Biweekly update on Ethereum DeFi ecosystem vol.12, 19th August — 2nd September
9B milestone, Uniswap is now #1 for TVL, Aave acquires electronic money license, Yearn's delegated funding vaults, 1inch's token and liquidity mining program, Synthetix’s Pollux release, and more!
TL;DR
-Uniswap takes the crown — it is now #1 on DefiPulse for TVL. The project flipped Coinbase for transaction volume and flipped Bitcoin for transaction fees. Forby, the Uniswap team introduces Token Lists, a new standard for creating lists of ERC20 tokens. This is a community initiative to improve discoverability and trust in ERC20 token lists in a manner that is inclusive, transparent, and decentralized.
-These weeks, Aave was #1 for TVL. Aave company got a UK license to provide payment services: Aave’s UK entity responsible for integrations and support, Aave Limited, is now licensed as an authorised electronic money institution. After a lengthy application process, the authorisation was granted in July by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The team also announced that they’ll support a proposal to add a RealT Market to the Aave Protocol where RealT assets can be used as collateral. Check out their August Update: DeFi in VR, Governance on testnet, and EMI license. Previously, in collaboration with Aave, the Opium Team built and launched a Credit Default Swap for Aave’s recent Credit Delegation feature. YFI is now listed on Aave. Huobi launches LEND. Aave is now live on Token Terminal and Instadapp.
-Delegated funding DAO vaults are a new product being deployed to the Yearn Finance protocol. Funders provide YFI into the fair launch Vault. This works as per a normal delegated vault, you receive your LP share based on your contribution. Yearn also launched their insurance product.
-As for votes completed since the last newsletter, Compound Proposals 21 to Reduce COMP emissions by 20%, and Proposal 20 to Upgrade cUSDT Interest Rate Model passed with effectively unanimous support. Binance has launched DeFi Staking, allowing its users to earn interest on DAI by supplying it to Compound, directly through the Binance interface. This type of integration highlights the flexibility of the base functionality of the Compound protocol.
-A lot has happened since the last Making Maker: August was all about the Dai debt ceiling, the first Maker Foundation hackathon, governance updates, and more. These weeks, the Governance Facilitators and the Maker Foundation Smart Contracts Team have placed an Executive Vote to Activate Liquidations 1.2, Multiple Other Changes and to Approve August 2020 Governance Cycle Bundle. Check out answers to questions about the Dai debt ceiling, the roles that asset debt ceilings play in the Maker Protocol, and how each is adjusted. Watch ten videos that provide brief overviews of the major elements of MakerDAO — from the Dai stablecoin to the smart contracts that power the Maker Protocol.
-dYdX LINK-USD Perpetual Market now live. Traders can trade this new market with up to 8x leverage with no expiry. The contracts have been audited by Open Zeppelin, and are fully open-sourced. Previously, StarkWare and dYdX partner up. Their engineering teams are collaborating on a Layer 2 scaling solution for Perpetual Contracts, based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine and dYdX’s Perpetual smart contracts. dYdX’s Perpetual Contracts will be powered by StarkEx by the end of this year. If you missed Bankless AMA with Antonio Juliano check it out here.
-In the latest update, mStable summarises the current thinking about how staking will look, the functions it will serve, and the risk reward ratios it will entail. Huobi launches MTA.
-Yam V2 Governance Portal now live. If you hold YAM, you can now vote on and submit proposals using the new governance portal.
-With Synthetix’s Pollux release, all Synths are now powered by Chainlink’s network of decentralised oracles. This marks a major step forward for the decentralisation of Synthetix, as oracles are a pivotal LINK in the system. The new Synthetix visual brand is now live. The vision for this initiative was to create a distinct and characterful brand identity for the protocol, while expressing the energy of the Synthetix ecosystem.
-Dharma released “Intelligent Slippage Fees”, the next evolution of Dharma’s intelligent parameter setting system. In short, Dharma calculates the intra-block volatility for a given token pair over the last 12 hours, and set the slippage fee at the 95% confidence threshold. Check out the details here. And Dharma now supports ERC20<>ERC20 pairs. Together, these two features make Dharma the easiest place to trade anything on Uniswap. Furthermore, Surge Fees in Dharma released.
-xDai has been collaborating with Amazon Web Services to show how easy it is to create custom ERC20 tokens using. Fresh xDai weekly recap is here.
-The Gnosis Safe Multisig now stores more than $1B in digital assets. Gnosis and Energy Web jointly announced a strategic partnership to offer Gnosis Safe services — a multisig enterprise solution for managing digital assets — on both the Volta test network and the Energy Web Chain production network. As part of the partnership, Gnosis will become an Energy Web member and plans to host validator nodes for Volta and the EW Chain. Also, new incentivization program for stablecoin liquidity providers on Gnosis Protocol/Mesa DEX starting today.
