Welcome to the 5th 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 16th and August 23rd, 2020.
Want to mine some yield farming knowledge? We’re leaking alpha. Check out defiprime’s new Alpha DeFi community forum, where we just launched some great guides on YFI, Mooniswap, and more.
🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- yEarn introduced a DeFi insurance primitive: yinsurance.finance.
- Yam Finance kicked off the YAM to YAMv2 migration, and the process completed on August 22nd. This paves the way to interim community governance proposals while Yam’s coming V3 protocol gets audited.
- Huobi’s decentralized finance division, Huobi DeFi Labs, is starting a consortium with projects like MakerDAO, Compound, and others in order to foster DeFi projects and builders across the West and the East.
- Synthetic published a great guide on synthetic futures.
- yEarn’s YFI governance token reached a new all-time price high of $16,081 on August 20th. That’s up 39,747% since the token’s July 18th launch-day price of $31.65, per CoinGecko.
- Meet EasyFi, a new universal Layer-2 lending protocol. First up, the project is creating a fork of Compound on the Matic Network.
- Coinbase published a blog post outlining the best practices for token projects interested in getting their ERC-20 tokens listed on the U.S. crypto exchange.
- Having trouble wrapping your head around elastic supply tokens? This new explainer post will quickly get you up to speed.
- In a new Deribit Insights post, Hasu argued YAM was a Nakamoto Scheme, where “early investors try to exploit late adopters, but whose decentralized architecture sets them apart from traditional Ponzis and pyramid schemes.”
- bZx started a public test phase for Fulcrum’s new UI.
- The specter of software vulnerabilities and black-hat hacks is ever present in the young DeFi arena. To that end, Seth Goldfarb wrote an excellent 101 guide this week on how to responsibly disclose such vulnerabilities and attacks.
- Token-curated communities are here to stay. Find out more about how these microeconomics are sprouting up in this primer post.
- The DAOhaus team announced their V2 system, which will let users efficiently create and extend “magic internet communities.”
- Discussions picked up this week about redenominating the YFI supply, but they remain just that for now, community discussions.
- Is crypto venture group The LAO about to get some competition from yEarn in the form of a crowdsourced crypto VC fund? Maybe so. Speaking of The LAO, the project just invested in Transak, a fiat-to-crypto payment gateway.
- The YAM forks are rolling in now. There’s Ham Finance, YAM Classic, $PASTA …
- Credit default swaps have arrived in DeFi courtesy of Aave’s Credit Delegation feature.
- NEAR Protocol’s first dapp is live in the form of Flux, a “scalable open market protocol.” The ETH-NEAR Rainbow Bridge is also getting ready to go public.
- Ampleforth is working on building out an “Elastic Finance” ecosystem.
- The Set Protocol team published a deep dive on yield farming.
- Whatever you do, don’t buy $MEME!
💱 DEX Report
- dYdX is going for a Layer-2 meld, with StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine being the project’s tech of choice. The engine is underpinned by zk-Rollups.
- In 2017, scammers targeted ICO traders with fake projects. In 2020, a new wave of scammers are similarly targeting Uniswap traders.
- Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi made a case for what the unbundling of Uniswap could look like in the years ahead.
- Ampleforth rolled out a “Geyser Enceladus” liquidity mining campaign, which allows users to stake Mooniswap LP tokens to earn AMPL rewards.
- The 1inch team unveiled the 1INCH network token and a Mooniswap liquidity mining program. The 1INCH token’s proposed distribution scheme caused controversy among some stakeholders, leading to the 1inch team sparring with naysayers on social media.
- The 0x-based Tokenlon DEX reached $600 million in all-time trading volume.
- The Yield team introduced YieldSpace, an automated liquidity provider for the project’s yTokens, which are like zero-coupon bonds for DeFi.
- Uniswap is beasting all other DEXes when it comes to weekly unique takers.
- defiprime started its new AMA series with Loopring Exchange’s Matthew Finestone, the project’s Head of Business. Don’t miss this one!
- “CRV is not just money, it’s power,” Stake Capital argued in a new write-up on the tokenomics of CRV, the governance token of the Curve stablecoin exchange. You can say that again, as this weekend Curve founder Michael Egorov locked up enough tokens to secure 71% of the protocol’s governance. The move admittedly came as an overreaction to yEarn having gained +50% of Curve’s voting power.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- Binance launched a new “DeFi Staking” service, and the offering’s first supported token is the Dai stablecoin. Facilitated by Compound, the service will allow users to stake Dai on Binance for the chance to earn up to 12% in annualized earnings.
- Tether activated its USDT integration with Layer-2 scaling solution OMG Network.
- Stablecoin hub protocol mStable is looking to hire more Solidity developers.
💎 NFT News
- Artist XCOPY sold all the pieces of “The Rabble,” a multi-NFT artwork composed of Master and Layer tokens on programmable art marketplace Async Art, for +85 ETH.
- NFT minting platform Cargo announced Cargo gems, which will serve as an ecosystem token and pave the way to NFT staking on the platform.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 6th issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
