Welcome to the first issue of This Week in DeFi – a newsletter covering the top stories in open finance!
Despite Black Thursday and the global pandemic, DeFi continues to progress on a fundamental level. This week we saw the liquidity sector heat up as Balancer announced their seed round led by Placeholder VC while Uniswap released details on their new v2 upgrades. We also saw new Maker tools from DeFi Saver and Coinbase Wallet announcing their integration of major lending protocols.
Lastly, Gitcoin Grants Round 5 began earlier this week! The Grant round offers one of the best ways to support early DeFi projects and active community members. If you’d like to explore the open grants, visit the official page here.
Top Stories
Coinbase Wallet Integrates Compound and dYdX
Access Compound and dYdX lending markets through Coinbase’s non-custodial wallet!
Balancer Labs Announces $3M Seed Round
Balancer Labs closes a $3M seed round for its new liquidity protocol led by Placeholder VC, Accomplice, CoinList, and Inflection.
Uniswap Releases V2 Details
Uniswap introduces ERC20 pairs, improved oracles, flash swaps, and a protocol DAO with its upcoming V2 DEX upgrade.
Gitcoin Grants Round 5 Begins
Gitcoin went live with Round 5 of CLR Grants, offering a $250,000 matching pool for tech, media, and public health causes.
Bonus Reads
Interest Rates
Dai Lending Rates
With the DSR drop to 0%, we’ve seen a significant downturn in DAI interest rates across the board. Right now, Nuo Network offers the highest APY of 20.86% – however, we should highlight that this extremely high yield may come with some significant, unseen risks associated with the platform and all prospective users should proceed with some degree of caution.
We’ve also added Aave to our lending page – allowing anyone to see the lending and borrowing rates for the range of assets supported by the protocol. To get a full picture on the lending rates market, feel free to visit our official rates page.
USDC Lending Rates
With the new addition of USDC as a collateral type in Multi-Collateral Dai, the Coinbase/Circle stablecoin is seeing more activity in DeFi as a whole. With that said, interest rates on USDC have suffered as major lending protocols like dYdX and Compound are offering <1% APYs in recent weeks. Compared to its 30 day average of over 2%, these are significantly lower than its historical average.
Similar to Dai lending markets, Nuo is currently offering the highest APY of 7.07% on USDC loans while Coinbase continues to offer the same 1.25% APY. For prospective Nuo depositors, we urge a degree of caution when using the platform as the substantially higher rates than the rest of the field should raise some slight concerns.
Find a full overview on all DeFi lending and borrowing rates on our Rates page!
Stat Box
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Analyst at Bankless – one of the leading resources for open finance. Lucas is an active contributor to the DeFi ecosystem with appearances in other notable DeFi outlets including The Defiant and Our Network. He has years of experience working with dozens blockchain and token startups where he focused on token economics, marketing, and growth.