and they had a booth right next door to PayPal.

“I remember the PayPal people nearby kind of snickering at us. A couple of them had maybe heard of Bitcoin. If they’d even heard about it, it was a total joke — a stupid scam on the internet, or something. It was a totally unproductive conference.”

History has not been kind to the snickerers and scam-sayers, many of whom have since been converted. In 2020, eight years after the conference, Paypal finally joined the fray, enabling users to buy and sell crypto, and it will soon add it as a method of payment at 29 million merchants.

Voorhees spread the gospel of Satoshi at the conference alongside Charlie Shrem and Roger Ver. Shrem was the founder of BitInstant, viewed by some as a martyr to the cause after serving two years in prison on a case related to an exchange user reselling Bitcoin on the darknet marketplace Silk Road. Ver was perhaps the biggest believer of all, earning the nickname ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ for his charismatic promotion of the currency.

“In terms of proselytizing, Roger was the absolute best. He was a total maniac about it” Voorhees recounts with a chuckle.

“Even for Charlie and I, who were very much supportive of the general sentiment, It was pretty overwhelming and just incessant.”

“Everyone that works at a startup feels a little bit like they’re changing the world, that they have this huge mission, and certainly every company tries to amplify that,” he says, being a CEO himself. But for Bitcoiners, Voorhees clarifies, “it is really a ‘change the world’ kind of thing, and to change the world on a fundamental level. It’s to change the institution of money itself — that is a profoundly tall order.”

Vorhees explains that he sees Bitcoin as nothing less than revolutionary:

“It’s not just a better user-interface for the money that people had before. It’s a different type of money that changes government, changes culture, changes social and economic relationships on a very very deep deep level. That’s why it’s taken so long to to catch on, to get recognized, because it is trying to move into such an entrenched institution.”

Libertarian roots

Now 35, Voorhees spent his early ‘90’s childhood in the mountains of Colorado before moving to the University of Puget Sound near Seattle in 2003. He studied international economics and business but doesn’t really feel like he learnt either.

“In the entire major of economics, though I had courses in the history of economic thought, I never learned about the Austrians,” he says, referring to the Austrian School of economics. Often ignored by mainstream Keynesian economists, Austrians are obsessed with things like hard money and decry unbacked fiat currencies so they have been embraced by gold-bugs and the Bitcoin community, which is after all, often called ‘digital gold’.

A freshly minted graduate in 2008, Voorhees left to pursue adventure in Dubai where “anyone with a college degree could immediately get a job, because they were growing so fast.”

Working as a marketer for a real estate agency, he watched from a distance as the world he thought he knew began to buckle under the weight of the unfolding Global Financial Crisis. Dubai did not feel its effects until half a year later, he recounts, describing the intervening time as “this very weird period where Dubai was going through this massive economic boom, and the rest of the Western world was falling apart.”

From this desert oasis spared from the global drought, the business and economics graduate “started really understanding money on what I felt was a very fundamental level.” For Voorhees, the story of money is a simple one: “money emerges as the good that is bartered for most frequently.” That used to be gold and is currently fiat money, but it could just as well be something else, if a more useful and efficient money was embraced.

Upon this realization, Voorhees took on a “very strong aversion to fiat currency and to government control of money” because as a believer in a market economy, he felt that no government should control the price or distribution of any goods. “Money was actually the most important good of all, and thus most important to not be centrally planned. And yet it was even in, you know, allegedly capitalist economies,” he says.

“A capitalist economy that has a government-managed money system seemed completely antithetical, but I didn’t have any answers or solutions to that other than some kind of return to the gold standard, which seemed somewhat anachronistic.”

Voorhees returned to Colorado after two years abroad, soon moving to New Hampshire to join The Free State Project, an organized political migration which he describes as “a multi-decade initiative to move 20,000 radical libertarians to one small jurisdiction [New Hampshire] to hopefully have an outsized influence on the political structure.” It was there, in the company of fellow radical libertarian political activists, that Voorhees encountered Bitcoin in 2011.

“At that point I got completely hooked, and a year later ended up leaving New Hampshire and moving to New York to join Charlie Shrem at BitInstant.” There, he took the reins of marketing as employee number three.

It was around that time that Charlie Shrem, Roger Ver, and Erik Voorhees — each of whom would go on to become crypto-luminaries in their own right — pooled their money together to set up a Bitcoin booth at the Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas. “We needed to be next to the PayPal booth so we can show the world OUR financial system,” Shrem recounted. Vorhees says they failed to convert anyone to Bitcoin at the conference despite their best efforts.

Belief in false profits

Vorhees admits he used to be a Bitcoin Maximalist, a believer in the one true coin who rejected all false currencies. “I used to be a maximalist. Obviously when I got into Bitcoin, it was kind of the only coin,” he says.

