Welcome to the 2nd 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 26th and August 2nd, 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 guides on UMA, mStable, and more.
🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- MakerDAO, currently Ethereum’s largest DeFi dapp, now has more than $1 billion worth of assets secured in its protocol — a feat unmatched by any other DeFi dapp to date.
- Rising indexing protocol The Graph is launching an incentivized testnet, “Mission Control.” Those who perform well during the campaign will be rewarded with Graph Tokens (GRT).
- The Synthetix Foundation, early steward of the Synthetix protocol, is decommissioning itself amid a decentralization pivot. The project is now controlled by 3 separate DAOs.
- DeFi synths project UMA has rolled out a liquidity mining pilot for its $UMA governance token.
- Yield farming is a really young phenomenon, so many folks still haven’t wrapped their heads around it. If you’re looking to play catch up, don’t miss Ping Chen’s “Analysis of yearn and mStable frenzy.” It’s a great primer.
- Decentralized comms turned DeFi lending project Mainframe acquired money-streaming dapp Sablier. Mainframe plans to integrate Sablier’s streaming tech into its new fixed-rate lending protocol.
- Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin was a guest on Unchained, Laura Shin’s acclaimed crypto podcast.
- Dispute resolution protocol Kleros is running a PNK rewards program to incentivize market creators and liquidity providers on Dxdao’s Omen prediction marketplace.
- Augur V2 has arrived. Accordingly, Ethereum’s oldest prediction market play now offers Dai-denominated markets among other significant optimizations. REP holders will need to migrate to REPv2 to participate in the new system.
- The Aave team unveiled Aavenomics, a program proposal that seeks to pivot the Aave protocol toward decentralized governance, new token economics, and more.
- Trying to figure out YFII? This Twitter thread from TokenInsight’s chief analyst will help.
- Compound published new updates on governance and HAL, a “1-click-setup IFTTT for Ethereum.”
- U.S. crypto exchange giant Coinbase is exploring a new batch of asset listings, including tokens from DeFi projects like Balancer, Curve, Ampleforth, tBTC, The Graph, UMA, and WBTC.
- Anthony Sassano had a good write-up in The Daily Gwei on the Tendies (TEND) craze.
- P2P cross-chain atomic swaps project Liquality added support for WBTC, paving the way for rapid swaps between WBTC and BTC.
- The RenVM has facilitated ~$75 million in volume to date.
- Andrew Kang wrote an insightful thread on the bZx’s comeback via the iETH Buyback Program.
- The scaling project Matic Network is launching a DeFi Incubator Program.
- PieDAO has three DeFi index tokens in the works: DEFI+L (large market cap projects), DEFI+S (small caps), and DEFI++ (70% DEFI+L, 30% DEFI+S.
- Speaking of indexes, Synthetix just released a new sDEFI index token, too.
- Decentralized oracle project Chainlink unveiled the Chainlink Community Grant Program.
💱 DEX Report
- Balancer Labs, the team behind the Balancer automated market maker protocol, blacklisted YFII, a fork of yearn.finance’s breakout YFI, from its front-end UI.
- In other Balancer news, the project just surpassed $500 million in all-time volume. That was fast!
- AMM-based projects like Uniswap and Curve now account for +80% market share of DEX volume.
- DEX aggregator 1inch.exchange published an excellent primer on the project’s Chi Gastoken innovation. Good stuff to know with gas prices as high as they have been lately.
- Uniswap is routinely smashing through volume records these days. The trading protocol facilitated over $1.3 billion worth of trades over the last month.
- Bancor V2 launched, featuring improvements like liquidity amplification and better impermanent loss mitigation.
- Zerion added support for DDEX, so users can now check their DDEX balances and margin positions in-app.
- Loopring, the zkRollup-based exchange and payment protocol, is making a bid to attract Curve liquidity providers with a new rewards mining campaign.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- U.S. crypto exchange giant Coinbase just launched a Dai rewards program. Coinbase users in eligible jurisdictions who hold Dai in their accounts will earn 2% APY.
- With Dai currently trading above its $1 peg, Instadapp introduced the “Short DAI” feature, which lets users create a short position against the Dai with a single click.
- defiprime’s Nick Sawinyh completed his year-long DeFi stablecoin lending experiment.
- “Adaptive money” enterprise Ampleforth is bubbly lately, but from a distance it’s not the easiest project to understand. To that end, the DeFi educators at Finematics just put out a great explainer vid.
💎 NFT News
- OpenSea, Ethereum’s premier NFT marketplace, now has 20,000 users.
- The Maker community approved Decentraland’s MANA as a MakerDAO collateral type. MANA is the currency of Decentraland’s virtual world, where parcels and other assets like VR wearables are stored as NFTs atop Ethereum.
- Rising NFT market data website NonFungible.com announced it was delisting market history for art marketplace Rarible as a result of “massive wash trading efforts.” This comes as Rarible recently launched its $RARI token, which is awarded to the marketplace’s buyers and users. \
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 3rd issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
