Today in DeFi - yTrump/nTrump, KuCoin Hacker Uses DeFi, Rails L2 Payments

yTrump/nTrump

CoinGecko has just listed yTrump and nTrump. These are prediction market tokens powered by Augur. yTrump is a token that will settle to $1 if Trump wins, and nTrump will settle to $1 if he loses. Find out more in this thread by Ben Davidson:

Ben Davidow @Ben_davidow

1) Last night CoinGecko listed yTrump. yTrump = tokenized YES shares from Augur’s market on whether Trump will win the 2020 election. Augur TVL has nearly doubled in the past 24 hours and this is not a coincidence...

Kucoin Hacker uses DeFi

KUCOIN @kucoincom

The Latest Updates about #KuCoin Security Incident: ✅ $ORN Token SWAP completed, trading available now ✅ $KAI Token SWAP completed ✅ $NOIA Token SWAP completed ✅ $OPQ will accelerate the planned Token SWAP We will continuously update the progress: kucoin.com/news/en-the-la…

Kucoin was hacked over the weekend for over $150M. However, one by one, projects started upgrading their contracts, blacklisting the stolen tokens and preventing them from being moved. Several token projects, including USDT, VELO, VIDT, SNTR, AKRO, COV, KAI, NOIA, OPQ, have all announced token transfer disables or swaps.

Not all project tokens disabled their token transfers, which requires the ability to upgrade contracts, as well as come to a decision on doing so quickly. SNX and COMP, two DAO controlled projects, have not disabled their transfers. While this demonstrates the decentralization of these projects, these tokens were sold by the hacker in the last two days.

To perform his sells of these tokens without getting blacklisted, the hacker used Uniswap - another actually decentralized DeFi project. You can see the hacker’s sells for SNX here, and some sells for COMP (as well as for LINK) here.

The hack brings up many interesting questions about how decentralized DeFi projects really are, or should be.

While centralization, especially in early stages, can help DeFi projects avoid pitfalls such as bugs or exploits, most DeFi projects should probably aim long term for true decentralized design and governance. As a user, understanding how decentralized, or centralized the projects and tokens you use can also be very important to know.

Rails L2 Payments

Rails @Rails_eth

Introducing Rails: an #ethereum layer 2 scaling solution for instant, gasless transactions. Owned by the @Dxdao_. Powered by @loopringorg's zkRollup. Coming soon. Have a read below. Then prepare to #getonrails.

medium.comRails: A New L2 Product from Loopring and DXdao Enables Gas-Free Ethereum TransfersLayer 2 implementations are becoming increasingly important for users, with the regular high gas fees that are experienced recently. If the ETH ecosystem is expected to grow, fast, safe, and cheap…

Loopring and DXdao have collaborated to deliver a new zkrollup-based L2 payment solution.

“Rails’ release is just the starting point, with many plans for additional features soon, such as supporting gas-free swaps. For now, Rails is limited to executing gas-free transfers between users and dApps that are registered on Loopring’s zkRollup. In the upcoming Loopring v3.6 release (circa December 2020), users will be able to transfer assets to any Ethereum address, not just those already on the rollup.”

Find out more in the Medium article or register for the demo on Keybase

Disclaimer: Projects or tokens mentioned in this newsletter are often in experimental and unaudited stage. Do your own diligence before using or buying anything mentioned.