“As other coins came out I dismissed them, scoffed at them, and generally didn’t like them because I felt like they were a distraction from the important project.”

Though he tried to focus on Satoshi’s vision, the new projects started gnawing at him and he realized that many of them “were doing things that Bitcoin wouldn’t do or couldn’t do.” By mid 2014, his conversion was in full swing.

“My whole mindset began changing. One of the most important things about Bitcoin is that it is decentralised. And it seemed to me antithetical to have a decentralized digital economy where there is only one chain — you know, one code base, one chain, one set of economic rules. It seemed very appropriate that you would get multiple different digital assets, and that was actually part of the decentralization, part of the virtue of Bitcoin was that Bitcoin isn’t the only thing there.”

He tempers this by adding the usual provisos — most tokens are garbage, many are scams, a majority will fail. “It’s only a minority of them that are interesting, but a minority is a lot more than one.”

He still has empathy for his “shortsighted” maximalist peers, who he sees as victims of human nature’s tendency toward tribalism, which expresses itself in lots of ways, “Certainly it expresses itself in religion. And it has expressed itself in crypto, and some portion of people- their mind twists itself into complete advocacy of one flag and complete derision of all others.”

“[It’s] a group psychological phenomena and I don’t know how that stops, but I do think it is really harmful for the growth of decentralized digital finance generally.”

Gambling with Satoshi’s dice

Only a year after learning about Bitcoin, Voorhees launched Bitcoin-based gambling site SatoshiDice in 2012, which took the young crypto community by storm.

“On Reddit, this guy posted that he had created this casino-like mechanism where there’d be this dice roll, and based on the dice roll, a user would either get their coins sent back or lose them. I tried it, and there was magic in it immediately […] So I started working with him.”

This was groundbreaking because “it allowed any person in the world to place a bet by sending a Bitcoin transaction” no matter where they were from or how their local laws governed online gambling.

What’s more, the player did not need to trust SatoshiDice, because “it was provably fair,” meaning that it worked like a transparent machine where all odds and inner workings were open for anyone to inspect. Governments around the world have various commissions to regulate and audit gambling operations, but SatoshiDice’s function potentially made such organizations obsolete, powerless, or both.

“SatoshiDice showed you what the odds were. It was transparent with the odds, and you could prove that the rules were fair.”

The simple, trusted, and permissionless nature of SatoshiDice brought huge success to the platform. Within months of launch, the game was responsible for as much as half of all Bitcoin transactions.

SatoshiDice had an unofficial IPO on the MPEx exchange, a sort of Bitcoin stock market where unregistered Bitcoin companies offered shares and paid dividends denominated in BTC. These were the forerunner of the ICO boom several years later, and attracted similar attention from authorities for breaking securities laws.

Though the casino was “making a tonne of money,” it was also overwhelming as Voorhees felt his job of “running the world’s biggest Bitcoin casino” was distracting him from his greater calling of preaching the good word of Satoshi. Despite ongoing growth, he reluctantly sold the business in 2013 for 126,315 BTC which was then worth $12 million. That would be a cool $6.25 billion today.

Fighting the system

Voorhees did not enjoy calm for long, as the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) soon came after him for making a public offering of unregistered securities. Voorhees considered this unfair, seeing that his investors had made exponential returns. He ended up settling for $50,000.

“That was nine months of total misery, dealing with them. If I didn’t despise the government before, I certainly did it after that. It was such bullshit.”

A core value of his is that people should be free to transact with each other voluntarily, and that no government agency has the right to come in between them. In his worldview, “institutions and government exist purely to curtail people’s power over money,” whereas “crypto gives people total economic power to make transactions in any way they wish, and no one can stop it.” As Voorhees sees it, these two forces will inevitably clash.

Voorhees’ company Shapeshift allows users to trade cryptocurrencies without identity verification. Things were not always that way — in 2018 Voorhees says his company fell under the same rules as traditional banks and therefore had to implement Know Your Customer, or KYC, identity verification procedures, making anonymous transactions impossible. “That was absolutely miserable. Our customers hated it. I hated it.”

But by 2020, decentralized exchanges (DEX’s) which allow users to trade without depositing their funds with a third party were gaining ground and made it possible for Shapeshift to reorient its business and re-align with its libertarian values. All KYC was abandoned, and the platform became a gateway for users to trade on various DEX’s. “I had learned with Satoshi Dice that an economic relationship didn’t need anything other than a public key to send in a transaction, and anything else could be based around that,” he says.

Voorhees says that his opposition to KYC is not down to ideology but his desire to protect users against things like identity theft.

“Identity theft in the US alone is something like a $30B to $40 billion a year problem. It is more costly than all forms of property theft combined. It’s this massive thing, and crypto comes along and solves that problem.”
But how committed is he to this principle? Would he class it as theft if a government accessed user data to tax a client’s unreported financial transactions. “Yeah, exactly. Taxation is absolutely theft,” he responds with blunt matter-of-factness.

The WSJ investigates

ShapeShift’s ethos has proven controversial among adherents to the rules and regulations around traditional finance. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal alleged Shapeshift users had laundered $9 million via the platform. However a third-party analysis by blockchain intelligence firm CipherBlade suggested the investigation was flawed in assuming that funds were illicit even after passing through four different hands, causing the $9 million figure to be inflated by a factor of four. It is clear that Voorhees, who is normally calm and composed, was deeply affected by this.

“Here’s The Wall Street Journal coming after us, calling us the money launderer, when their own inflated number would put us as far better [at combating money laundering] than any of the major banks that they write about all the time.”

There’s a noticeable quaver in his voice. The battle is personal.

We spend the last minutes comparing attitudes toward money in different societies. In the Nordic countries for example, all taxes are a matter of public record. Voorhees finds this disturbing, adding that “a lot of people with money feel guilty about it” whereas creating wealth in an ethical way he believes is a good thing for society.

“I would like to see people who become very wealthy, first of all be proud of that, so long as they did it in an ethical way, and to use those resources in whatever way they think is best. I think that’s how that’s how economies grow and I think there’s nothing wrong with that.”

The reformed Bitcoin Maxi who saw the light: Erik Voorhees

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3 Stages when creating a Decentralized Crypto App

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Codezeros

The popularity of cryptocurrency is popular worldwide, with the multiplicity of a varied one being invented every single day. In accordance with Google, there are approximately 6000 of them, and if you intend to set the blockchain up, you must be aware of the ownership soon being handed over to the users..

With blockchain blowing our minds up, it has found its direct application in decentralized applications. The applications are here to match the service information with users in the absence of any middlemen. This can, however, be implemented in any industry. With the projects on the soar, we are witnessing the rising demand for decentralized applications and the need for new blockchain developers.

Why do you need to create a decentralized application?

Decentralized applications render essential perks to an application. The apps had been invigorated, especially for the cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges; however, the scenario is slowly changing with the due course of time.

Now that you have decided to go for DApps Development, it is a must to be aware of the stages to create one. Here is detailed information on stages pertaining to creating a decentralized crypto app.

3 stages to develop a decentralized crypto app:

Stage 1:

Create a product appropriate for the market:

This is, in fact, the first and foremost rule for any startup founder. While creating the first version of a product, it is mandatory to focus on meeting the market requirements while pondering to collect the first users. This is when you require a robust development team applying the agile methodology and equipped with the necessary skills. This is also when you require a constructive and strategized marketing plan and, of course, transparency. Feel free to share your development and documentation plans with a professional Blockchain Dapps Development Company.

The cryptocurrencies are entirely dependent on decentralization along with token distribution between users. However, this is not true at this stage. This is when you need to control the procedures and quickly process decisions on your own. This needs to be followed by evaluating the market hypothesis and further needs feedback from prior users.

Stage 2:

Time to prosper:

The second stage is extremely pivotal to activate members. The founders need a community that is largely capable of sustaining a robust network, and hence needs to activate the users in ways more than one. Some of the ways include granting, encouraging individuals to take part in product development, and more. This marks the onset of shifting responsibility from the owners to the users.

This ends with making an agreement that decisions are performed by consensus and brings the system a step closer to decentralization. The network gets a lot secured for users that pave the way to attract new users. The second step involves the primary need to make a decision.

Steps to expand the network:

This is rather the most popular way to distribute tokens. A blockchain owner needs to evaluate the available tokens in your system. At this stage, considerations such as the number of tokens to be left on your side, the number of tokens to be distributed, the number of tokens to be rewarded, and more need to be assessed.

Stage 3

Decentralized crypto app:

As the third stage of the process, it is time to decentralize crypto apps.

This is when cryptocurrencies come to the realm and paves the way for an alternative approach. The approach is based on blockchain technology offers each user a unique opportunity to become a payment processor on the network. This leads to creating decentralization without attaining any failure point. As a result, it gets all the more efficient, resilient, and democratic, helping you to be a crypto app founder for Ethereum App Development and meet your goal..

With a developed network of users, you can acquire an easier way of distributing tokens in a well-distributed manner. The community then takes complete responsibility for the system. Only a decentralized solution guarantees a fully secured network, making it all the more beneficial and prospective for the users.

