This Week in DeFi – April 2

To the DeFi community,

This week, the dam finally broke as a flood of new Ethereum-based L2 DeFi offerings hit the market, opening the way for millions of new users to get in on the action without breaking the bank on gas fees.

Dharma announced Gas-Lite, bringing one-tap access to depositing funds in blue-chip DeFi protocols with gas fee reductions of up to 80% when transfers are made directly from user bank accounts. Similar to other L2 solutions in the market, Gas-Lite bundles transactions to spread the cost among many different deposits to drastically lower the cost of deposits for individual users.

MAJOR ALPHA LEAK (not an April Fools joke)

Y’all said you wanted cheaper transactions, I’ll give you cheaper transactions!

Dharma just cut the cost of depositing to @AaveAave, @compoundfinance, and @iearnfinance by 50-80% (direct-from-bank deposits only).

You’re welcome 🙇 https://t.co/3LqFlJL7bZ

— Brendan from Dharma (@brendan_dharma) April 1, 2021

Aave gave more details on their plans to tackle new frontiers in pursuit of keeping DeFi inclusive for everyone, not just high-net worth users, while staying true to it’s Ethereum based roots. The first step is integration with Polygon (formerly MATIC) for select assets like stablecoins, WETH, and WBTC, where fees are reduced to a fraction of a cent while maintaining the security and decentralization advantages of the Ethereum network.

Aave Protocol is now on @0xPolygon 👻

Deposit transaction took 2.7 seconds to be confirmed on PoS

Paid 0.000207884 MATIC ($0.000074 USD)

Enjoy! https://t.co/oyVkj81USf https://t.co/FhaLKTdUDq

— stani.eth 👻 =(⬤_⬤)= 👻 (@StaniKulechov) March 31, 2021

Synthetix officially launched staking assets to generate sUSD on mainnet Optimism L2 after months of testing, and will provide staking rewards for users who migrate collateral to the new service. There are some limitations, like sUSD on Optimism currently having few places to end up for extended yield farming strategies, but the successful Synthetix integration should lead to many more services porting to Optimism over the coming months.

The Staking dApp is now compatible with OΞ on L2! https://t.co/Y8rQGTRNWf

— Synthetix ⚔️ (@synthetix_io) April 1, 2021

And Perpetual Protocol has released Phase 1 of a two phase staking to help secure the perpetual contracts network, with liquidity rewards included of course. Similar to Sushiswap, a portion of PERP staking rewards will be vested for 6 months, and withdrawal from the staking contract will require a cooldown period of 14 days. Phase 2 of the staking release will include distributing trading fees to staking users as well, so stay tuned.

Finally PERP holders can stake PERP tokens in the protocol! It’s the last piece that’s missing from Perpetual Protocol V1 and super happy that we made it! https://t.co/jAnwzJGi3y

— Yenwen Feng (@tempofeng) March 30, 2021

There was never going to be one single event to herald the coming of the era of live scaling solutions for DeFi and the Ethereum community, but in important ways this week feels like we may have crossed that threshold.

The cascade of apps onto L2 was always going to start with top-tier protocols (especially after Optimism scaled back ambitions plans for a full launch last month to more manageable whitelisting of individual projects), and with the arrival of yield farming on Yearn, Aave, Synthetix, and more this week, it seems that phase of integration has finally arrived.

Next up? Accelerating the trend to capture more DeFi protocols, and getting the word out that DeFi is ready to serve the masses again, no matter how much capital you’re bringing to the table. Spring is here, which means summer is just a few months away. And with L2 integrations finally starting to drop, summer 2021 could make the DeFi summer of 2020 look like child’s play.

It’s time to claim airdrop tokens from UMA’s TVL-boosting campaign.

Band Protocol and Equilibrium team up for a new kind of cross-chain synthetic asset.

Alpha Finance continues to ship with brand new tokenomics for right-sized user rewards.

 

Actus offers a unique options-based airdrop campaign for early adopters.

Fei protocol breaks down the finer points of leveraging the new stable reserve asset.

Highest Yields: dYdX at 17.47% APY, Nexo Lend at 10% APY

Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 3.00% APY, Aave at 7.24% 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:  Poloniex at 10% APY,  Fulcrum at 11.51% APY

Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 1% APY, Compound at 10.71% APY

Total Value Locked: $45.54B (up 15.38% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $96.47B (up 7%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $16.59B (up 37.68%)

DAI Supply: 2.963B (up 1.26%)

Total DeFi Users: 1,757,600 (up 2.81%)

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] –DeFi Quietly Doubled By Most Metrics in Q1

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – The World’s Settlement Layer – The Daily Gwei #213

[Fabian Klauder – DeFi Times] – Are The Institutions Gone?

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – DeFi Pulse Farmer #34

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Magic Finance – The Daily Gwei #216

[David Hoffman – Bankless] – x*y=k…An Ethereum Story