Set Protocol – the leading DeFi asset management platform – has showcased their forthcoming V2 upgrade with a suite of notable features.

Since it's launch in August of 2019, Set Protocol has captured 

, making it a leading contender for anyone looking to take advantage of automated trading strategies called TokenSets. We've been pretty vocal about our support for Set and their innovative approach to portfolio management, but there's no denying that the 

 has segmented attention away from the protocol in recent weeks.

Now, Set Protocol is shaping up to release a V2 upgrade - a combination of key features centered around offering a more holistic, versatile trading experience for both Set traders and Social Set creators.

"With the explosion of new DeFi protocols, assets, and yield opportunities, it is impossible for the normal person to have the time and effort required to keep up."

"Set V2 opens up passive access to the normal user, and will dramatically lower gas costs as strategy executed is pooled."

While none of the features we'll dive into are live, the blueprint for V2 sets the protocol up to enjoy a renewed wave of activity in the coming weeks.

Underpinning all Sets are a makeup of different ERC20 tokens. Up until now, Set Protocol only supported highly liquid tokens like 

. Now, with their new TWAP rebalances, the flood gates can open for a more diverse range of assets, including popular DeFi tokens like LEND, KNC and SNX.

This comes with underlying support for yield farming, meaning that Sets which incorporate cTokens like cUSDC benefit from COMP rewards or those that leverage Balancer liquidity benefit from BAL. Outside of the more notable strategies, we expect this to expand to emerging farming opportunities like mStable MTA and yearn's YFI just to name a few.

Most importantly, Set V2 will introduce gas optimization for entering and exiting different TokenSets. As any Set trader knows, current Sets are faced with anywhere from $15-50 in trading fees, a big onramp for those looking to enter positions with minimal amounts of capital. While it's unclear exactly how much gas will be reduced, we'd expect to see those entry costs closer to the $5 mark whenever they are rolled out.

For Set Managers, V2 also introduces Set Portfolios which offer flexible index allocations across a variety of assets and TokenSets offered on the platform. This comes in tandem with new types of trade execution including limit orders and margin trading for more risk-savvy, experienced managers.

Last but not least, V2 is likely to bring about lending support for more of DeFi's top protocols including 

 and liquidity from Balancer and Synthetix among others.

For Social Traders, the ability to flex their trading knowledge has never been more opportune. Set Protocol is sure to create a diverse market of competitive traders capturing alpha and sharing it with their holders. Thanks to their trading fee upgrades, managers can incentivize themselves to do well with their capital pool as it directly benefits their return.

The launche of V2 signals the core goal for DeFi traders to be able to enter a position and have it passively accrue value in different market conditions. As DeFi becomes ever more complex, the average user is better suited to leave it to the full degens, and Set serves as a great product to benefit from other's expertise without having to mimic their every move.

In the coming months, it will be interesting to see how Set competes with other platforms offering liquidity mining incentives to capture market share. While rumors have been touted that Set could one day tokenize their protocol, it's not something we expect to see in the short term, and with that, the team will have to be especially creative with how to route liquidity into their top-performing strategies.

For all things Set and their coming V2 upgrades, follow the project 

Set Protocol V2 Upgrades: Yield Farming & Gas Optimization

Set Protocol Shares V2 Upgrades with Yield Farming & Gas Optimization

You may think that things look a little different around here, and you’re right. DeFiRate.com is currently undergoing a big facelift — from the homepage to the landing pages and everything in between.

Our goal with this redesign is to better serve you, our readers, with a more navigable interface and better content. Once our site redesign is complete, you’ll have an easier time finding the information that you want — and there will be a lot more of it, too.

Whether you’re looking for an in-depth review on Polkadot staking or want to find out what exchange offers the highest returns on your tokens for lending, we plan to make that information easy to find and navigate.

That doesn’t mean we’re making a complete departure from the content you’ve come to know and love. We’ll simply be making small changes to better improve the site and the information we’re offering to you.

In addition to the new homepage navigation, which features all of our content sections — lending, staking, exchanges, wallets, loans, NFTs, taxes, and prices — some of the recent improvements we’ve made to our content include:

 We want to make it easy for you to find exactly what you’re looking for when you’re looking for it. No complicated searches required. You’ll be able to locate what you’re looking for quickly and easily.

 We want our content to work for you. Crypto can be complicated, and our goal is to make it more accessible to you. To do that, we’re putting the focus on building comprehensive coverage. We want our content to answer all of your questions — without you asking for it.

 We're going deep — really deep — into the details of our reviews. From wallet functionality to exchange rates, features, and rewards, we're touching on everything you may want to know about the crypto platforms, tools, and tokens you're interested in. 

 If you’re new to crypto or just need to brush up on your terminology, we’ve got you covered. Our goal is to roll out all of the informative content you need to become a crypto expert in no time flat.

 Whether you’re looking for interest rates or earnings rewards, we’ve got that information on hand. It’s easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to navigate — making it simple to decide on the best way to maximize your returns.

And, what’s more is that those are just a few of the improvements we’re making to the site. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop as we roll out new features, new functionalities, and new, exciting changes to our website.

Until then, feel free to reach out to us with any feedback or suggestions you may have. We’d love to hear from you.

DeFiRate.com is getting a revamp — and you're going to like the way it looks.

DeFi Rate Announces 2022 Website Redesign | DeFiRate.com

Notice Anything Different? DeFiRate.com is Getting an Upgrade

This week, Ethereum scaling solution Optimism paid a $2 million bug bounty for the discovery of a bug that would have allowed users to double spend and generate an unlimited amount of tokens without backing. The exploit has been patched, and bug bounties yet again prove one of the most valuable resources for early-stage protocols where security is paramount.

Competing scaling solution Polygon announced a private sale of $450m 

 to investors including Sequoia Capital India, Softbank, and Galaxy Digital. The funds will go towards helping Ethereum maintain its status as the dominant smart contract execution blockchain, and helping Polygon build out a suite of services to become the ‘AWS of Web3’.

Ssv.network (Secret-shared-validator) announced a $10 million fundraise led by Digital Currency Group and Coinbase. Ssv aims to provide a decentralized staking solution for nodes to support the Ethereum consensus layer (formerly Eth 2.0) and will use the fund for collaborations and to fund grants for developers and network participants.

And MakerDAO launched a $10 million bug bounty program of their own by way of leading crypto security firm Immunifi. Bug reports and payments don’t require KYC, and the program will pay out a maximum of up to $10 million for a critical security bug found in the live smart contracts of the protocol.

DeFi hacks are still a common occurrence, which shouldn’t be a big surprise for a less than five year old industry built using entirely new underlying technology. But the headlines do little to validate the notion of DeFi as ‘the future of finance’, and those protocols that have been impacted by a major exploit are likely to face a significantly tougher battle being adopted by institutional finance organizations where such losses could mean the end of the business and potentially even personal liability.

Not every team has the resources to offer bug bounty programs on the scale offered by some of the leading DeFi players like Polygon (who paid their own $2 million bug bounty just a few months ago) or MakerDAO. But those protocols are also less likely to be targeted, as they offer smaller potential rewards for a successful attack.

But the riskiest junctures are likely to be manifest when a good idea’s time has come and applications go from niche with small TVL to the flavor of the day with TVL rapidly rising - these teams are already likely to be overstretched as demand outpaces talent and other resources beyond capital and the potential gain from exploits rapidly grows. In these situations, it’s best to follow the blue chip players as quickly as possible in setting up a bug bounty program, even if the rewards don’t scale up to $10 million. Credibility takes years to generate and seconds to destroy, and there’s no shame in incentivising the developer community to check your work.

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This Week in DeFi – February 11

 (AVAX) originally set out to be the home of DeFi, and has hosted a number of projects that make the most of its faster, more efficient ecosystem. And the list is growing.

Avalanche is true to its name. With 364 projects launched in the last 14 months, the smart contracts platform for decentralized applications is taking its role as an 

 competitor seriously. As the PoS blockchain with the fastest speeds and the most validators, it is ideally positioned to serve its chosen niche as DeFi’s destination of choice. Holders can easily generate yield from their positions by 

In addition to faster speeds, users enjoy lower costs to deploy smart contracts (currently one-tenth of the costs on Ethereum). Avalanche Virtual Machines allow developers to launch customized blockchains. Users can transfer assets to and from Ethereum easily via the Avalanche Bridge.

The network is not resting on its laurels, but aggressively targeting growth in its ecosystem. It recently launched the fund Blizzard, with 

$200m to be allocated to projects in DeFi

. This followed close on the heels of Avalanche Rush, a similar initiative involving $180m to fund developers looking to launch projects on the platform.

On top of its observable growth, the sheer amount of energy behind the Avalanche protocol speaks to its future potential to shape the future of DeFi. In this article, we are going to look at the projects that are currently need-to-know.

DeFi is at its heart the attempt to recreate the traditional banking system using chain-based solutions, avoiding the endemic issues of waste and bureaucracy that tend to plague centralized institutions.

DeFi, therefore, covers a lot of different fields. The 58 apps classified as DeFi in the Avalanche Ecosystem consist of a combination of home-grown applications and integrations of existing solutions (

Below, we examine some of the leading DeFi applications developed on and for the Avalanche network. Many of them are an answer to the question, “What would [insert name of well-known dApp] look like if it was faster and cheaper to use?”

Naturally, there are also genuine innovations that add to the existing DeFi universe.

One of the first ways in which DeFi revolutionized finance was the methods by which new projects raise money. The ICO boom of 2017 was one of the first major DeFi experiments, and it certainly delivered some important data. How projects are vetted and nurtured is fundamental to the future of DeFi.

“Welcome to the future of fundraising”

Avalaunch is the Avalanche network’s native solution for helping new projects launch and build communities. It is essentially an Initial DEX Offering (IDO) platform that aims to fix the common problems with decentralized funding, from basics such as pricing and speed to user experience.

While not a new concept, it brings an additional layer of ease and reliability to the wild west of decentralized listing. Listing on a typical platform can require a certain level of patience and expertise. A natural step in the evolution of any new technology is that processes require less effort and encounter fewer bugs.

If this seems like a small innovation, remember that it is how Apple in its golden age made everything it touched into a mass-adopted technology, without having to cut prices.

In a blog post earlier this year, the company expressed a more inclusive approach to non-native Avalanche projects. On the basis that the future is multi-chain, they assert, "a good team with a strong vision, regardless of their current chain of choice, is absolutely worth our time and attention".

 laid the foundation of decentralized finance by introducing permissionless payments, pioneers such as Aave and 

 laid another by solving the problem of how to decentralize borrowing. Avalanche’s own solution is in turn an important step in its work to move the DeFi field beyond the constraints of Ethereum.

Currently one of the hottest projects on the network, Benqi is a decentralized, non-custodial borrowing and 

. In practical terms, it offers users the core functionality of a bank: users can borrow and lend digital assets (WETH.e, WBTC.e, USDT.e, etc.), and earn interest. As it also operates as a bridge to Ethereum, users of the latter can escape the limitations of the Ethereum network.

There are plans to add liquidity staking and to launch an additional DeFi primitive to enhance the range of DeFi strategies open to Avalanche users. Also on the roadmap are a series of subnets (similar to parachains) that will allow institutions to build networks without the limitations of Virtual Machines.

From a governance perspective, the development team is targeting progressive decentralization towards proper DAO status. Liquidity mining incentives will ensure that the native QI tokens are distributed more widely, along with governance.

As the majority of DeFi activity still revolves around trading, the same is true of the most celebrated Avalanche projects. In addition to the below, these include Lydia Finance, Canary Exchange, Elk Finance, and Olive Cash (both multi-chain).

Pangolin is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for Avalanche and Ethereum assets. Originally a fork of the 

 DEX, it uses the automated market-maker model (AMM) to offer P2P trading - only faster and cheaper. It is unusual in prioritizing fiat integration, offering users the ability to purchase the native Avalanche token AVAX using Apple Pay or Credit Credit. This reflects its strategy to reach a larger audience of users.

The project emphasizes the fact that it is community-owned and community-driven. The original intention was to distribute 100% of the native PNG tokens to the community (liquidity mining and airdrops).

The community recently voted to reduce the supply of PNG by 57% (from 538 million to 230 million) to improve the underlying tokenomics, and to allocate 30m tokens to a foundation to fund the 'long-term sustainability' of the network.

"One-stop-shop decentralized trading on Avalanche"

While Pangolin may have been the original Avalanche DEX, Trader Joe has risen in recent months to become the largest with a TVL of $2.49bn as of the time of writing (compared to Pangolin's $419m).

It markets itself as a “one-stop” trading platform for the Avalanche user base. It is also planning to expand into the Lending space (via its "Banker Joe" arm), and potentially aims to become an end-to-end DeFi provider in the long term.

Unlike Pangolin, its tokenomics are more traditional, with 40% split between the developer team and the treasury, and 10% set aside for strategic investors (a group that already includes Defiance Capital). Rewards are focused on holders of the JOE token (rather than liquidity providers) who share in the trading fees.

Interestingly, neither Trader Joe nor Pangolin waive trading fees (as some other DEXes do), but seek to differentiate via functionality and user experience.

The DeFi focus of Avalanche naturally attracts projects that aim to solve highly-specific issues with the financial system, such as Verso Finance (which aims to connect traditional finance with decentralized finance). The majority of specialized projects exist to assist DeFi-specific investment strategies, such as yield farming.

Penguin Finance is based on PancakeSwap, and its stated aim is to bring yield-farming, staking, and other functionalities to the Avalanche Network. Leveraging the Pangolin platform for trading, it presents users with a gamified design to incentivize and enable them to pursue various DeFi investing strategies.

The platform includes actual games (Penguin Emperor, Penguin Arena), charity events, NFTs, and ‘the cheapest and highest-yielding auto-compounding protocol on the Avalanche network”.

Holders of the PEFI token can Yield-Farm in “Igloos”, stake in “Nests”, and earn additional rewards from partners in “Club Penguin”. Users have various incentives to invest long-term. The coin is built on a deflationary mechanism so that the value increases over time, and there is a 'Paper Hands Penalty' of 6% for unstaking PEFI.

Deflationary tokens and ‘paper hands’ penalties incentivize users to invest long-term. While it is looking for a stable base, it is a frenetically evolving platform and worth following.

Yield Yak is an auto-compounding farming platform for the Avalanche network. It enables users to deposit LP tokens they have received from other Avalanche DEXes such as Pangolin and maximize their yield.

Although gas fees are cheaper on Avalanche, they are not negligible. Yield Yak pools the LPs deposited by users in a smart contract leverages economies of scale to reinvest rewards more efficiently.

Auto-compounding saves users time, and dividing the costs of investing and compounding maximizes the farming yield. Eventually, users will also be rewarded for their activity with YAK tokens (not yet released), which give holders a share in the governance of the platform and its trading fees.

While the concept appears sound and there is no evidence of suspicious behavior, questions remain about the safety of the protocol and its audit status. It currently holds a score of 2.74 on isthiscoinascam.com.

Avalanche is just getting started. This overview has been like a snapshot of a sprinter about 5 meters out of the starting block, and is not intended to be definitive or complete. It is intended to give a sense of the pace of innovation on this (relatively) young platform.

The cleaner, quicker ecosystem that AVAX provides will no doubt be a source of many more innovative projects in the future. With its open attitude and willingness to collaborate, it is likely that many future projects on Avalanche will begin life outside the network.

While we have focused on native Avalanche applications, the future Avalanche envisages is one of interoperability rather than tribal loyalty. That is a great point in its favor, as the market overall shifts from the old question of the Flippening to the Great Convergence.

