Good Morning! Welcome to Bacon, Eggs, and DeFi #002. In the next few newsletters, I will be experimenting with ways to divide the news up. Here’s what happened yesterday in the world of DeFi!
DEXes:
Balancer revealed features of the upcoming v2 release, which is expected to launch in March. The main change is transitioning from multiple pools to a single vault, which will allow for greater gas efficiencies and AMM logic experimentation. Another exciting feature is Asset Managers, smart contracts that can lend out idle assets in the vault to lending protocols for additional yield.
Manta Network, a privacy-oriented DEX for Polkadot, raised $1.1 million from investors including Polychain Capital, Hypersphere Ventures, and Multicoin Capital. Manta Network plans to launch in Q3 of 2021.
The developers of Swerve Finance, a community-oriented fork of Curve Finance, announced they have decided to discontinue working on the current iteration of Swerve and pursue an alternative project.
SnowSwap integrated Chainlink’s Fast Gas Oracle, ensuring that swaps on the DEX have consistently updated gas prices. SnowSwap currently has four pools, including the yVault USD, yVault Curve, btcSNOW, and eth2SNOW.
Lending:
Mike Sall and Blake West, two former Coinbase employees, are launching Goldfinch, a decentralized lending protocol for no-collateral loans. Goldfinch previously raised $1 million from investors including Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, and Kindred Ventures.
MakerDAO crossed $5 Billion TVL for the first time.
Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of Aave, teased an Aave debit card powered by Credit Delegation, a new feature in Aave v2 allowing depositors to earn extra yield by lending their deposits to other users.
Asset Management:
Zerion users can now access Indexed Finance's DEFI Top 5 Index (DEFI5) and Cryptocurrency Top 10 Index (CC10) in the app's invest section. Users can also invest in DeFi indexes like DeFiPulse Index (DPI) and PieDao DEFI++.
Akropolis integrated four of Yearn’s v2 yVaults, including DAI, USDC, steCRV, and HEGIC (excludes wBTC yvault).
Index Coop announced the completion of the January rebalance for the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI). As part of the rebalance, DPI added MTA, the governance token for mStable. Additionally, the DPI will add SUSHI on February 28th.
BadgerDAO previewed their Bitcoin Bridge, which will allow users to mint renBTC and deposit directly into Badger’s vaults.
Derivatives:
UMA Protocol and YAM Finance announced the launch of uSTONKS, a synthetic token that tracks the combined performance of the ten most referenced stocks on r/wallstreetbets.
Injective Protocol announced the launch of Equinox Staking, the third phase of the Solstice Testnet. Equinox Staking will allow both validators and delegators to earn rewards (baseline APY, APY boosts, and other incentives) through staking. Injective plans on launching to mainnet in Q2 of 2021.
Governance:
YFI token holders voted to approve Yearn Improvement Proposal (YIP) 57 (1.67k Yes votes - 83.46%). As a result, an additional 6,666 YFI will be minted, with 33% going to key contributors (on a vesting schedule) and the rest going to Yearn’s treasury. Additionally, Yearn added 13 new yVaults this week.
BAL, the governance token of Balancer, will be added to Aave after AIP-8 passed.
Insurance:
DeFi insurance aggregator ArmorFi increased the maximum bounty for a critical bug discovery to $600,000 (paid in ETH or ARMOR on a vesting schedule). This increase makes the bounty the highest across all DeFi protocols. ArmorFi’s bounties for high, medium, and low risk level bugs are $10,000, $5,000, and $1,000 respectively.
Other:
PoolTogether, a no loss lottery built on Ethereum, announced Loot Boxes, a permissionless way for anyone to add tokens or NFTs to a prize pool. Users can find a Loot Box contract by navigating to a pool’s page and clicking Contribute to the Loot Box. PoolTogether will also be launching a new prize pool on Wednesday.
Mark Cuban said he owns AAVE, SUSHI, ETH, BTC, and LTC during a Reddit AMA on r/wallstreetbets.
CoinGecko integrated TVL data from DeFi Llama.
zkSync, a protocol for scaling transactions on Ethereum using zkRollups, reached 1,000,000 transactions.
DeFiPulse added data from Alpha Homora v2 following its’ release on Monday.
Stay tuned for the next edition of Bacon, Eggs, and DeFi!
- Austin (@1A1zP1)