Welcome to the 4th 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 9th and August 16th, 2020.
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🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- DeFi users went buzzing this week over the launch of Yam Finance, an unaudited project offering the YAM token and a yield farming campaign. Then the project rapidly imploded due to a bug in its rebasing contract. A YAM migration plan is now in the works.
- Lending protocol Aave now has the second-most assets under management, $1.05 billion, of any DeFi project. Aave also just introduced its V2 upgrade.
- Ethereum’s top DeFi protocols have impressive annualized earnings as things stand: Uniswap (~$11.8 million), Balancer (~$11.4 million), Synthetix (~$6.3 million), Kyber Network (~$6.3 million), dYdX (~$5.5 million).
- Opyn published its post-mortem analysis on the recent oETH put exploit. The team, which just reimbursed its ETH put sellers, is currently working on fixing the vulnerability that led to the original exploit.
- The bZx team published a new guide on BZRX staking, a pivotal aspect of the bZxDAO governance process.
- Binance listed yEarn’s YFI , Aragon’s ANT, and Curve’s CRV for trading.
- Meet PowerPool: a new protocol for easily pooling governance tokens.
- You thought the +100 gwei gas era was rough? Try +200! Or +300!
- A new automated yield farming project, APY.Finance, entered into the limelight.
- MolochDAO introduced its coming v2x “Mystic” upgrade. The evolution will give members more features and cheaper transactions.
- Hegic, the options trading protocol, announced the HEGIC token and a liquidity mining campaign.
- Idle, a lending protocol aggregator, has rolled out support for multi-protocol yield farming.
- Kyber Network published its 17th ecosystem report this week. July 2020 was the project’s 11th month in a row where it achieved a record number of total users, new users, and trade volume.
- Smart contract wallet Argent is updating its gas policy and will no longer subsidize the gas of its users’ transactions. The project is exploring L2 scaling solutions in a bid to return to gas-free transactions.
- ConsenSys dev Jordan Lyall spun up The Degenerator, a sarcastic build-your-own DeFi machine, and the project’s actually taken off since then.
- Ethereum brought in $34.5 million in fees last week compared to Bitcoin’s $9 million. Thanks DeFi!
- Binance-backed decentralized perpetual contracts project Strike Protocol rebranded as Perpetual Protocol.
- Cream Finance revealed new info around the distribution of the project’s CREAM token, including multisig and vesting schedule plans.
💱 DEX Report
- Apparently preempting the Curve Finance team, an anonymous developer deployed the open-source contracts underpinning the long-awaited CRV governance token and CurveDAO system. On the heels of these launches, the stablecoin exchange became the 3rd DeFi project to hit $1 billion in assets under management.
- The 1inch.exchange team introduced Mooniswap, a new kind of automated market maker DEX that rewards liquidity providers with protocol earnings at the expense of arbitrage traders. The DEX has already reached +$12 million in liquidity.
- 1inch also announced it raised $2.8 million in a seed funding round.
- Between August 9th and August 10th, Uniswap powered $250 million worth of 24-hour trade volume. Uniswap also beat its July 2020 volume record of $1.76 billion within the first two weeks of August.
- Additionally, this week Uniswap became the largest 30-day gas spender on Ethereum, acutely overtaking Tether’s USDT for the number #1 position.
- There’s a new automated market maker on the block, and it’s DODO: a “next-generation” on-chain liquidity aggregator project.
- Prysm, a collaborative trading community built atop a liquidity aggregator, was announced.
- Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX is implementing Know Your Customer (KYC), which is good news for Ethereum’s decentralized alternatives like dYdX and bZx.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- Upon Maker Vault #719 user minting 10 million Dai this week, the total Dai supply reached past a new all-time high of 400 million.
- ConsenSys Diligence offered a series of security recommendations to Lien Protocol after reviewing the codebase of the stablecoin and ETH option project.
- The yUSDC vault on yEarn is currently fetching +50% APY.
💎 NFT News
- Aave’s DeFi gaming project Aavegotchi has all the makings to become a considerable project in the NFT economy. Put this one on your radar.
- Artist Pak has racked up nearly 600 ETH in sales on NFT art platform SuperRare.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 5th issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