Avalanche DeFi Projects

Cross-chain protocol THORChain (RUNE) has suffered around $8 million in losses in a new exploit today - its second hack in just over a week.

 router, with the hacker surprisingly stealing less funds than they could have made away with.

The exploit took advantage of THORChain’s ETH router, which controls the movement of Ethereum-based tokens through the project’s cross-chain decentralized exchange.

The exact mechanics of the exploit are still to be disclosed, however 

the attacker managed to drain significant amounts

, Alchemix (ALCX) and XRUNE Token (XRUNE). The total value of tokens drained amounted to around $8 million.

The attacker then offloaded all of the proceeds via decentralized exchanges 

 at extremely high slippage, securing around $4.1 million in ETH.

Interestingly, the hacker left a message on one of the transactions indicating that they could have taken several other assets from the protocol if they so desired. They also added that a 10% value-at-risk bounty would have prevented the attack, as well as warning against rushing code that controls such a large sum of funds.

The THORChain team has halted the functionality of the ETH router until it has been peer-reviewed with audit partners. This will disable any further transfer of Ethereum-based assets via the platform. Liquidity providers in the ERC20 token pools will also be compensated.

 from the team said that they would be willing to award the requested 10% bounty if the hacker reaches out, out of the project’s treasury.

The attack is the second in just eight days, 

 resulted in more than $6 million in losses.

THORChain (RUNE) Suffers Second Exploit in 8 Days, $8M Stolen

This week, Chainswap raised $3 million in a funding round led by Alameda Research and the OKEx OK Block Dream Fund, while also taking the rare step of announcing an upcoming airdrop before the snapshot has been taken. Chainswap currently bridges between Ethereum, BSC, and the Huobi ECHO chain, with plans to integrate the Bitcoin, 

, and Solana blockchains in the near future.

UMA and Sushiswap, two of the fastest moving and innovative projects in the DeFi arena, have teamed up to offer call options for xSushi tokens. The first set of options will expire on May 31st, allowing options buyers to buy xSushi at $25 regardless of the spot price on that date. If the xSushi price is above that price, options holders can execute the contracts and flip xSushi for instant profit.

Balancer was in the headlines this week after announcements that an implementation of the crypto swap protocol would be coming to Algorand, with some confusion over who would be engineering the project. The Balancer team will remain focused on building Balancer V2 on Ethereum, while participants from Reach and the Algorand team plan to have a Balancer implementation up and running in Q3. Reach received a small $5k grant from Balancer to support the mission of expanding to new crypto frontiers.

Kyber is making moves to further increase the capital efficiency of one of the earliest token swap protocols with the beta release of the Kyber Dynamic Market Maker. The DMM will use variable fees to offer liquidity providers some protection against impermanent loss, and will reduce slippage slippage for traders. Kyber’s DMM will also allow LPs to define active price ranges similar to the 

 V3 implementation, adding further protection against impermanent loss while potentially limiting prices at which price ranged liquidity pools will be used for swaps.

It’s undeniable; if you’re willing to go hunting for opportunity, DeFi is back in business and stronger than ever, with multiple low-cost chains to choose from and major developments flowing out of some of the most established and innovative teams in the industry. With so many new capabilities cropping up after months of research and development, the density of alpha-rich asymmetric bets is approaching levels last seen in the spring of 2020, when DeFi was just starting to ramp up as users came to realize the full potential of composable protocols and the increasing demand for sources of non-traditional returns.

It’s true, there’s more ground to cover between old reliable plays on Ethereum, BSC, Algorand, and a rising number of cross-chain protocols that don’t call any single base layer home. But a focus on good tokenomics and projects with a long-term view are likely to outperform over time, even if they’re not the most popular flavor of the day. In a fast moving market, slow research might just still be your best friend. Few...

