This Week in DeFi – April 16

To the DeFi community,

 

This week, Sushiswap dev Boring Crypto quietly announced the full mainnet launch of Kashi, the first of many BentoBox apps being developed for the decentralized exchange platform. Kashi enables leveraged long and short positions in a wide variety of tokens drawn from the Onsen yield farming program, and liquidity providers can farm yields with single token exposure, eliminating impermanent loss risk and reducing insolvency risk across the entire Sushiswap liquidity pool ecosystem.

 

Aaaaand… it’s live… https://t.co/9003iRcTjF

…on ETH and BSC#Kashi #BentoBox #Sushi #Sushiswap

— BoringCrypto (@Boring_Crypto) April 13, 2021

 

The Ethereum Berlin upgrade made a mostly soft landing on the scene in spite of a bug that caused outages at some high-profile Ethereum services for several hours, bringing improvements to gas infrastructure that should offer limited relief from ruinous fees as the Eth faithful await July’s London upgrade and EIP-1559. Berlin increases the gas cost of a first interaction with a given protocol, in exchange for lower fees on each subsequent interaction to better reflect the resource cost to the Ethereum network of the touch points.

 

After months and months of planning, the Ethereum Berlin upgrade is ready to be deployed today, with multiple improvements to the gas system! 🥳

It’s paving the way for this summer’s London upgrade, which plans to burn some of the fees that would normally be accrued by miners.

— Ethereum World (@worldofethereum) April 14, 2021

 

Real estate-backed loans have come to MakerDAO, expanding the premiere decentralized stablecoin protocol to real world assets. The addition of New Silver DROP tokens as collateral for DAI issuance was approved via a community vote, and reflects the highly dynamic nature of the MakerDAO protocol design. With the mainstreaming of NFTs, it should only be a matter of time before even more exotic assets are approved as collateral for DAI loans…

 

Real World Assets (RWA) are here! This is a critical new frontier for @MakerDAO & @centrifuge bridging DeFi to TradFi. RWA will diversify the collateral portfolio backing Dai with non-correlated yield-generating assets. Gradually, then suddenly… https://t.co/IfmdmJBHxB

— Nik Kunkel (@nomos_paradox) April 12, 2021

 

Cross-chain swaps for Bitcoin and other popular tokens are getting a facelift with the release of pTokens v2 app. The release also includes fee payments to pNetwork node operators, with the pNetwork DAO also offering APY of 42% at current transaction volumes. The cross-chain swap options just keep coming!

 

The user experience is SO. MUCH. BETTER. with the pTokens dApp v2!

Now live at https://t.co/Z6nTGjdOo0 💪 https://t.co/fwuszd6GIh

— Alice Corsini 🦜 (@alicecorsini_) April 15, 2021

 

And UMA announced another innovative financial instrument for the DeFi space in Volatility Tokens, a new way to bet on or against volatility in the price of Ethereum. Similar to the VIX in traditional equity markets, high volatility translates to a higher price for the forthcoming UMA primitive, adding yet more variety to the potential strategies available to generate return in unpredictable DeFi markets.

 

1/ Introducing @dvixprotocol, the Decentralized Volatility Index.

The first product under development will track the volatility of ETH and is being built on UMA.https://t.co/eG9UBMErGO

— UMA (@UMAprotocol) April 14, 2021

 

One big takeaway from this week? DeFi developers are putting together financial instruments that took decades for traditional markets to dream up in just months, in case you needed more evidence that DeFi is a serious engine for financial innovation. Mortgage backed-loans, volatility trading, and ever expanding options for leveraged trading and farming, not to mention inching closer to defeating impermanent loss on a number of different fronts—it’s almost like building on open, decentralized protocols powered by the support of dozens of different communities is a more efficient use of human ingenuity and resourcefulness than siloed, hierarchical, winner-take-all corporate organizations.

 

Where we’re going, we don’t need TradFi…

Highest Yields: Fulcrum at 11.46% APY, dYdX at 10.28% APY

Cheapest Loans: Aave at 6.27% APY, Compound at 7.98% 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: dYdX at 13.7% APY, Compound at 11.79% APY

Cheapest Loans: Aave at 12.16% APY, Compound at 14.77% APY

 

Total Value Locked: $59.77B (up 18.05% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $125.51B (up 17.52%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $13.55B (up 6.6%)

DAI Supply: 3.21B (up 5.59%)

Total DeFi Users: 1,856,600 (up 2.6%)

[Defiant Team – The Defiant] – Defiant Media Raises $1.4M to Build the Financial Information Platform for Web3

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – Did Flashbots drive gas prices lower?

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Work and Play – The Daily Gwei #226

[William Peaster – Bankless] – 7 things you can do on Layer 2

[Balancer Blog – Stanislav Kozlovski] – A Primer on Fair Token Launches and Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools