Welcome to the 11th 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 27th and October 4th, 2020.
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🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- DeFi insurance project Nexus Mutual rolled out shield mining, which rewards NXM to users for “staking 50% of every cover purchase price.”
- DerivaDEX, a new leveraged derivatives trading platform shares new design of the insurance fund and is prepping for launch.
- Insurance is hot in DeFi right now: insurance project Nsure.Network raised $1.45 million in seed and private funding this week.
- A $30 million “Black Thursday” class-action lawsuit alleging MakerDAO misrepresented risks around the Dai stablecoin has been sent to arbitration.
- Yield farming aggregator project APY.Finance activated its APY liquidity mining program.
- Uniswap (UNI) has been added to the Compound protocol.
- DeFi Saver released “Aavetomation,” i.e. automatic liquidation protection and leveraging services for Aave.
- Aave’s token migration from LEND to AAVE has officially started.
- The PieDAO project unveiled “DOUGH farming season” for its DOUGH governance token.
- Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao said he anticipates that DeFi will cannibalize Binance (and other centralized crypto exchanges) over time.
- Business banking startup Multis, which aims to let users create business accounts for handling cryptocurrencies, just raised $2.2 million in seed funding.
- The Bollinger Investment Group published a great primer on liquidity mining.
- Defiprime interviewed Chainlink’s Adelyn Zhou and got an inside look at the Chainlink backstory, future plans, and how the project’s going to build truly chain-agnostic oracles.
- Leading U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase added support for Balancer (BAL) and Ren (REN) this week.
- Lending platform Salt Lending was ordered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to refund investors over the project’s $47 million ICO in 2017. The project settled with the SEC almost immediately.
- The SEC also just dunked on Kik over the KIN token. A U.S. judge just totally sided with the Commission in its court battle regarding Kik’s $100 million ICO.
💱 DEX Report
- Upstart decentralized exchange project DODO unveiled the DODO exchange token and an Initial DODO Offering.
- UniLend, a decentralized protocol for spot trading, money markets, and lending and borrowing services, just raised $3.1 million in seed funding and private sales.
- The 0x team published a comprehensive analysis on the performance of DEX liquidity aggregators.
- Did SushiSwap’s liquidity grab end up making Uniswap stronger? It seems so now.
- Synthetics trading platform dHEDGE published a roadmap and vesting update.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- MakerDAO is looking to hire new devs to help build out the Dai stablecoin ecosystem.
💎 NFT News
- yEarn creator Andre Cronje started work on an NFT-based game called Eminence Finance, but an unknown party launched a flash loan attack on its unreleased contracts and made off with $15 million. The attacker sent back $8 million (why, no one knows right now), and a refund system was set up for affected users.
- Meet VeryNifty, a new NFT art project that lets you wrap your NFTs into vNFTs to mine $MUSE tokens and compete for 1st place in the VeryNifty Museum.
- Jordan Lyall, founder of NFT farming project Meme Protocol, was a guest on the Cryptotesters podcast this week. Don’t miss this great listen on a really interesting DeFi + NFT meld.
- The Pinata team wrote a great primer on how to mint and sell audio NFTs. Musicians around Ethereum, now’s your time to shine!
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 12th issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