: Nexo Lend at 10% APY, Fulcrum at 9.52% APY

: Fulcrum at 11.51% APY, Poloniex at 10.69% APY

This Week in DeFi - April 9

 is a nifty new tool that aggregates all known airdrops and POAP tokens on one page. Users can visit Earnifi, input their wallet address and see immediately if they are eligible for any airdrop rewards that they may have forgotten to claim.

 and avid Ethereum Developer. The project was recently an on-stage finalist at ETHglobal, in both rounds of judging, a judge claimed 

In just the first 36 hours of launch, Earnifi has already helped DeFi users claim over 

 in forgotten airdrop rewards. This number is likely to increase rapidly with the rising number of DeFi protocols that look to airdrop their native protocol tokens as a way to bootstrap their initial community.

, and others have all utilized to some degree this last year. There is no doubt that many wallet owners are unaware of the rewards that may be sitting dormant, waiting to be claimed.

Dawson has even added a feature that can notify users of new airdrops associated with their provided wallet address by email. Never miss an airdrop again!

Keep up with DeFi Dawson by following him on 

Earnifi Helps Ethereans Claim Forgotten Airdrops

 has just completed their $10M Series B fundraise, the decentralized perpetuals trading exchange welcomes Three Arrows Capital and 

 on board as the lead investors of this round.

Both lead investors stated that much of their motivation in wanting to invest in dYdX was due to the fact they are active users of the product. Other investors involved in this round include Wintermute, 

The protocol’s main point of differentiation is its high-performance matching engine with order books, which delivers an institutional-grade trading experience that is hard to find in the decentralize finance space.

Since the start of this year, total trading volume has already surpassed $3.5 billion, the team plans to launch dYdX on StarkWare’s layer 2 solution this coming February.

Last year in 2020, the dYdX team was able to achieve multiple milestones such as:

Total cumulative trade volume across Perpetuals, Margin, and Spot trading increased

billion in 2020, up from $63 million in 2019.

Volumes on perpetual contracts accounted for 

new team members across Engineering, Design, & Growth.

With the influx of new capital, the team plans to rapidly add new tradeable assets, invest in strategic markets, hire addition developers, and decentralize the protocol further.

dYdX Secures $10m in Series B Raise

 - a popular aggregator of decentralized exchanges - has announced their 

This latest update includes a revamped UI, optimized gas fees, and other improvements that ensure the most optimal rates for users when performing token swaps through 1inch. Swaps on 1inch exchange are split across 21 supported decentralized exchanges, including familiar names like 

The biggest update in V2 is the introduction of the Pathfinder API, this new API contains a novel discovery and routing algorithm that will help 1inch users find the best possible paths for a token swap in the shortest amount of time possible. The Pathfinder API also ensures that token swaps are split between the underlying exchanges based on "market depths", this gets users the best rates while also taking gas fees into account. Beyond just simple swaps, the PathFinder API gives users the ability to pack, unpack, and migrate collateral tokens from lending protocols like 

. A feature like this can save DeFi users a ton of time and gas fees.

1inch has been working hard to reduce failed transactions on their platform as well and in this update, they've shared their answer to failed transactions - a partial and dynamic fill mechanism. This solution ensures that instead of wasting gas on failed transactions, the user's unswapped tokens can return to their wallet.

Substantial UI improvements have also been made to 1inch as the team built the new user interface completely from scratch. Taking suggestions from their users, the 1inch team also added a key feature for traders to be able to see their entire deal size in USD rather than crypto denominations. By thinking ahead and building the new UI modularly, the 1inch dev team has also empowered users to build their own trading dashboards when using 1inch exchange.

This isn't some random forked project and it shows. 1inch v2 has already passed 5 security audits from 

. There's also another 5 audits from some of the most reputable firms in the space that are still underway. Perhaps even more important than the audits, 1inch is actually quite battle-tested by DeFi standards and has withstood the test of time better than many of the other protocols in the space.