Conclusion:

By adhering to the steps mentioned above, you can slowly pave the way towards developing a decentralized crypto app. The apps are a potent choice for a varied case, and no wonder the solutions attract users with the reliability, speed, and loyalty they have in their bag. With the market as expansive as this, you need an app that promises more extensive innovation and convenience. Thus, it is recommended to get in touch with reliable decentralized DApp development services to curate an app as per your business needs and requirements. With the professionals by your side, you need not worry about creating a decentralized crypto app. Hence, explore the services around and make your best pick, entrusting the leading development services.

3 Stages when creating a Decentralized Crypto App

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Soccer fan tokens on the march as Poland’s biggest club adopts crypto

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The spread of blockchain-based soccer fan tokens across Europe continued on Feb. 22, as Poland’s most successful soccer club partnered with sports fintech firm, Chiliz.

Legia Warsaw, which holds the record for the most number of Polish league championship wins, will launch a token on the fan engagement and rewards platform, Socios.

The $LEG fan token is expected to launch in the coming months and will grant supporters voting rights on various club decisions. Token holders will also be eligible to take part in exclusive games, competitions and VIP experiences. The supply of $LEG fan tokens will be capped at five million.

Legia Warsaw joins 21 European footballing giants to have created fan tokens on the Socios platform recently. Major soccer institutions such as Lionel Messi’s F.C Barcelona, Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s AC Milan have all launched club-based fan tokens on the Chiliz blockchain.

CEO of Legia Warsaw Dariusz Mioduski appeared optimistic about interacting with the new technology offered up by blockchain and tokenization.

“Pioneering solutions and new technologies, which additionally give our fans unique opportunities to actively participate in the life of our club, are the exact direction in which we want to develop,” said Mioduski, adding, “We believe that the potential of the most popular sports brand in this part of Europe, which Legia Warsaw undoubtedly is, will allow Socios.com to gain many fans not only in Poland, but also in the international arena.”

The CEO and founder of Socios.com and Chiliz, Alexandre Dreyfus, welcomed Legia Warsaw onto the Socios platform and anticipated it would increase overall fan engagement.

“Very soon Legia fans all around the world will have a new way to get closer to the club they love and will be able to influence the team in polls, access VIP rewards, exclusive promotions, chat forums and much more on Socios.com,” Dreyfus said, adding, “We’re sure $LEG Fan Tokens will be a massive hit with fans and become a very powerful new engagement tool for the club.”

Soccer fan tokens on the march as Poland’s biggest club adopts crypto

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Graph Protocol has Integrated Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, Celo, and Plans to Expand Other Layer 1 Blockchains

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Graph Protocol has Integrated Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, Celo, and Plans to Expand Other Layer 1 Blockchains

According to the latest announcement, Graph protocol is considering integrating Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, and Celo. 

After a successful mainnet launch on Ethereum in December, it is now planning to integrate additional Layer-1 Blockchains, including Bitcoin. Also, it was reported that it recently integrated with some of the Decentralized Finance(DeFi) protocols such as Uniswap, AAVE, Decentraland, Gnosis, Balancer, and Synthetix.

The Graph is a protocol that enables developers to build APIs, called subgraphs, that can query and index Blockchain data. It aims to offer an infrastructure for accessing on-chain data from various Blockchains, with the broader purpose of promoting collaboration and interoperability across the decentralized web.

It was noted that Graph already supports various Blockchains such as Ethereum, IPFS, and POA, and InterPlanetary File System. 

Graph Aims to Support All Layer 1 Blockchains and Become Acceptable Indexing and Query Solution

Graph launched its mainnet on Dec. 17, 2020, allowing developers to search, index, use and publish data from public Blockchains. Its primary goal is to allow Blockchain Developers to access on-chain data and build dApps quickly. 

As Graph network has already integrated various Blockchains and plans to support all Layer-1 Blockchains as well, it was noted that Ethereum will continue to be the standard for the Graph and its native token, Graph Token (GRT).

In December 2020, when the Graph launched its Mainnet, UniSwap founder Hayden Adams expressed his views regarding using the project. 

He mentioned that the Graph had done great work in making smart contract data easy to monitor and use. 

He believes that the design of the new system will help more developers to build their own subgraphs, leading to much better access to information. 

Eva Beylin, the Director at Graph Network, expressed her views and talked about supporting many chains so that developers can build dApps and accelerate Web3 adoption. The report suggests that Beylin has underlined the need to work toward making Web 3.0 as developer-friendly as Web 2.0. 

She further explained that developers have the ability to choose whichever chain depending on their needs, and Graph protocol will also help current Ethereum developers build interoperable applications.

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online Blockchain Certifications, check out Blockchain Council.

Graph Protocol has Integrated Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, Celo, and Plans to Expand Other Layer 1 Blockchains

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