Latest this week
This week can probably be summed up as “the calm before the storm”.
NYC Blockchain Week is right around the corner. I’ll be flying from Sydney so if anyone would like to meet up feel free to drop me a line (Twitter/Telegram: @kermankohli)
Bitcoin rips $6k without much hesitation. Ethereum will probably follow soon. When it does follow, we’re going to see the ETH locked in DeFi skyrocket to a ridiculous level. This will probably create a lot of sell pressure on DAI which could lead us to 30%+ stability fee rates. Dai Stability Fee is needed soon.
FinCEN released draft guidelines regarding crypto/blockchain technology. The most surprising thing about this is the fact dApp developers need financial licenses to comply. This would mean majority of the DeFi projects here would need to pony up a large amount of cash to be compliant. The other option is to ban US IP addresses and reincorporate in BVI or Cayman.
On Chain Statistics
Total Locked in DeFi: $414M. This is approximately $14m up from last week! Rising ETH prices have a strong link to ETH locked up. I wonder if this metric crosses $1B+ once ETH hits $1000+.
Biggest Gainer: wBTC is up to $1.2M locked up. A sharp increase from $800k the week before. Looks like more people want to speculate on Bitcoin via Ethereum’s financial primitives.
Interesting Stat: MakerDAO stability fee currently sitting close to 20%. Peg is nearing $1.
Community Submitted Links
Levels of decentralisation: https://hackernoon.com/how-decentralized-is-defi-a-framework-for-classifying-lending-protocols-90981f2c007f
Understanding Uniswap data: https://www.covalenthq.com/blog/understanding-uniswap-data-analysis/
Project Updates
KyberDAO Voting Experiment #1 on the Aragon platform was a very insightful experience. Over time, through more of such research and experiments, we hope to learn and work together as a community to develop a suitable decentralized governance model for Kyber Network. Read our review.
Crypto.com (MCO) and Paxos Standard (PAX) are now available on Kyber Network. The tokens are accessible through KyberSwap and other platforms that are tapping into our on-chain liquidity protocol.
KNC (Kyber Network Crystal) is listed on the Crypto.com Wallet app! You can deposit, buy and store KNC on the app and use the Crypto.com Card globally at vendors that accept Visa.
SNX staking rewards have been launched and are claimable via our Mintr dApp. During this first year, the total SNX supply is increased by 75% , which is supplied directly to active stakers.
We're in the process of launching details for our first Synthetix.Exchange trading competition, which will start next Monday. This first iteration will be mostly community-only with minimal marketing, to ensure we can make it as smooth as possible when we aim future competitions at future traders.
We've also made some UI changes to Synthetix.Exchange, and are looking to launch a few more synthetic assets tracking the prices of more cryptocurrencies (long and short) to add to sBTC, sETH, and sBNB.
We published A Framework for Classifying DeFi Protocols with input from Brendan Forster at Dharma, Robert Leshner at Compound, Nik Kunkel at MakerDAO, Antonio Juliano at dYdX, Varun Deshpande at Nuo, and Emilio Frangella at ETHLend.
Our audit with ZK Labs is back on track. Our auditor, Matthew DiFerrante, was hospitalized. It has now been handed off to Harry Roberts at ZK Labs.
In a push towards continued transparency, we're publishing bi-weekly updates to include newly released features, improvements & bug fixes as well as specific features that are being prioritized for future development. All updates to AirSwap can be viewed at https://updates.airswap.io
Earlier this year, we launched DexIndex, a tool that searches Ethereum decentralized exchanges (DEXs) for the best prices. If you haven’t used DexIndex yet, we invite you to try it out. For projects looking to get added to DexIndex, you can fork the code and directly contribute!
AirSwap is co-hosting Fluidity Summit on May 9 this week at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (Weylin). For those who are attending, we can’t wait to see you there!
One thing we need help with:
AirSwap is hiring! If you’re interested in what our team is working on at AirSwap, please submit an application in the “Careers” section here.
Completed rewards program UI design
Rolled out alerts and notifications using PagerDuty
Added MKT:USD rate endpoint to MPX API
Integrated new contracts and middleware with MPX admin
Refactored MARKET.js in preparation for integration with ethers.js (web3 replacement)
Integrating the TEX library into the front-end and working on client performances
In Hong Kong, Gavin Wood spoke on staking on Polkadot.
New Builders’ Portal for Polkadot.
New Substrate tutorials here.
Build Your Own Blockchain with Substrate workshop during NY Blockchain Week.
Robert Habermeier will be at the Founders meetup during NY Blockchain Week.
Web3 Foundation is providing grants to build the Web3 ecosystem.
We’re hiring a Release Manager for Parity Ethereum.