Welcome to the 10th issue of The Defiprime Post, a quick weekly primer covering the biggest developments around Ethereum and DeFi. This week’s issue covers events between September 20th and September 27th, 2020.
Want to mine some yield farming knowledge? We’re leaking alpha. Check out defiprime’s new Alpha DeFi community forum, where we just launched some great new guides on PERP, SWRV, and more.
🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- Phil Liu, the chief legal officer of investment manager Arca, published a piece arguing that Uniswap’s UNI “may very well be outside the enforcement framework of U.S. securities laws.”
- New yield farming aggregator project APY.Finance raised $3.6 million in a seed funding round.
- Now that the Yam Finance “Replanting” was successful and YAM rebases are flowing once again, the project’s builders are eyeing new improvements around treasury management, usability, and more.
- Synthetic assets project Synthetix is prioritizing efforts around alleviating gas prices and maintaining sUSD’s $1 peg.
- Trustless tokenized bitcoin project tBTC relaunched.
- bZx co-founder Kyle Kistner was the latest guest on Chris Blec’s Trust Bubble show, which centers around “honest and hard-hitting conversation” on topical DeFi matters.
- Set Protocol introduced yield farming strategies on TokenSets. The first such offering, the ETH USD Yield Farm, automatically farms UNI by providing liquidity to Uniswap’s ETH/DAI liquidity pool.
- Be sure to check out “The State of 1559,” the first community update on EIP-1559’s progress. If implemented, this EIP would significantly improve Ethereum’s fee market.
- BarnBridge, a cross-platform protocol for tokenizing risk, announced a two-phased liquidity mining campaign around the $BOND token.
- General front-running arbitrage bots have surfaced in DeFi. These bots can “identify profitable DeFi transactions and kill them by getting there first and claiming this profit.”
- The Graph Network team released a post outlining the tokenomics of its coming GRT token.
- Hedge fund manager Three Arrows Capital minted 2,316 WBTC via BitGo on Thursday, September 24th.
- Optimism unveiled the Optimistic Ethereum Testnet, which Synthetix is already testing out. The testnet indicates that a mainnet version of the layer-two scaling tech is now just around the corner.
- New York-based crypto exchange Gemini listed a range of DeFi tokens, including SNX, UNI, YFI, and more.
- Meet Rails, a new layer-two scaling solution owned by DXdao that will enable instant and gas-free Ethereum transfers.
- The first Aave AIP is here, and it’s focused on kickstarting the planned LEND to AAVE token migration.
- A potential vulnerability with some of yEarn’s Vaults was discovered and patched in a matter of minutes.
- CompliFi Protocol, a new issuance protocol for derivatives on Ethereum that don’t default, was introduced.
- defiprime interviewed Alex Svanevik, the co-founder and CEO of blockchain analytics platform Nansen.
- defiprime published an “Ethereum Gas Explained” primer this week. If you’re ever helping anyone try and better understand how Ethereum works, it’s a great share.
💱 DEX Report
- On-chain liquidity protocol Kyber Network went on a DeFi spree in adding support for CREAM, CRV, SUSHI, SWRV, UNI, YFI, and YFV.
- Derivatives project Opium Network launched a credit default swap (CDS) for ERC-20 bitcoin implementation WBTC on the Opium Exchange.
- Maskbook released a new version of Mask that lets users trade through Uniswap without having to leave Twitter.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- Lien Protocol, a new options and stablecoin protocol, faced an interruption of service this week after whitehat hackers and auditors discovered a bug in Lien’s BondMaker program.
- Origin Dollar (OUSD) launched. The token “automatically earns competitive yields from DeFi protocols while it’s still sitting in your wallet.”
- Liquity, the decentralized borrowing protocol project that issues the LQTY stablecoin, raised $2.4 million in seed funding.
- Centralized assets currently account for 40% of the collateral in Maker Vaults, which underpin the Dai stablecoin.
- Maker’s Dai stablecoin is seeing increased adoption in the NFT ecosystem’s art and culture sectors.
💎 NFT News
- Prolific NFT flipper Pranksy partnered with fractional NFT trading platform NIFTEX to release 10,000 $COZOM, tokenized shards of the highly collectible CryptoPunk #3831.
- Investment firm BlockTower Capital revealed plans for investing $10 million into the NFT ecosystem in the near future.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 11th issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
