DeFi Project ParaSwap Launches Airdrop of Native Cryptocurrency to Early Adopters

It pays to be early in crypto. And today is no different. As part of its first-ever token launch, decentralized finance (DeFi) project ParaSwap announced today that it is handing out 150 million of its native PSP tokens to early users. 

ParaSwap is a platform that collects different cryptocurrency trading rates from across the DeFi space. One trade may be routed through Uniswap, while another trade may be executed by the Kyber Network. Sometimes, one trade may even be split and routed through two or more different decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to achieve the best rate.

Today’s airdrop makes up roughly 7.5% of the token’s total supply, according to a statement shared with Decrypt. The entire supply will be unlocked gradually over the next four years. 

Source: ParaSwap

Retroactive airdrops like ParaSwap’s have become a highly-popular token distribution model. Uniswap made headlines last year, for example, for launching its UNI token in a similar fashion. Another well-known DeFi platform 1inch Network launched its 1INCH token on Christmas day through a retroactive airdrop. 

Many of these airdrops have gone on to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

The thinking goes that by giving early adopters tokens, they will be more inclined to participate in the protocol’s continued development. This is because these kinds of tokens all carry governance capabilities, allowing users to vote on various issues related to the platform. 

The same is true for the PSP token, however, its primary utility will be that of incentivizing market makers on the platform to remain competitive when offering rates. 

Parswap’s founder Mounir Benchemled said that the project will soon launch a DAO as well. 

How do ParaSwap and PSP work?

ParaSwap is powered by a network of market makers who help match orders for crypto traders. By providing liquidity for a specific trading pair, they also help traders avoid pesky slippage. For this service, market makers earn a fee. 

If there is a high amount of volume for a particular market, then the market maker earns a larger fee.

With the PSP token, the ParaSwap team wants to double down on this mechanism. 

Now, token holders can stake their holdings with market makers that are either providing a reasonable price for their service or are servicing a unique token pair. As the amount of PSP staked increases, so too do the additional awards granted to the market maker. In this way, market makers are earning for high trading volume and through the trust of PSP token holders.

The latter rewards, those earned from staking, are split between the market makers and the stakers every two weeks. This also induces stakers to put their money on the best market maker, as well as incentivizing market makers to provide the best rates for a trade. 

Benchemled said, “We are excited to introduce a brand new model that rewards both stakers and market makers and makes ParaSwap a better trading venue for users, dApps, and protocols.”

 

Do You ‘Like’ My Portfolio? Coinbase Adds Social Media Buttons

Coinbase announced new social media features on Thursday that will allow users to share images of price charts or their portfolios on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

In a blog post describing the features, Coinbase touted its new one-click sharing tools as an entertaining way to educate others about crypto.

“We want to help self-empower the community with easy-to-use sharing tools making it simpler and more fun to share information on your portfolio allocations or key crypto topics such as emerging new assets,” said Coinbase.

For those who elect to share their portfolio, the Coinbase tool will only display percentage allocation not the financial value of the portfolio. It also includes a feature that will automatically share changes to a user’s portfolio to social media, but one that can be toggled on and off.

The move by Coinbase is interesting in part because the company is emulating other financial platforms like Venmo and Public, a stock and crypto-buying app, that have have long made social media a core part of their product.

Meanwhile, Coinbase has also indicated that its forthcoming plans to offer an NFT platform will include a social network.

The company is likely treading carefully, however, since mixing social media and financial platforms poses regulatory risk. Specifically, encouraging users to post about their financial holdings could—in certain circumstances—amount to dispensing investment advice.

In any case, the upshot of Coinbase’s new sharing tools are likely to be more crypto-related messages on social media. The tools could also provide a new source of information for market watchers: If prominent or wealthy traders use the public sharing features, traders may look to emulate their strategies.

The Coinbase news comes after the company, which had been having a blockbuster year, saw its profits decline in the third quarter and its share price slump.

New DAO Forms to Buy Copy of US Constitution at Sotheby’s Auction

ConstitutionDAO, a new decentralized autonomous organization dedicated to preserving the U.S. Constitution, is planning to pool capital using an Ethereum smart contract to purchase a first-edition printed copy of the historic document. Sotheby’s is set to auction the copy on November 18 at 6:30pm EST.

The copy up for auction is valued at $15 million to $20 million. It is sometimes referred to as the Goldman Constitution because it resides in the private collection of the New York-based Goldman family. The document is one of only 11 surviving 1787 first-edition copies.

In 1988, S. Howard Goldman purchased the Constitution copy for $165,000. Now his wife, Dorothy Tapper Goldman, is putting it up for auction. According to Sotheby’s, Dorothy will donate the resulting funds to a charity in her name “dedicated to furthering the understanding of our democracy and how the acts of all citizens can make a difference.”

Julian Weisser, a core contributor to ConstitutionDAO, told Decrypt that the DAO was formed to put the Goldman Constitution back into the public sphere. Weisser did not share with Decrypt how much has been raised so far. 

By creating a DAO and purchasing this Constitution copy with the DAO’s funds, the document will become fractionally owned by each of its contributors. At the time of writing, the ConstitutionDAO’s Discord server has around 5,500 members.

“We are grateful to Dorothy for keeping this important artifact safe, and thrilled that she’s donating the money earned from the sale to a worthy charitable cause,” Weisser told Decrypt.

Connor Swenberg, a protocol architect for SyndicateDAO and a contributor to ConstitutionDAO, wrote on Twitter that Sotheby’s will accept an Ethereum address as proof of funds to participate in the upcoming auction.

In the past, Sotheby’s has occasionally accepted cryptocurrency as a form of payment, but a representative from Sotheby’s bids department in New York told Decrypt that the venerable auction house won’t be accepting cryptocurrency as payment for the Goldman Constitution. This means that all ConstitutionDAO funds will have to be converted from crypto into dollars.

FTX exchange President Brett Harrison offered via Twitter yesterday to exchange ConstitutionDAO’s cryptocurrency to facilitate the Goldman Constitution purchase.

In order to bid in the auction, the DAO also will have to fulfill Sotheby’s KYC (know your consumer) requirements in one of two ways, according to ConstitutionDAO supporter Alice Ma. Either a museum or an LLC will have to bid on the DAO’s behalf.

After the document is purchased, Ma wrote on Discord, the “operating plan is to place the piece on loan for public display at a museum.”

ConstitutionDAO is looking into the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Historical Society as potential homes for the historic document.

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Discord Backs Out of Crypto while Twitter Wades In

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

This week on crypto Twitter: Jimmy Fallon joined the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT craze, Discord CEO Jason Citron hinted that the messaging platform will integrate with crypto, then backtracked a few days later, AMC CEO Adam Aron flaunted the success of AMC’s new crypto payments options, and many more things happened besides. Read on to see our weekly roundup of Twitter’s cryptosphere.

On Monday, Discord CEO Jason Citron tweeted a screenshot of what appeared to be a MetaMask wallet connectivity feature inside the popular messaging platform’s user settings. The tweet was a response to a blog post tweeted by blogger Packy McCormick, who discussed the idea of a “Discord-native crypto wallet” — an idea that first appeared on a Discord user survey back in August. McCormick was sold on the idea. 

However, Citron backtracked days later, tweeting that Discord has “no current plans to ship” this MetaMask integration. Reasons for Citron’s U-turn are unclear, but it could be due to the amount of backlash in responses to his initial tweet. Many of Discord’s core audience of gamers greeted the potential crypto update with cynicism, citing environmental concerns, and the oft-repeated taunt that crypto is a “pyramid scheme”. 

On Wednesday, Twitter announced it was setting up a crypto team to explore decentralized apps. The team will be led by Berlin-based crypto engineering leader Tess Rinearson, who announced her new role on the platform the day the news broke, saying: “I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined Twitter, to lead a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and other decentralized technologies — including and going beyond cryptocurrencies.”

Details of exactly how Twitter plans to get into dApps are scarce, however, the company mentioned that it is ““We’re exploring ways to incorporate decentralized technologies into our products and infrastructure”.

On Wednesday’s “Tonight Show” Jimmy Fallon interviewed NFT artist Beeple, who earlier this year made crypto history when he sold an NFT at auction for $69.3 million.  Fallon told the artist that he bought his first NFT — an ape — which Beeple quickly surmised was a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.

The following day, Fallon changed his Twitter profile pic to his Bored Ape Yacht Club avatar and tweeted “Permission to come a bored?”

That same day, the CEO of movie theatre chain AMC flaunted the success of his company’s decision to start accepting crypto for payments. Adam Aron told his 210,600-plus followers: “We proudly now accept: drumroll, please… Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin. Also Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal. Incredibly, they already account for 14% of our total online transactions! Dogecoin next.”

Meanwhile, Coinbase added buttons to its applications enabling users to share price charts or images of their portfolios on Twitter or Instagram profiles. The move pivots Coinbase toward financial platforms like Venmo or Public, which have long integrated social media features into their applications. 

On Friday, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called ConstitutionDAO announced plans to buy an extremely rare first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution, which is being auctioned through Sotheby’s later this month. 

The DAO has quickly attracted support, gaining 4,688 followers on Discord and 5,561 on Twitter at the time of writing. It’s also getting a helping hand from crypto exchange FTX US. The exchange’s president Brett Harrison tweeted: “FTX will gladly exchange the crypto raised by @ConstitutionDAO into dollars to facilitate purchase of The Constitution at @Sothebys!”

On Saturday, decentralized lending protocol CREAM Finance announced its compensation plan to users affected by an exploit that cost the network $130 million in crypto. It’s the third hack this year to hit the protocol. It published this announcement on Twitter and Medium: 

“We will distribute 1,453,415 CREAM tokens to impacted users. We are utilizing remaining CREAM tokens within the treasury, and removing the project team’s remaining CREAM token allocation. There will be no further CREAM allocations to the team.”

While the payout will be proportional to users’ positions at the time of the exploit, it won’t quite cover their losses. At today’s rate of $56.95 to a CREAM token, the promised payout amounts to $82,771,984, which is almost $50 million short.

Finally, today’s news: The biggest upgrade to the Bitcoin network since 2017 went live today. Taproot boosts Bitcoin’s transaction privacy and facilitates the implementation of lightweight smart contracts. It means transactions that require multiple signatures are now cheaper and easier to execute. Chaincode Labs engineer Pieter Wiulle tweeted: “The real work will be in building wallets/protocols that build on top of it to make use of its advantages. I’m very excited to see where that takes us.”

So it’s been a dense week for news on crypto Twitter. No doubt with a new crypto-savvy team, the Twitter platform itself will become one-to-watch for dapp innovations in the near future. Discord probably won’t be going there soon, though.

Trading Volume on OpenSea Doubles as Bored Ape Yacht Club Sales Spike 900%

Yesterday, the amount of Ethereum traded daily on NFT marketplace OpenSea jumped from around $48 million to $105 million, according to Dune Analytics. 

The last time that the daily volume of Ethereum on OpenSea hit $100 million was on October 15. Back then, it was more of a regular occurrence. Things cooled off for a good month, but a sudden tenfold surge in sales volumes for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs yesterday appears to have contributed to the sudden upsurge. 

Dune Analytics, OpenSea ETH trading volume
Data from Dune Analytics shows a sudden doubling in the volume of Ethereum traded on OpenSea on November 13, 2021.

According to NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam!, the sales volume of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs went up 900% overnight, while sales of spin-off Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) are up 1,100%. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that was launched back in April. Each image is a portrait shot of a cartoon ape generated from a combination of up to 170 possible traits. The NFTs are stored as ERC-721 tokens on Ethereum. 

The NFT project has received heavyweight backing from the pop world recently. It started last week, when Rolling Stone magazine partnered with BAYC to release 2,500 limited-edition paper zines, each with a Bored Ape on the cover.

On Wednesday, a digitized version of the magazine was put up for auction as an NFT on Superare, alongside another alternate cover inspired by Mutant Ape Yacht Club–a similar collection of 20,000 NFTs launched by BAYC’s creators back in August. There is currently still a day and a half left to bid on them.

On Thursday, Universal Music Group–the biggest record label in the world–announced that it would be forming a Gorillaz style metaverse group called Kingship. The avatars for the group will be based on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs owned by collector Jimmy “j1mmy” McNelis. 

Fans can expect to see Kingship performing in virtual world settings and releasing more NFTs as the metaverse expands. The group will be managed by Nicholas Adler, who currently manages the crypto-friendly Snoop Dogg, and its music will be put out by a subsidiary of Universal called 10:22PM. 

In a similar piece of news, legendary hip hop producer Timbaland announced on Friday that he’s also starting a metaverse band composed of BAYC avatars. To tie in with the project, Timbaland is also setting up Ape-In Productions, a new company that will produce music and animations for the project. 

The company will release its first single as an NFT on Wednesday. The song is called ‘ApeSh!t’ and it’s performed by a band called TheZoo. 

Finally, NFT collector @PuffYatty tweeted the news that BAYC creators Yuga Labs filed a trademark application with the US Patent & Trademark Office for the word “APE” to be used in “cryptocurrency, online games, computer software platform, & development of custom blockchain software.”

No doubt BAYC and MAYC NFT holders are already going ApeSh!t.