Welcome to the 6th 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 23rd and August 30th, 2020.
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🔥 The DeFi Bulletin
- Aave’s U.K. business arm was granted an Electronic Money Insitution (EMI) license by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority. The license paves the way for Aave to onboard new users throughout Europe. Aave also became DeFi’s largest project this week.
- DeFi dashboard Zapper.fi secured a $1.5 million seed round from investors like Framework Ventures, MetaCartel Ventures, and CoinGecko.
- Decentralized options platform Opyn launched put options on Curve’s CRV token.
- The Opium Team’s Andrey Belyakov released a write-up on DeFi derivatives, noting that collateralized derivatives can help prevent the kind of financial crises that unfolded in 2008.
- yEarn introduced Delegated Funding DAO Vaults: a new type of tooling that allows projects to easily apply for and draw from credit lines provided by decentralized groups.
- The new Fair Launch Capital group is offering “no-strings-attached grants” to fair launch DeFi projects to cover audits and beyond.
- Cooper Turley published an insightful overview write-up on the bZx relaunch and the BZRX token in the Token Tuesdays newsletter. Separately, Binance just listed BZRX for trading and published a Binance Research piece on the token.
- The Hegic team released a breakdown of the Hegic Protocol’s central risks.
- The “food-based moneygames” in DeFi are getting wild. TokenBrice.eth has a new guide out on how to assess risk in the space.
- Cross-chain DeFi composability? It could be coming, if Polkadot’s Snowfork ETH/ERC-20 bridge pans out.
- PeckShield completed its audit of the bZx v2 protocol: “all issues found have been confirmed or fixed.”
- Seed Club was announced, a new social token incubator project.
- Zcoin is looking to integrate with Ethereum’s DeFi sector via the RenVM.
💱 DEX Report
- Uniswap unveiled Token Lists, which allows users to plug in community-curated token lists to the reigning DEX protocol. Check out defiprime’s new DeFi Tokens List, for example.
- Uniswap’s 24-hour trade volume just flipped Coinbase’s 24-hr volume for the first time ever.
- Decentralized exchange dYdX launched a LINK-USD perpetual futures product.
- Still trying to wrap your head around the DODO exchange? The project published a new primer on how its system handles frontrunning. The DODO team also just raised a seed round led by Framework Ventures.
- 1inch.exchange is on route to break $1 billion in volume this August.
- SushiSwap, a Uniswap fork with a $SUSHI token tacked on to reward liquidity providers, hit the limelight this week. Is this only the beginning of the Vampire Attack phenomenon?
- Crypto exchange FTX launched a perpetual contract product linked to Uniswap’s top 100 liquidity pools.
- 0x-based DEX Matcha listed BZRX for trading.
- Perpetual contract exchange Perpetual Protocol published its PERP token distribution plans.
- Is MCDEX milking its investors? One pseudonymous user argued so this week.
💵 State of the Stablecoins
- The smart contracts underpinning DefiDollar (DUSD), which is backed by an index of stablecoins, went live on the Ethereum mainnet.
- USDC 2.0 is here, and with it a slew of optimizations for the increasingly popular stablecoin. One of the token’s new features is gasless sends, which can abstract gas prices away from users.
- Options and stablecoins project Lien Protocol introduced details about its LIEN token, which rewards holders with rebates via Lien Protocol and FairSwap fees.
- Meet ARC, a new game-centric project focused on fostering token-collateralized synthetic USD.
💎 NFT News
- The pop-up Meme Protocol project rolled out an NFT farming campaign.
- Ethereum NFT trading card game Gods Unchained is holding a DeFi Challenge, in which community members can win prizes for suggesting the best ways Gods Unchained can bring DeFi elements to its ecosystem.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the 7th issue of The Defiprime Post out this time next week! 👋♦️👋
