It’s been a wild week for the crypto world, so I won’t waste your time. Here’s the 5 quick links I promised:
In the aftermath of all the drama over flash loans and oracles, one team put together a really interesting list of all the things one must consider when constructing a new Defi project.
After all the news about Flash loans, there are now smart contracts that are backed by ETH on the block level, but can be minted infinitely within a block for flash loans. If your security isn’t “Soros proof”, it’s not enough to be perfect.
This one is a personal one - make sure you have 2FA on EVERYTHING you own. You don’t get a 5th link in this newsletter until you do. Better to be safe than sorry. Go download one right now. like Google Authenticator. Or Authy. Whatever, I’m not sponsored by any of them.
Kava Invites Cosmos’ Sunny Aggarwal to their AMA
If you want to understand why another stablecoin-print protocol is necessary and relevant, and how the construction of a CDP-system built on a Cosmos chain rather than as an ETH smart contract (like MakerDAO), Sunny has it boiled down perfectly.
Opyn launches tokenized, collateralized insurance for Curve.fi, the “uniswap but reduced-slippage” stablecoin dex, with the oCRV insurance token available on Uniswap & and is listed on Coingecko. The coin pays out 0.0092 cents per token in case of exploit on all of these things (hattip to Andre Cronje for building so many integrations into this yToken). This is defi legos at its finest. Yields for selling this insurance peaked at well over 430% APY (credits to @DegenSpartan for tweeting it & making it a tweet thread), and this was even with slippage on a thin liquidity pool in Uniswap.
Bonus link: Paul Graham: How to Write Usefully
Sometimes the best part of crypto is pulling in things that aren’t crypto into crypto. Paul leaves us with the line “Put railings on the balconies, but don't put bars on the windows.”
I guess the crypto analog au jour d’hui: put limits on what you enable smart contracts can do. But don’t ban flash loans?