This Week in DeFi – March 5

To the DeFi Community,

This week, Alchemix Protocol and Compound are keeping up the pace of DeFi innovation in the lead up to Optimism and other Ethereum-based scaling solutions. Alchemix brings a new type of synthetic ERC-20 token based on the future value of interest on a deposit, and will reward early adopters with a liquidity mining program. Meanwhile, Inverse Finance launched the INV protocol token via an airdrop worth up to $60,000 as trading was unlocked.

Last week, we had the highest single vote participation rate in on-chain governance history: 74% participation

Today, the market is offering our members up to $60,000 to quit our DAO and 86% refuse to leave so far

SIXTY-THOUSAND US DOLLARS TO WALK AWAY

— Inverse.Finance (@InverseFinance) March 5, 2021

Experimentation within the Ethereum-based DeFi community continues to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with programmable money, and is still by far the richest in the blockchain arena. But many projects are also hard at work bringing their protocols to other blockchain networks, as Sushiswap deploys preliminary contracts to five new blockchains to speed up trading and lower fees. Compound also released the prototype for Gateway, a cross-chain interest rate market for borrowing native assets across different blockchains.

Today, we’re proud to announce a prototype based on the Compound Chain whitepaper:

Gateway is a cross-chain interest rate market that allows you to borrow assets native to one chain (e.g. ETH), with collateral from another chain (e.g. CELO).https://t.co/kFzxnz9SWc

— Compound Labs (@compoundfinance) March 1, 2021

Other major DeFi projects are making notable inroads on alternative blockchains as well; CREAM is expanding to Fantom as part of a larger integration across Yearn Finance projects, while Alpha Homora is joining 1inch on tapping Binance Smart Chain for their bandwidth expansion needs.

Sushi is going multichain 🍣⛓

We have deployed the Sushi contracts to these networks

1. @FantomFDN
2. @0xPolygon
3. @xdaichain
4. @binance
5. @MoonbeamNetwork

You can access our a̵͚̙̭̟͓͛͑l̶̢̨͈̳̻̀̚p̸͕̭̰̜̐ͅh̶̪̰͚͕́̓̀́̄a̸̩̹̳̳͇̅̀ ̵͈̤̲͒͆̌ releasehttps://t.co/B9spJVXTay https://t.co/r0DtiywycS pic.twitter.com/5Pk5oEBAne

— Joseph Delong (@josephdelong) March 3, 2021

L2 exchanges are seeing their own increasing volumes, and Quickswap does more than $30 million in 24 hours, and volume across the most popular L2 exchange options crosses $50 million.

L2 DEX trading volume in the last 24hrs:

1 @QuickswapDEX $34,272,350 (>30% own token❗)
2 @ZKSwapOfficial $8,138,493 (>50% own token❗)
3 @loopringorg $5,917,842
4 @Leverj_io $1,326,715
5 @deversifi $1,259,070
6 @nashsocial $854,745
Powered by @coingecko API

— L2_Dex_Wars (@L2Wars) March 4, 2021

The cutting edge of DeFi innovation still seems to be in the Ethereum orbit, but new centers of gravity are rapidly solidifying themselves as reliable, robust competitors for the best development talent in the space. And despite much murmuring among the ETH faithful about imminent large-scale L2 implementations, the longer excessive gas prices persist, the more developers will be drawn to sandboxes where they can experiment quickly and cheaply to build cool new stuff.

Who’s the winner in all this? The open finance community, from sophisticated traders to everyday consumers who all benefit from better, faster, and stronger DeFi protocols changing the landscape of shared economies forever. And those of us just in it for the tech, of course :^).

Highest Yields: Nexo Lend at 10% APY, Fulcrum at 9.53% APY

Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 3.00% APY, Aave at 7.93% APY

MakerDAO Updates

DAI Savings Rate: 0.00%

Base Fee: 0.00%

ETH Stability Fee: 4.50%

USDC Stability Fee: 0.00%

WBTC Stability Fee: 4.50%

Highest Yields: Fulcrum at 12.19% APY, Nexo Lend at 10% APY

Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 1% APY, Compound at 6.94% APY

Alchemix gives users the value of their yield over time up front in a new DeFi primitive design.

Compound wants to let you borrow between tokens on their native blockchains.

On the finer points of DeFi’s favorite poster child protocol.

Indexed Yearn LP tokens have arrived.

Badger decentralizes the DAO treasury with help from 0xB1, Polychain, and more.

Total Value Locked: $39.03B (up 9.3% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $72.28B (down -15.07%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $11B (down 40.76%)

DAI Supply: 2.43B (up 10.43%)

Total DeFi Users: 1,524,500 (up 2.7%)

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] – Amazon Makes Hosting An Ethereum Node Easier

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – Miner Extractable Value and Maker’s Lock-In

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – The EVM is the Moat – The Daily Gwei #196

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] – Yearn Raises Dai Vault Limit as Alchemix Deposits Surge

[Lucas Campbell – Bankless] – Token Metrics You Should Know

[The Tie] – Bumpin’ with Beta: or, How I Learned to Love Portfolio Volatility