DeFi Weekly #38
Set launches their strategy enabled tokens, dYdX & InstaDapp launch their new protocols & Uniswap closes an investment round from Paradigm
Welcome
Hello everyone! DeFi Weekly is a rebrand of Protocol Weekly which I started out last year where protocols were all the rage. Protocol Weekly was meant to be the newsletter which gives you an update on what the best protocols were doing. However, as the industry has matured we’re seeing a shift away from building isolated protocols, to building products in a new economy natively built on Ethereum aka DeFi (decentralised finance).
The idea behind this newsletter is to give a holistic overview of everything in this space with key developments you need to know about, interesting on chain statistics and updates from teams (if they choose to share them). We’re also changing the fact that updates could be from both protocols and products. Some new additions to this newsletter are: InstaDapp (aggregated DeFi app) and bZX (derivative protocol).
I hope you like the new direction!
Latest this week
This week has been a pretty massive week in the DeFi space. Some of the top highlights include:
Set launched their strategy enabled tokens that enabled automated trading strategies. They’re basically smart tokens. The team’s done a solid effort in designing the product and protocol.
dYdX moves away from margin tokens and moves to a direct approach for lending and borrowing. It seems like multiple DeFi products are slowly starting to converge on similar functionality.
The InstaDapp team released their new v2 protocol which allows you to interact with multiple DeFi primitives in one interface. These guys ship at a crazy fast speed.
Uniswap closes out their seed round led by Paradigm. Congrats to Hayden! What I find unique about Paradigm is they’re one of the very few firms where one of the founding partners (Fred Ehrsam) has been a successful entrepreneur. Experienced crypto operators turning into professional investors is a rarity in this space
One thing which is common across all of these protocols/products is that they’re well designed and easy to use. Good design isn’t an option anymore, it’s a requirement. The rise of more sophisticated wallet providers such as Fortmatic, Portis and BitSki will play a large part of improving app UX as well.
On Chain Statistics
Total Locked in DeFi: $419M. If the price of ETH keeps rising we’re going to start seeing more people seeking leverage via Maker, Dharma, dYdx etc.
Biggest Gainer: Dharma up 17.3% with a total of $10M locked up. #ReFi with #DeFi seems to be working.
Biggest Loser: Augur down 4.2% with a total of $876k locked up. v2 come soon!
CDP #3228: Holds 28k ETH and willing to bet the price of ETH won’t drop below $138. Bullish.
Project Updates
Along with our new website, we release the first version of the Kyber protocol paper, where we formalize Kyber as a liquidity protocol that can be implemented on any smart contract-enabled blockchain to power on-chain token swaps and widen Kyber adoption. Learn more here.
Our developer portal had a facelift! This new portal reorganizes important topics such as Integrations, Reserves, Environments, and API/ABI into its own sections. Reserves now has its own dedicated section with clearer instructions and documentation to help more people understand the benefits of providing liquidity on Kyber and how to do so. Check out the new portal.
Kyber had a fruitful EDCON Hackathon and Conference in Sydney, where we got the chance to meet our Australian community. Congrats to Team EthSub for winning the Kyber EDCON bounty!
Currently waiting on ZK Labs audit to launch Fulcrum (https://medium.com/bzxnetwork/introducing-fulcrum-tokenized-margin-made-dead-simple-e65ccc82393f)
Started work to upgrade the Fulcrum portal to allow both tokenized positions and base protocol positions (article: https://medium.com/bzxnetwork/how-do-fulcrums-ptokens-and-dydx-s-margin-tokens-compare-
Wyre Talk protocol deep-dive released: https://simplecast.com/s/f4d28cbc
dApp Digest podcast released on the latest District0x Weekly: https://blog.district0x.io/the-district-weekly-april-20th-2019-5574269e5543?gi=fd2e4ac69c36
InstaDApp Version 2 - we introduced a smart contract wallet which directly interacts with other protocols which provides a better user experience.
Uniswap Pools - We released Uniswap pools so users can now easily manage their CDP, balances & Uniswap pools in one dashboard - https://instadapp.io/dashboard/
AirSwap is co-hosting Fluidity Summit on May 9 at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (Weylin). Limited early bird tickets are on sale now. You can stay up to date with event updates on the official Facebook Events page.
Since the launch of our conversational OTC trading product Spaces, we have onboarded professional OTC desks as liquidity providers for interested OTC traders. We launched our first interview from our OTC Spotlight series featuring Grapefruit Trading.
A few weeks ago, we rolled out the private beta for AirSwap. If you’re interested in participating in the beta program, please sign up for the waitlist. The beta will be rolling out to the public on April 25
Signed contract with security audit firm
Added variable fee structure and integrated into MPX API
Completed evaluation of ethers.js
Completed UI design for minting platform fees
Added an option for user to select gas setting
Partially filled orders now to show remaining quantity
Recording from Gavin Wood discussing Governance: What, Why, and How at Ethereum Singapore.
Parity's CTO Fred Harrysson wrote up some thoughts on how to build blockchain clients differently, more sustainably, and with more focus on users.
New interview with Gavin Wood on his vision for Polkadot and PoW and PoS.
Parity Ethereum core developer Wei Tang presented "Account Versioning: Software engineering way to solve the immutability / invariant problem." Slides here.
Interested in building on Polkadot? The Web3 Foundation is providing grants.
We're hiring Blockchain Runtime Engineers.
Random
Not sure how, but I came across this satire publication called CoinJazeera on Twitter. They have some pretty hilarious posts that make you literally laugh out loud. Here’s some highlights from their recent piece about CZ and IEO’s
We couldn’t help but notice a similarity in CZ’s strategy to another familiar coin: Polkadot. When pressed, he reassured the public that he was not creating an Ethereum competitor.
“Yes, you caught me.” he sighed. “My final plan is indeed this. We first had the ICO, then we had the IEO, and finally we will have the CZO, The Changpang Zhao Offering.
https://coinjazeera.news/binance-chain-czs-final-scam/