Keep up with 1inch Exchange by following them on 

1inch Exchange Version 2 Release

The anonymous creator removing a large chunk of liquidity is what many have come to meme a 'rug pull'. The dev share contract held more than 2.5M SUSHI along with 20k ETH. After removing nearly half the liquidity from the SUSHI/ETH pool, 2.5M SUSHI was sold for 18k ETH, amounting to roughly $6M of profits at the time of sale and a $7M stash from the other half of the devshare liquidity. In total, Chef Nomi made off with roughly $13M at the time of writing.

While many were quick to claim that ChefNomi has exit scammed, the lead developer has been very vocal about the sale on Twitter, claiming that he cashed out to "focus on building".

As anyone could have guessed, the community is now up and arms, claiming that the entire project is now toast due to a loss of trust. Still, Chef Nomi is chugging on, deploying the contracts for the forthcoming SushiSwap migration set to take place tomorrow.

 dropped by more than 35% as the rest of the market continues to slide for a myriad of reasons.

The timing has left many to wonder if Chef Nomi even planned to hand over the Master Chef and devshare contracts via MultiSig wallet in the first place. Still, the conversation to hand power over to the community continues, albeit with drastically less attention.

Many well-known thought leaders were openly against the 

 clone from day one. With SUSHI down more than 50% on the day, it seems like a poetic ending to the community AMM which aggregated more than $1B in liquidity in under a week. Chef Nomi tried to justify the move by comparing it to what Litecoin founder, Charlie Lee, did when he sold his tokens at the peak of the 2017 bull market.

Now, a weird middle ground ensues. The migration is expected to still happen as planned, and at the time of writing 

 still has nearly $900M in liquidity currently locked in it's contracts. Whether it be due to outrageous gas prices or an underdog hope that SushiSwap can give the funding to a community-owned wallet, the next 48 hours are sure to be one of the most interest we've seen to date.

To stay up with SushiSwap, follow the project 

Chef Nomi Pulls the SUSHI Rug on SushiSwap LPs

DeFi truly never sleeps, with "insurance mining" and a new token called SAFE making big waves this past week. After a strong community push, a suite of internal drama has brought the project back down to reality.

yieldfarming.insure is a project launched by an anonymous developer that distributes SAFE governance tokens to users who locked up insurance-related crypto assets like the wrapped version of Nexus Mutual tokens, wNXM.

Much of the hype behind the SAFE project was driven by community assumptions that the project would be closely related to DeFi blue chips like 

 & NXM. All of the insurance-related assets staked to the platform are underwritten by Nexus Mutual and the anon developer behind SAFE. The project started to gain traction when Chef Insurance revealed that he received a $25k grant from yearn founder Andre Cronje.

With SAFE, farmers could stake to any of the four supported pools you to earn governance tokens.

Just days after staking pools opened, the price of SAFE spiked to a peak of over $4,000. Crypto twitter was buzzing with predictions of the kind of innovative insurance products that SAFE might be able to create. Some were even bold enough to compare it directly to YFI. But, SAFE suddenly experienced a meteoric fall in price after the release of some 

Chef Insurance accused community member and investor Azeem Ahmed of various unethical actions. The lone dev claims that he was manipulated early on and that Azeem had plans to maximize profits to the detriment of the wider SAFE community.

Of course, there are always two sides to every story and Azeem has also been vocal on twitter making the case the Chef Insurance was simply too inexperienced which led to a breakdown in collaboration. Here's his rebuttal.

Make of it what you will, but incentives were clearly not aligned here and many are now left holding large bags of SAFE wondering how the project can redeem itself.

After coming clean about the back-end dealings behind SAFE, Chef Insurance was met with community support. The project now plans to migrate to a new token untouched by the individuals that Chef had called out as whales looking to “pump and dump” SAFE.

What remains is a divided community resulting from yet another yield rush flying too close to the sun.

Insurance Mining Hits a Speed Bump with SAFE Drama

Flexa - a crypto payments protocol - has 

 in light of a product upgrade in partnership with Consensys.

