Welcome to the 32nd 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. 28th and March 7th, 2021.
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🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- DeFi is “recreating the entire financial system,” according to Wall Street forecaster Jim Bianco.
- EIP-1559, which will update Ethereum’s fee system and put ETH on a path toward being deflationary, was greenlit for the London hardfork this coming July.
- Coinbase published a report on the “rise of the Ethereum economy.”
- Institutional interest in Bitwise’s DeFi Index Fund is booming right now.
- Compound Labs released a prototype of Gateway, a cross-chain interest rate market.
- Furucombo published a post-mortem report on its Feb. 27th exploit, which led to ~$15M in losses.
- UMA Protocol revealed the airdrop details for its KPI Options tokens.
- Synthetic outlined the details of its Vanadinite product release.
- Want to track how DeFi indices are faring? Check out this new Dune Analytics dashboard.
- Matter Labs, the team building the zkSync L2, raised a Series A funding round from investors like Union Square Ventures, Coinbase, and more.
- Speaking of raises, DeFi options protocol SIREN Markets just raised $4M in a round led by 1kx and Spartan Group.
- Badger DAO diversified its $21M treasury with help from Polychain Capital and others.
- Ruler Protocol, a new DeFi lending platform centered around liquidation-resistant loans, launched. Developed by the Cover Protocol team, Ruler’s launch reportedly led to the breakup of the Yearn + Cover Protocol partnership.
- Bitcoin-centric DeFi upstart Sovryn raised $10M through its SOV token sale.
- Meet Kine, a new decentralized derivatives protocol.
- Grants have proven key around DeFi to date. Accordingly, 1kx’s pet3rpan published a guide on how best to approach grants programs for token communities.
- It was only a matter of time until we started seeing rug pulls on other centralized EVM-based chains. We got a glimpse of that this week when Meerkat Finance was drained and then undrained on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
- B.Protocol integrated support for Compound.
- This week defiprime interviewed B.Protocol founder Yaron Velner.
💱 DEX Report
- Cross-rollup DEXes are closer than you think!
- Loopring just rolled out Round 4 of its L2 liquidity mining series.
- Opium Protocol extended its 1inch liquidity mining campaign and kicked off a new one via SushiSwap.
- Insurance protocol Unslashed launched its USF liquidity mining program on Uniswap.
- Can SushiSwap’s SUSHI token hit $500? It’s in the realm of possibility, according to a new analysis from Naïm Boubziz.
- Balancer is coming to Moonbeam, a Polkadot parachain.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- DeFi dashboard Zapper.fi added support for 5 ongoing DefiDollar liquidity mining campaigns.
💎 NFT News
- NFT-based DeFi game Aavegotchi launched on the Ethereum mainnet and saw its initial run of collectibles sell out within a minute.
- Yield Guild Games, a DAO centered around NFT gaming, raised $1.3M.
- Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey minted his inaugural tweet as an NFT using Ethereum-based platform Cent, and the bid for the digital collectible has already reached over $2M.
- Institutional investors are starting to get interested in cryptoart.
- Ever created an NFT on Rarible? You might have a PAINT airdrop waiting for you on MurAll.
- NBA Top Shots is great fun, but the infrastructure around it right now is centralized.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 33rd issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
