DeFi Weekly #39
Set starts to gain traction, dYdX launches, Veil resolves a 88ETH market, Welcome Synthetix!
Latest this week
Warm welcome to Synthetix.io to DeFi Weekly & DeFi Pulse!
Set’s locked up over $65k in their Vault contract < 1 week. For a non-speculative use case this is pretty exciting to see!
dYdX launches their new protocol/interface to the public. Check it out at dydx.exchange
Veil/Augur resolves one of its largest markets till date with over 88ETH in liquidity.
Synthetix has locked up $3.6m in their smart contracts
The Veil market “will @petebuttigieg reach over 1M followers” is really interesting since it shows a glimpse of early traction for Augur. Not only was the volume significant, but the participants of the market created models using @SocialBlade data to place their bets. Once betting on social growth/activity achieves significant volume, you could then get more localised social markets by state, city or even online communities. Some kind of market which predicts how many readers will be in a crypto subreddit during a bull run could create a positive feedback loop provided the scale is large enough (unlikely).
Extrapolating further having markets based on the outcome of a on-chain vote could be ridiculously cool. Imagine the year is 2025 and MakerDAO is trying to become a para-chain. One side of the market would be betting that they will get in (large stake holders who think they can influence the vote) and the other side is activist community holders who believe Maker should stay on Ethereum and create enough liquidity for other token holders to follow. These are attack vectors that haven’t really been explored about on-chain governance but will become apparent especially when the stakes rise and become more political. Aragon’s AGP-42 proposal to purchase DOTs using Aragon treasury funds was rejected which reflects the start of this trend. Right now the tech behind many on-chain governance mechanisms is being laid out, however when the next bull run comes along and everyone’s treasuries are now worth 10x-50x their original amounts we’re going to start seeing the ugliness of on-chain voting come out. I honestly don’t think there’s been enough thought about the implications of the tools we’re building out right now.
On Chain Statistics
Total Locked in DeFi: $395. This is approximately $20m down from last week. I wonder if the drop in prices + MakerDAO stability fee increasing is the main cause behind this.
Biggest Gainer: Dharma takes #3 on the leaderboard taking out Uniswap with a $2m lead.
Biggest Loser: Augur is down 13.2 with a total of $729k locked up. Protocol market fit is tough.
Project Updates
Launched Inverse Synths onto Synthetix.Exchange, which allow users to short BTC, ETH, and BNB through tokens that fluctuate in value inversely to the actual asset. https://blog.synthetix.io/seth-sbnb-and-inverse-synths-are-now-live/
We've been busy working on delivering the ability for SNX holders to claim their staking rewards, which should be finished in the next day or two.
Synced up with a member of our community to build out and launch a Twitter Bot that reports on the daily volumes at Synthetix.Exchange.
The V2 mobile app is ready on both the Android and IOS app store with the following cool features:
+ Sleek design and cool interface 🎨
+ Support ERC-20 tokens on-chain & off-chain 🚀
+ Support for $DAI 🌈
+ Improved user experience 🌝
+ Hub security checks 🛡️
Open sourced the Lightcone Relayer - a fully functional Loopring backend, responsible for hosting and matching orders off-chain. Blog post, Repo. This backend is compatible with Loopring protocol v2, and the relayer is already well into modifications to support the zkSNARK-based Loopring v3.
Published further guidance for the LRC token contract upgrade, scheduled for May 8th. LRC will remain ERC20-compliant, but the upgrade allows for further functionality related to our new fee model. LRC holders should keep their tokens on their own non-custodial Ethereum addresses, or on supporting exchanges.
Added minting fee and flow improvements to MPX
Completed initial integration of ethers.js
Integrated solidity contract release into MPX and MPX API
Completed alert and notification setup for production environment
At Sub0, the first Substrate developer conference, Gavin Wood presented new Substrate features, including off-chain workers (CPU, network, secure-storage, IPFS), indexable events, fee abstractions (block weight, rewards), and on-chain parallelism.
At Sub0, Robert Habermeier presented on Substrate's swappable consensus and the Cumulus libraries for easily turning a Substrate chain into a Polkadot parachain.
New Build Your Own UTXO chain tutorial.
New generic binary Merkle tree implementation in Rust, compatible with Serenity.
May Substrate events are here.
Web3 Foundation is providing grants to build the Web3 ecosystem.
We're hiring Developer Advocates, among many other positions.
Random
Favourite Tweet this week was the Elon x Vitalik exchange. Check it out at: