Blockchain Bites: Didi to Trial the Digital Yuan and a Look at Chainlink's Gains

The Chinese equivalent of Uber will pilot the nation's digital yuan, a major Ethereum alliance is moving to support DeFi as Nexo gets ready to enter the prime brokerage space with help from Chainlink. Here's the story:

FOMO
TikTok videos and a fomenting sense of FOMO have driven trading volumes of dogecoin up nearly 2,000%, as of Monday, according to Messari. The meme-inspired asset’s price climbed 35% over the same period. The Dogecoin Twitter handle has issued a statement saying: “Be mindful of the intentions people have when they direct you to buy things. None of them are in the spot to be financially advising. Make choices right for you, do not ride other peoples (sic) FOMO or manipulation.” Separately, one Compound observer is rethinking governance token COMP's meteoric rise. In the past seven days COMP has traded hands between $172 and $215, though Pankaj Balani, CEO of Delta Exchange, thinks the true value should be around $40. He ascribed COMP’s high prices to “initial euphoria” as well as a lack of liquidity to cash out.

Blockchain Trials: Digital Yuan & Ant Financial
Didi, the Chinese equivalent of Uber, is forming a task force to design and implement a trial of China’s CBDC on its transportation platform – potentially reaching 500 million Didi users. “Under PBoC’s overall DCEP strategy and operation timeline, Didi’s DCEP task force will design and implement pilot DCEP projects in accordance with rigorous safety, security and governance standards,” the firm said. Meanwhile, Shanghai-based Cosco Shipping confirmed it would trial Ant Blockchain, a product of Alibaba subsidiary Ant Financial, to streamline its operations.

Funding
Wintermute, an algorithmic market maker, has received a $2.8 million Series A investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the backers of Snap and an early iteration of Ripple. Wintermute provides liquidity on more than 500 spot trading pairs, on dYdX perpetual swaps and a handful of crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) from 21Shares. Elsewhere, Chainalysis said Tuesday it has raised $13 million in additional Series B financing from Ribbit Capital and Sound Ventures, bringing its total for the round to $49 million.

Movers & Shakers
Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the business end of the second-largest blockchain, has appointed a new executive director, Daniel C. Burnett. Previously a standards architect within Ethereum-focused ConsenSys, Burnett wants to widen the EEA’s scope beyond banks and blue-chips, to include exchanges and the world of DeFi. Separately, crypto lender Nexo is preparing to enter the prime brokerage space with Chainlink-powered audits that bring more transparency to its operations. The Swiss lender announced an integration with the oracle provider to provide audit trails for Nexo’s lending and borrowing operations.

Blockchain Blocked
A Taiwanese blockchain-based contact tracing app was unable to promote its public health solution due to Apple’s pandemic moderation policy, which only allowed health apps published by government entities or nonprofits into the Apple app store.

Quick bites

• Venezuelan military officials reportedly seized 315 bitcoin miners (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
• Adobe’s Flash will sunset this year. Here’s its story (Richard C. Moss/Ars Technica)
• Is Yield Farming being fed by incentives? (Jack Purdy/Messari)
• Decrypt dives into a leaked FBI report detailing how the federal investigative agency is learning to decode the laundering of bitcoin to the privacy-protecting crypto monero (Timothy Lloyd/Decrypt)
• Konstantin Ignatov, one of the key figures said to be behind the alleged crypto fraud OneCoin, has again had his sentencing control date adjourned.

Market intel

$60M BTC
Nearly $60 million worth of bitcoins moved to Ethereum during June, according to data estimates from Dune Analytics. Wrapped Bitcoin, the oldest tokenized bitcoin protocol on Ethereum, is responsible for roughly 75% of that growth after moving more than 4,800 BTC to Ethereum last month. The trend may be propelled by maturing decentralized finance services like yield farming and MakerDAO, which added tokenized bitcoin as collateral, said Delphi Digital co-founder Medio Demarco.

Linking DeFi & Gains
Similarly, Chainlink, the 12th largest cryptocurrency by market value, clocked 200% year-to-date gains primarily driven by the crypto’s role in the DeFi ecosystem. “The market cap for DeFi projects have quintupled in the last half year, and most of the ecosystem is now relying on (or planning to rely on) Chainlink for connecting on-chain DeFi smart contracts to off-chain data feeds like commodities and crypto price data.“ This growth has decoupled link from bitcoin, which has gained only 29% so far this year, according to data source Coin Metrics.

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Podcast

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