This Week in DeFi – April 9

To the DeFi community,

This week, Chainswap raised $3 million in a funding round led by Alameda Research and the OKEx OK Block Dream Fund, while also taking the rare step of announcing an upcoming airdrop before the snapshot has been taken. Chainswap currently bridges between Ethereum, BSC, and the Huobi ECHO chain, with plans to integrate the Bitcoin, Polkadot, and Solana blockchains in the near future.

ChainSwap closes $3M Strategic Round to create a Multi-Asset Hub for Smart Chains 🦄

Announces airdrop for cross-chain bridge users and AntiMatter $MATTER holders 🎉https://t.co/Dy1qn5MEeL

— ChainSwap (@chain_swap) April 6, 2021

 

UMA and Sushiswap, two of the fastest moving and innovative projects in the DeFi arena, have teamed up to offer call options for xSushi tokens. The first set of options will expire on May 31st, allowing options buyers to buy xSushi at $25 regardless of the spot price on that date. If the xSushi price is above that price, options holders can execute the contracts and flip xSushi for instant profit.

Decentralized call options are extremely powerful, both for bullish investors getting long exposure and project teams managing their token treasuries. As @UMAprotocol adds more collateral types and price identifiers, you’ll be able to create call options for even more tokens. https://t.co/0mYVsyV1jL

— John Shutt (@jdshutt) April 5, 2021

 

Balancer was in the headlines this week after announcements that an implementation of the crypto swap protocol would be coming to Algorand, with some confusion over who would be engineering the project. The Balancer team will remain focused on building Balancer V2 on Ethereum, while participants from Reach and the Algorand team plan to have a Balancer implementation up and running in Q3. Reach received a small $5k grant from Balancer to support the mission of expanding to new crypto frontiers.

1/ We’re excited by support from @Algorand & @BalancerLabs to explore how Balancer can work on Algorand. To clarify today’s news: Yes, we received a small Balancer grant. But we are motivated by the potential of a robust AMM like Balancer on a high performing network (@Algorand).

— Reach (@reachlang) April 6, 2021

 

Kyber is making moves to further increase the capital efficiency of one of the earliest token swap protocols with the beta release of the Kyber Dynamic Market Maker. The DMM will use variable fees to offer liquidity providers some protection against impermanent loss, and will reduce slippage slippage for traders. Kyber’s DMM will also allow LPs to define active price ranges similar to the Uniswap V3 implementation, adding further protection against impermanent loss while potentially limiting prices at which price ranged liquidity pools will be used for swaps.

After months of research, we’re excited to unveil the mainnet beta of Kyber Dynamic Market Maker (DMM) protocol! 🚀https://t.co/RjjAK3qe5V is a next-gen AMM designed to optimise fees and enable extremely high capital efficiency for liquidity providers. https://t.co/aSMArRzw7t pic.twitter.com/QyvPEIOeQb

— Kyber Network (@KyberNetwork) April 5, 2021

 

It’s undeniable; if you’re willing to go hunting for opportunity, DeFi is back in business and stronger than ever, with multiple low-cost chains to choose from and major developments flowing out of some of the most established and innovative teams in the industry. With so many new capabilities cropping up after months of research and development, the density of alpha-rich asymmetric bets is approaching levels last seen in the spring of 2020, when DeFi was just starting to ramp up as users came to realize the full potential of composable protocols and the increasing demand for sources of non-traditional returns.

It’s true, there’s more ground to cover between old reliable plays on Ethereum, BSC, Algorand, and a rising number of cross-chain protocols that don’t call any single base layer home. But a focus on good tokenomics and projects with a long-term view are likely to outperform over time, even if they’re not the most popular flavor of the day. In a fast moving market, slow research might just still be your best friend. Few…

Highest Yields: Nexo Lend at 10% APY, Fulcrum at 9.52% 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: Fulcrum at 11.51% APY, Poloniex at 10.69% APY

Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 1% APY, Compound at 11.03% APY

Coinbase joins the DeFi Alliance just days before going public.

1inch rebrands as growth and ambitions take off.

Band Protocol and Injective tighten their partnership through mutual node operations.

Opyn introduces WBTC options trading on-chain.

Instadapp mints 100 million tokens for use in governance based on the Compound protocol.

Total Value Locked: $50.63B (up 11.18% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $106.8B (up 10.71%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $12.71B (down -23.39%)

DAI Supply: 3.04B (up 2.6%)

Total DeFi Users: 1,809,600 (up 2.96%)

[Dan Kahan – The Defiant] – Coinbase’s Open Books Makes Crypto Hard to Ignore

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – Fei launch and the enduring allure of stablecoins

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Protocol Alliances – The Daily Gwei #221

[Fabian Klauder – DeFi Times] – Let’s Go Layer Two!

 

[Lucas Campbell – Bankless] – Decentralized VC will eat venture investing