The protocol's new token, AMP, will replace Flexacoin (FXC) - giving token holders the ability to stake AMP as collateral to Flexa-enabled apps. With Flexa, tokeholders stake tokens to different applications as 'spending power' for vendors to accept cryptocurrencies as payment. Stakers receive rewards relative to their amount of tokens staked. The AMP token functions very similar to FXC, with select upgrades to flexibility for future use cases. More on the change 

On September 30th, FXC will no longer be supported in the Flexa app at which point the team will destroy ownership of the Flexacoin token contract. Before then, token holders should migrate their Flexacoin to AMP at a 1-1 exchange rate using the 

It’s important to note that the September 30th deadline is the last day that FXC holders will still receive proportional network rewards, but there is actually NO deadline for swapping your Flexacoin for AMP. It will always be possible to migrate from FXC to AMP for as long as the Ethereum blockchain is online.

Although there is no rush to migrate your FXC for AMP, its best to do it before the deadline to maximize Flexa Network rewards. At the time of writing, AMP staking is currently offering 5.5% APY on the SPEDN network, the most popular staking pool.

, connect your wallet holding FXC, and follow the on-screen instructions.

AMP token is now the primary collateral token securing all transactions on the Flexa network where it will serve more generalized purposes so that projects other than Flexa can use it as digital collateral. Check out the official docs on the AMP token 

Beyond making technical improvements, the Flexa team has also announced a strong exchange partnership with the launch of the new AMP token. Gemini - a regulated New York crypto exchange - will be the first market to support AMP.

Flexa’s focus on proper auditing, smooth migration, and strategic exchange partnerships is a nice change from the wild west of Uniswap token listings we’ve become accustomed to in the recent past.

To keep up with Flexa, follow the project 

Flexa Announces AMP Token Migration for Retail Crypto Payments

 - the sector leading DEX - has released its 

 with a community airdrop to anyone who has interacted with Uniswap prior to September 1st.

Underpinning the hottest governance token to date was a retroactive airdrop where any account that interacted with Uniswap V1 or V2 contracts received 400 UNI. Liquidity Providers also earned favorable rewards based on historical liquidity while the 220 holders of at least one $SOCKS (a tokenized Uniswap merchandise item) received 1000 UNI.

In total, 150,000,000 UNI - or 15% of the supply - was distributed through the community airdrop, broken down as follows:

 historical user addresses [100,613,600 UNI]

To claim UNI rewards, simply head to Uniswap and look for the purple "UNI" box in the top right. Here you will need to submit a transaction to claim your rewards. Please note that 400 UNI was airdropped to any wallet which has ever interacted with Unsiwap, meaning many users may be eligible for multiple airdrops depending on the different number of wallets used.

 pools will each earn an allocation of 5M UNI over the course of the next two months. This breaks down to 83,333.33 UNI per pool per day or 54 UNI per pool per block.

This intro to liquidity mining is set to be followed by formal governance over incentives after the first 30 days in which the community treasury (responsible for future liquidity mining rewards) will be vote on pools & allocations.

Outside of the liquidity mining rewards, UNI's 1B supply is set to be broken down as follows:

All team, investor and advisor tokens will be subject to four-year continuous locks, meaning tokens will unlock in real-time. Here's a breakdown of how these tokens will enter the circulating supply over time.

Perhaps what's most novel about the distribution is an ongoing 2% perpetual inflation set to kick in once all 1B tokens have been distributed. While this parameter is obviously malleable by governance, it sets a fantastic precedence for protocol sustainability.

 both springing to list UNI less than 12 hours after launch, it's clear that DeFi has a new cool token on the block.

In the wake of a SushiSwap attack, anon devs have now learned the golden rules of DeFi:

Uniswap Launches UNI Governance Token with Community Airdrop

It’s the season of vegetables & forks within the DeFi universe and a new dish has been served, and this one needs a chopstick and not a fork! We are talking about the newest entrant – 

SushiSwap is a fork of Uniswap with a native governance token ($SUSHI) and a change in the reward distribution mechanism. With Uniswap, LPs earn 0.3% of trading fees whereas on Sushiswap, LPs will earn 0.25% fees, with the remaining 0.05% being distributed to SUSHI holders.

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