Welcome to the 3rd issue of The Defiprime Post, a quick weekly primer covering the biggest developments around Ethereum and DeFi. This week’s issue covers events between August 2nd and August 9th, 2020.
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🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- The phrase “DeFi” just turned two years old.
- Lending protocol Compound just released its own price oracle.
- Open trading platform dYdX launched an ETH-USD Perpetual Contract product.
- A new State of Synthetix report is out.
- An unknown actor or group exploited Opyn’s ETH put contracts and stole 371,260 USDC. The Opyn team promptly removed liquidity from Uniswap and was able to white-hat hack 439,170 USDC out of harm’s way, while samczun helped the team recover an additional 132,995 USDC.
- Blockchain security firm PeckShield published a great analysis of the Opyn attack for anyone interested in understanding the incident better.
- MetaCartel member and Rocket founder Alex Masmejean unveiled a yield farming campaign around his $ALEX personal token.
- Meet Set V2: the automated asset management protocol’s announced the new system will have numerous optimizations, including multi-asset support and yield farming strategies.
- DTC Capital’s Spencer Noon pointed out that yEarn’s YFI is now the most decentralized DeFi project per combined ownership percentage of “Top 5” addresses: 1. YFI (9.5%), 2. ETH (12.9%), 3. MKR (23.5%), 4. BAT (24.5%), and 5. COMP (64.6%).
- Matthew West argued yEarn is a DeFi Credit Union of sorts: “Owned by the members, [the] profits are divided accordingly. Depositors get paid, the underlying platforms get paid, and the shareholders also get paid.
- yEarn just rolled out LINK yVaults.
- This week Chainlink hosted a Q&A with bZx founder and CEO Tom Bean and co-founder and CVO Kyle Kistner to talk shop, decentralized oracles, and more.
- Security firm Trail of Bits published a great write-up on a vulnerability with yEarn’s initial yVault system.
- Options trading protocol Hegic put its July 2020 Community Report out.
- Dextf.com chief scientist Marco Marchioro published an analysis showing that Ethereum gas price’s spike up during Asia’s trading hours, so “one can save on gas prices if they are willing to wait for the Asian wee hours.”
- In a new report, asset management firm Arca argued DeFi is having a breakout year thanks to “value accretion and governance.
- An Argent engineer discovered a bug in the staking contracts of YFII, a fork of yEarn’s YFI.
- The Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA) launched an accelerator venture for DeFi startups.
- Meet the new yEarn yDAO: the community-managed group will help foster open-source maintenance of yEarn.
- yEarn developer Andre Cronje had a great interview with Camila Russo in The Defiant.
- Options trading protocol Hegic is introducing the tokenomics of its new $HEGIC token on August 12th.
- One LINK shorter faced a $9.094 million on-chain liquidation this week.
💱 DEX Report
- The builders of popular trading protocol Uniswap are looking to make a handful of key dev team hires as the project progresses toward its V3 system.
- Decentralized exchange DeversiFi was the recipient of Aave’s first Credit Delegation transaction.
- 1inch.exchange added support for pLTC, a stable tokenized version of Litecoin.
- Emiliano Bonassi released Gas Saver, a “smart-contract library to leverage 1inch.exchange’s $CHI tokens in your contracts and save tons of gas.”
- Hakka Finance introduced BlackHoleSwap, a decentralized stablecoin change that boasts of offering “nearly infinite liquidity.”
- Binance listed Balancer’s BAL token, as did Huobi.
- Decentralized exchange protocol 0x has its H1 2020 governance update out.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- Reflexer Labs, the team behind the ETH-centric RAI reflex bonds that will underpin MetaCoin’s COIN stablecoin, just raised a $1.7 million seed round.
- The Yield Protocol team unveiled yDai, which is aimed at fixed-term and fixed-rate borrowing and lending of Dai.
- Thanks to a new partnership with Circle, European financial services firm BCB Group will now offer USDC services to its institutional clients.
- In a new speech on the future of retail payments, Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard said “[e]fforts by global stablecoin networks … have raised other fundamental questions about legal and regulatory safeguards, financial stability, and the appropriate role of private money.”
💎 NFT News
- Messari research analyst Mason Nystrom highlighted how SuperRare, Ethereum’s leading art marketplace to date, has seen its platform sales volume quadruple to date.
- Ethereum-based and NFT-centric gaming world The Sandbox is releasing its $SAND token through Binance Launchpad.
- NFT collector WhaleShark just rolled out a liquidity mining campaign around the $WHALE token.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 4th issue of The defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
