BTC teeters perilously

Perched boldly on the shoulders of the first wave of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, so-called “DeFi 2.0” coins, including Cosmos (ATOM) and Harmony (ONE), are surging ahead even as the wider crypto market continues to crater.

ATOM, the 16th-largest digital asset in terms of its total market capitalization, is the native coin of the interoperability-centric Cosmos network, a blossoming Layer-0 world of its own, birthing and comprising many independent, parallel blockchains.

In the past 24 hours, ATOM has risen by 17%. It’s up 75% in the past month. These gains appear to connect with newly launched cross-chain bridges to Ethereum and the upcoming Theta upgrade (Cointelegraph).

ATOM, at last check, about 8:45 a.m. (EST), was within spitting distance of its all-time high of $44 reached in September.

Meanwhile, ONE (which is No. 47), is the native coin of Harmony, a blockchain that purportedly can run Ethereum applications faster and less expensively. ONE rose 13% in the past 24 hours to $0.31. That’s 15% off its ATH reached in late October.

Early Friday, amidst fear, loathing, hash rate disruption and still more liquidations, Bitcoin sank below $41,000. The price slump spurred worries of further losses, with the hashtag "BitcoinCrash" trending on Twitter (Decrypt).

BTC tested an intraday low of $40,685 earlier this morning, per CoinGecko. That level hasn't been seen since late September.

As of 9:15 a.m. (EST), the largest digital asset stood at $41,800, down 3% in the past 24 hours.

A competition to attract Curve (CRV) token holders is escalating with a new wave of next-generation DeFi players battling it out in the live-on-the-razor’s-edge, laugh-in-the-face-of-death world of stablecoin staking.

Never confused with the Coke/Pepsi "Cola Wars" of the late 1980s (although somewhat reminiscent of the Edison/Tesla "Current Wars" of the late 1880s), the "Curve Wars” started last fall when Yearn Finance, Convex Finance and some other yield aggregators began enticing holders of locked CRV, or what's known as voting escrowed CRV (veCRV), in a bid to control the supply. That’s because control of veCRV means control of how rewards are allocated across the liquidity pools that comprise Curve Finance, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for swapping stablecoins.

It’s not a zero-sum game. CRV, which is the 73rd-largest coin, per CoinGecko, isn't so much under siege as it is basking in glory. CRV rallied more than 120% in the fourth quarter of 2021.

The war, Hackernoon said, can be described as "the race between various protocols that are continuously trying to ensure that their preferred pools are offering the highest $CRV rewards."

“Major stablecoin projects have realized this weekly vote allocation is critical to keeping their Curve liquidity high,” Delphi’s analysts added.

Convex Finance is currently the single largest owner of veCRV, holding 47% of the total supply. The protocol offers an APY of 48% on staked CRV, nearly 10 times greater than APYs offered by various pools across the multibillion-dollar DeFi industry (CoinDesk).

With crypto more than a little wobbly this week, CRV lost momentum, going flat over seven days. Meanwhile, CVX in that same span shed 6% (showing that the pair are not entirely symbiotic).

Another Curve War combatant is Spell Token (SPELL), connected with Abracadabra Money, a platform for boosting yield farmers’ rewards. SPELL hit its all-time high, $0.035, in early November. But it has since shed 56%. The 102nd-largest token by market capitalization, SPELL has lost 8% over 24 hours.

Frax (FRAX), another competitor in the battle for Curve voting power, just now looked like it wanted to pop off in defiance of the wider market crash. But it has cooled in the past few hours. FRAX, the 76th-largest coin, fell 2% over 24 hours to just under $1.

Descended from Austrian nobility, eccentric, strangely chinned and cheek-boned, the Bogdanoff brothers came of age in the 1980s, being associated with science fiction and then, later in the ‘90s, becoming embroiled in an academic controversy.

And so, naturally, it came to be that the pair were embraced by the crypto community, frequently showing up in widely shared memes dating back to the middle part of the last decade.

News that Igor Bogdanoff, and his twin brother, Grichka, had both recently died from complications related to Covid was met with sadness and remembrances - Bitcoinist reexamined their careers going to back to when they hosted a French television show set inside a spaceship – and there was this heartfelt tribute from Tony "The Bull" Spilotro, tweeting, "you made me laugh, you fascinated me, and I'm truly sad you're gone."