Steven Zheng

During The Summer of DeFi in 2020, many decentralized exchanges like Uniswap benefited from their “selling picks and shovels” approach for meeting the demands of DeFi token traders. With the rebirth of the NFT market, the success of the picks and shovels strategy is no different. Starting in August, NFT marketplaces have regularly produced billions […]

Due to their nature, NFTs are often limited in accessing the growing DeFi ecosystem open to many fungible tokens. For example, while you can use ETH as collateral to take out loans or generate yield through staking, NFTs have very limited options in DeFi. The two new protocols mentioned in this piece are attempting to […]

DeFi Digest is a series that summarizes recently launched projects and applications that The Block's research team found interesting.

The Block has updated a 2020 analysis on bitcoin mentions in DOJ press releases as a proxy for bitcoin-related crime trends

In this piece, The Block Research provides a guide on how to find, analyze and interact with non-fungible token projects.

Genie Labs: NFT Liquidity Aggregator Creating liquidity pools for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is difficult to near impossible due to the nature of NFTS — that is, they are not identical, so you can’t pool two NFTs together and offer them up as having similar value like you can with your average ERC-20 token. This liquidity concentration issue […]

The Block Research provides a fresh look at trading fees on the world's top crypto exchanges.

The Block Research's latest Company Intelligence report focuses on Chainalysis.

The Block Research digs into ConsenSys for its latest company intelligence report.

JellyFi: Zero-collateral lending and borrowing Undercollateralized lending and borrowing is a service that many DeFi projects have been attempting to offer. Because of the anonymous nature of DeFi, there are limited repercussions for malicious actors if they default on undercollateralized loans from protocols. As such, the largest DeFi lending protocols are all overcollateralized, which makes […]

The Block Research examines the current state of the Bitcoin network's global mining pool ecosystem.

This week's DeFi Digest explores Alkimiya Protocol and Pawn.Fi.

This week's DeFi Digest from The Block Research explores Lemma and Spectral.

Bitso is a Mexican cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2014. Despite its dominance in Mexico and its presence in the greater Latin America region, Bitso is not a well-known brand in the U.S. and Europe. This is unsurprising as the exchange has historically focused its business and marketing efforts on growing its footprint in Latin America […]

Today's DeFi Digest takes a close peek at Gearbox and Automata.

Founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville, Circle was launched with the goal of creating a platform to allow consumers and merchants to interact with digital currency payments — primarily bitcoin at that time. Since its inception, Circle has undertaken multiple adjustments to its core business, from growing into a digital currency banking platform to […]

In this week's DeFi Digest, The Block's Steven Zheng explores MEV projects.

Founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Gemini was marketed as a regulatory-friendly cryptocurrency exchange.  As described in Ben Mezrich’s book Bitcoin Billionaires, unlike the early supporters of bitcoin who had libertarian and anti-establishment political leanings, “Cameron and Tyler also knew that government regulation would come; and unlike many in the room, they believed […]

This week's DeFi Digest explores Fractional and Risk Harbor.

Company Overview 2020-2021 saw an acceleration of large financial institutions and payment companies expanding their support for cryptocurrency and blockchain services. Powering the backend infrastructure of many of these expansion efforts is Paxos, a firm that, until more recently, shied away from the media spotlight that other crypto firms like Coinbase and Binance have basked […]