The Defiprime Post #22: Your Weekly DeFi News in Bite-Sized Fashion

William M. Peaster on 21 Dec 2020

Welcome to the 22nd issue of The Defiprime Post, a quick weekly primer covering the biggest developments around Ethereum and DeFi. This week’s issue covers events between December 13th and December 20th, 2020.

Want to mine some yield farming knowledge? We’re leaking alpha. Check out defiprime’s new Alpha DeFi community forum, where we regularly launch great new yield farming guides! Also, check out our new DeFi Person of the Year 2020 awards.

🔥 The DeFi Bulletin

  • U.S. crypto exchange giant Coinbase listed Aave (AAVE), Bancor (BNT), and Synthetix (SNX) for trading this week. The exchange is also formally preparing for its coming public offering.
  • CME Group is launching ether futures early next year, which means ETH’s entrance to the mainstream is only just beginning.
  • The U.S. CFTC’s Technological Advisory Committee just received a brief on the growth of DeFi and the ecosystem’s nascent regulatory challenges.
  • Popular Ethereum-based lending protocol Compound revealed Compound Chain, a separate blockchain that will be used to foster Compound as a central DeFi hub across many blockchains.
  • Ethereum privacy project Tornado.Cash is looking to launch a community governance system.
  • CoinDesk had a write-up this week on how yield aggregator protocol Yearn is positioning itself as the Amazon of DeFi on the heels of the project’s recent mergers.
  • Don’t miss MetaMask’s monthly report for November 2020, which details big recent updates around the browser wallet.
  • Blockchain data index project Graph Protocol launched its mainnet and saw its GRT token listed on Coinbase.
  • Meet Euler, a new decentralized lending protocol centered around reactive interest rate models.
  • Unlock Protocol unveiled Unlock Discount Tokens (UDT) in a bid to further decentralize the project.
  • DeFi777 v1 is launching.
  • Eth2 staking protocol Lido raised $2 million from investors like ParaFi Capital, Semantic Ventures, and more.
  • Smart contract auditing firm Trail of Bits discovered a vulnerability that could have “broken” Aave.
  • The StaFi Protocol team released a whitepaper for the project’s rToken staking liquidity solution.
  • PieDAO is rolling out PieVaults.
  • No-loss Ethereum savings game PoolTogether secured a seed extension from ParaFi Capital.
  • Upstart LP token lending protocol Warp Finance published a post-mortem report on the hack the project faced this week.
  • Lending protocol Maple Finance just closed a $1.3 million seed funding round via its MPL governance token.
  • FinCEN has rolled out some rushed, menacing rule proposals that would seriously crank up regulation around individual crypto wallets in the U.S.
  • DeFi on Bitcoin? It’s set to be much easier now courtesy of a new suite of tools built by Sovryn (and for RSK).
  • Binance led the Series B $12 million funding round of MATH, a cross-chain crypto wallet venture.
  • Decentralized credit protocol Union just raised $3 million.

💱 DEX Report

  • The Bonfida project, a decentralized exchange built on Solana, raised a $4.5 million seed round.
  • Decentralized exchanges DeversiFi and Loopring teamed up to create L2 Squared, an industry committee and working group focused on improving layer-two scaling solutions in the cryptoeconomy.

💵 State of the Stablecoins

💎 NFT News

Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 23rd issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋

DeFi is coming. Don't get left behind

About the author
William M. Peaster
William M. Peaster is a writer and curator of the DeFi Arts Intelligencer, a newsletter tracking Ethereum’s digital collectibles arena. He is not a financial advisor. The thoughts shared in this guest post are his opinions and reflect his personal experiences and personal optimism around Ethereum. He currently owns some cryptoart and ETH.

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