Welcome to the 9th issue of the DeFi Arts Intelligencer, your weekly source for key happenings around blockchain art, collectibles, and games. Subscribe here.

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For this dispatch:

🎨 Digital Art & Collectibles

🕹️ Blockchain Games

The Maker project announced the Dai Gaming Initiative, which is aimed at bringing the Dai stablecoin into more game economies.

Axie Infinity’s Season Two began.

Ethereum trading card game Gods Unchained is set to receive a new expansion soon.

Noted NFT analyst and Zima Red publisher Andrew Steinwold shared some insightful thoughts on metaverse advertising.

RPG game Neon District partnered with The Sandbox, buying up a portion of LAND where a Neon District-inspired game will be hosted.

♦️♦️ DeFi News

The cryptoeconomy acutely dived this week after the end of an 11-year Wall Street bull run kicked off de-risking sell-offs across risk-on assets.

On Mar. 12th, the ether (ETH) price crashed 50% on the day, leading to a spike of underwater positions and automated liquidations on DeFi lending dapps like Maker and Compound.

Temporarily high gas prices paved the way for a brief spate of anomalous activity in the Maker liquidation process that allowed one user to buy up a few million dollars’ worth of ETH essentially for free. An auction of MKR tokens will take place on March 19th to make up for the protocol debt.

Borrowing demand for Dai hit record levels on Compound. Compound @compoundfinance

Popular decentralized exchange Uniswap set a new daily volume record of $53 million. Kyber Network also hit a new daily volume all-time high on Thursday.

There is now more bitcoin locked in WBTC , an Ethereum token pegged to the bitcoin price, than is locked in the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s flagship scaling solution.

The rDai-powered rTrees project has now planted 1,000 trees!

📰Fresh Reads

🖌️Extra, Extra

I minted a new shop for generative pieces on OpenSea. As a person that’s tried more than a few crypto/blockchain apps, with full sincerity OpenSea is easily in my top 5 all-time favorite projects. And probably closer to top 3. It just makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s very user-friendly I think. Play around with it some if you haven’t yet!

Thanks for reading, and stay creative on- and off-chain!

Keep an 👁️ out for the 10th issue of the DeFi Arts Intelligencer this time next week, too. Cheers ✌️

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About DeFi Arts Intelligencer

The DeFi Arts Intelligencer is curated by me, William M. Peaster, a professional writer and editor who’s been tracking the Ethereum and Dai beats in recent years.

I’m passionate about art and a DeFi optimist, so putting together this newsletter is both fun and informative for me. I hope others may find the content helpful, too. But be mindful, the information herein should not be construed as investment advice. I’m not a financial adviser, and these are my opinions. Always take care to seriously consider the various layers of risk you face in participating in the still-maturing cryptoeconomy.

If you have a DeFi tip or lead, questions or comments, or would be interested in commissioning me for a writing gig, you can ping me at wmpeaster@gmail.com or on Telegram at @wmpeaster.

If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support it, feel free to subscribe or have a like-minded friend subscribe as well. Thanks kindly!

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