-0x’s new Request for Quote System announced. It allows professional market makers to bring CEX liquidity directly to DEX users to support great pricing for medium and large trades. The team has added several new liquidity sources to 0x API: Bancor, mStable, and Mooniswap. A recap of 0x Labs’ internal hackathon — July 2020 was published. mUSD, BNT, BUSD, FOAM, PAX, DONUT, LPT, BAND, BZRX, and OMG are all now available to trade on Matcha. Read through 0x new blog series on Scaling DeFi for an examination of layer 1 limitations, layer 2 options, and of 0x’s strategy.
-Balancer adds multi-path and smart routing: Multi-path order routing means a trade can now jump between multiple pools on Balancer. Good news is, less than a month later and Balancer already have added over $1 Billion to its cumulative trades.
-1inch.exchange is on route to break $1 billion in volume this August. 1inch token and liquidity mining program announced: the team details the mechanics and distribution of the 1inch token, how their liquidity mining program works, and how you can get involved. These weeks, the team integrated DODO and hakkafinance Black Hole Swap into 1inch. Sergej Kunz, 1inch ’s CEO and co-founder, spoke exclusively to 8btc’s “How We DeFi -ing” program about Mooniswap. 1inch CTO Anton Bukov and developer Mikhail Melnik to talk markets, Mooniswap, the CHI token and more on Santiment Network’s podcast. USDN is now available on Mooniswap.
-Loopring Monthly Update is here. This month the team released Loopring Wallet’s smart contract v1.1 and started the app’s UX/UI redesign. They hope to invite users to an early beta in September. Loopring protocol 3.6 is close to code-complete (a quite special new feature was added) and the external security audits will start in two weeks.
-Check out UMA’s Liquidation Opportunity Program: a total of $16,000 will be given away in the coming weeks for those who run liquidator bots on the UMA protocol, and UMA’s Liquidity Mining Pilot — Retro and Rollover: initial pilot attracted $20mm in locked value and will rollover to a new pool. Derivatives UMA gets Listed on OKEx.
-Set Community Update #13 — July 2020 is now out: the team updated the TokenSets News Feed Newspaper, added Spanish translation to TokenSets Flag of Spain, onboarded new Social Traders. With V2 coming soon, they shared Yield Farming Deep Dive.
-USDC upgraded to V2. The update will allow services that offer USDC support to pay transaction fees (gas) for their users.
-The Zapper team announced that they have raised a $1.5M seed round to expand DeFi accessibility led by Framework Ventures and Libertus Capital with participation from MetaCartel Ventures, Coinfund, The LAO, CoinGecko, and Zee Prime Capital. Previously, Zapper integrated Yearn Vaults, so you can now enter any Yearn vault using any asset on Ethereum with Zapper’s new integration.
-SushiSwap introduced. SushiSwap protocol is an “evolution” of Uniswap that claims to better align incentives for network participants by introducing revenue-sharing & network effects to the popular AMM model via the SUSHI token.
-MCDEX adds new Perpetual Markets: These markets include SNX-PERP, LEND-PERP and COMP-PERP that you can now trade on MCDEX’s decentralized exchange.
-DefiDollar, a stable asset backed by an index of stablecoins, is live. DUSD is a hedge against volatility and provides portfolio risk diversification.
-YieldSpace, a new automated liquidity provider for yDai (a token that is redeemable for Dai at maturity), introduced.
-Decentralized options platform Opyn launched put options on Curve’s CRV token.
-Hugh Karp hops on the Blockcrunch podcast to discuss Nexus Mutual. Binance Lists Nexus Mutual Wrapped NXM. The Zerion team has added support for tracking your NexuMutual tokens and staked NXM on Zerion.
-Matic Network is now available on Kyber Network. KyberSwap is now using Kyber Network Reserve Routing, greatly reducing gas costs for token swaps.
-Read Ren’s August Development Update on sMPC audit by Trail of bits, open-sourced sMPC Primitives, and Transaction Engine improvements. On top of that, RenVM | The Road to Decentralisation was published.
-Freshly-published Raiden Weekly is here.
-Token Terminal’s DeFi dashboard: Greenfield One, has released a research report highlighting the importance of governance systems in DeFi protocols.
-Advanced Analytics Tool For Ethereum & DeFi — Dune Analytics video tutorial.
-New DeFi podcasts.
-And much more!
Read the full report here.
⬙Check out our latest biweekly report on Ethereum vol.51 (18th August - 1st September)
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