This is the 1st issue of The Defiprime Post, a quick weekly primer covering the biggest developments around Ethereum and DeFi. This week’s issue covers events between July 19th and July 26th, 2020.
🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- $4 billion total value locked (TVL) in DeFi was reached this week, per DeFi Pulse.
- yearn.finance is now controlled by a 9-key multisignature address. The project’s YFI farming campaign took the DeFi arena by storm this week, and the YFI governance forum launched.
- Looking for a good YFI overview? CoastalDegen and weeb have you covered.
- On July 23rd, Aave flipped Compound to notch the #2 position on DeFi Pulse’s TVL leaderboard for the first time ever. Compound’s since acutely reclaimed the #2 spot, but the competitiveness shows Aave’s becoming a DeFi tour de force
- Ethereum devs published the specs for the final ETH 2.0 testnet.
- The WBTC ecosystem added new merchants, including Alameda, imToken, and Three Arrows Capital. There’s now more than 18,000 bitcoin (~$180 million) tokenized on Ethereum, with the majority of that supply coming via WBTC.
- Synthetix kicked off its Antares release, which optimizes UX around trading binary options on Synthetix.Exchange. Several firms, including Framework and Three Arrows Capital, are now serving as liquidity providers on Synthetix as well.
- dHedge, a Synthetix-based asset management protocol, emerged out of stealth.
- The mStable community was sent buzzing after an unexpected supply movement of MTA, mStable’s protocol token, sowed confusion.
- Zapper.fi is becoming a major DeFi liquidity facilitator.
- The Nexo team appears to be behind the “Chainlink FUD Report” that made its way through the cryptoeconomy last week.
- Crypto derivatives exchange FTX released spot markets and futures for $AMPL.
- Ethereum wallet Zerion unveiled its latest upgrade, with a mind toward a “sleeker, simpler interface.”
- For the bZx iETH buyback program, the iETH<->vBZRX rate will move from .0002 -> .0003 ETH per vBZRX this week. This is to counter the rate moving out of sync with the market.
- CoinDesk published a primer on yield farming, as did Bloomberg.
- Is the +100 gwei gas price era starting?
💱 DEX Report
- A new record for monthly DEX volume, +$2.5 billion, was set by DeFi users in July 2020.
- Stablecoin exchange Curve hit over $170 million in daily trading volume on July 25th. Deposits in the platform went as high as $440 million this week.
- The Balancer platform’s BAL holders approved three new community proposals. A proposal to approve the first batch of Balancer ecosystem fund grants is also on the slate.
- 0x’s Matcha exchange swapped $5 million through Curve in a single transaction.
- The Uniswap protocol is dominating Coinbase when it comes to ERC20 trading pairs that have less than $100,000 in 24-hour trading volume. DeFi is “going to dominate … the long tail of assets,” Uniswap creator Hayden Adams said, adding, “What happens when there are millions of tokens?”
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- Tether (USDT) could be on the verge of beating bitcoin as the “dominant currency on public blockchains,” according to Messari’s Ryan Watkins.
- The UMA team unveiled the first yield dollar token, yUSD-SEP20.
- Meet DeFiDollar (DUSD), an index-based stablecoin project that relies on “DeFi primitives to stay near the dollar mark.”
- eUSD, a new synthetic USD stablecoin based on the MCDEX ETH-PERP, has arrived.
- General reflex bond project RAI is now live on the Kovan testnet. RAI will be used to underpin MetaCoin’s MAI stablecoin.
💎 NFT News
- Meet Reality Cards: the cryptoeconomy’s first NFT-based prediction marketplace. Users of the platform won’t “bet on an outcome, [they’ll] own the outcome” via NFTs.
- NFT art marketplace Rarible, which unveiled its governance token last week, started distribution of $RARI on July 19th. In a nod to DeFi yield farming, Rarible users can earn $RARI for participating in the project’s marketplace.
- Aave’s Aavegotchi NFT project released its 2nd community update. Aavegotchis will be backed by Aave’s interest-bearing aTokens.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 2nd issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
