Welcome to the 30th issue of The Defiprime Post, a quick weekly primer covering the biggest developments around Ethereum and DeFi. This week’s issue covers events between Feb. 14th and Feb. 21st, 2021.
Want to mine some yield farming knowledge? We’re leaking alpha. Check out defiprime’s Alpha DeFi community forum, where community regularly share new defi projects! We also launched new project last week: Dexguru brings together permissionless, real-time data on every DEX market, on-chain research, powerful analytics, and trade execution capabilities — in one fully integrated UI.
🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- Instadapp launched DeFi Smart Layer, a new infrastructure layer for DeFi.
- DeFi insurance provider Nexus Mutual raised $2.7M in a NXM token sale to investors like Collider Ventures, 1confirmation, and 1kx.
- No-loss lotto game PoolTogether launched its POOL token, which holders will now use to steer the game’s governance.
- Bitwise is launching a new DeFi-focused fund, which will give mainstream investors access to assets like AAVE, COMP, and UNI.
- Leveraged yield farming project Alpha Homora is charting its path forward after suffering a flashloan-powered attack earlier this month.
- Gnosis’s Omen predictions marketplace is now live on the xDai sidechain.
- Meet Babylon.Finance, a new decentralized asset management protocol focused on community-ownership.
- Decentralized options protocol Pods raised $800k from investors like Boost VC, Framework Ventures, and The LAO.
- Perpetual options protocol AntiMatter closed a $150k seed round.
- “Yield hacking” project Ribbon Finance is now live on mainnet.
- Insurance protocol Unslashed announced its cover mining program.
- P2P risk exchange Saffron is making the leap to Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
- The Radicle collective introduced its RAD token.
- Vesper has emerged from beta.
- This week defiprime interviewed the 88mph team.
💱 DEX Report
- DEXguru, a new DeFi trading terminal, just launched its beta.
- DEX aggregators are seeing their volume surge right now.
- NFTX migrated liquidity for 5 of its CryptoPunks index tokens over to Sushiswap (from Balancer).
- Via the Bancor Vortex system, users can now borrow against their staked BNT.
- Check defiprime’s new report by Aaron Briggs on maximizing profit and identifying risks in AMM liquidity pools.
- dYdX founder Antonio Juliano was a guest on The Block’s “The Scoop” podcast this week.
- Binance listed DODO in its Binance Launchpool program.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- The RAI, not a stablecoin but rather a stable asset that’s algorithmically pegged to itself, is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. The token’s value steadily floats rather than tracking the value of a fiat currency, a la Dai.
- Algorithmic stablecoin ESD has had a rough go of things with its initial rendition. But the project will be reborn in optimized form via Continuous ESD, the project’s V2 system.
- Binance just listed Frax Shares (FXS), the governance token of fractional-algorithmic stablecoin project Frax.
- What will happen if the U.S. eventually cracks down on stablecoins? CoinDesk’s JP Konig explored the question in a new op-ed.
💎 NFT News
- NFTs make the internet ownable, so says Variant Fund’s Jesse Walden. He’s spot on, too!
- Stake a basket of ERC-20s in any NFT, that’s what the Charged Particle project’s making possible. Notably, then, the team just raised $750k in funding.
- nft20 is rolling out MASK20 and MEME20 farming incentives.
- OpenSea’s Non-Fungible Token Bible is the standard when it comes to getting up to speed on what NFTs are all about. Check it out if you haven’t before, and share it around. It’s an amazing resource.
- samczsun identified a bug pertaining to the Haskmask project’s sale mechanics. The vulnerability has since been patched.
- Kai, who’s famous for cracking the genetic code of CryptoKitties, published an explainer of his new 27-Bit Digital drop through generative art platform Art BLocks.
- Programmable art platform Async Art closed a $2M seed round.
- How to solve the NFT liquidity problem? Writer Alpha Ketchum just published an interesting write-up on this question.
- Move over, Fat Protocol Thesis: the age of the Fat CryptoPunks Thesis has arrived.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 31st issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
