This Week in DeFi – December 10

To the DeFi community,

This week, 0x protocol announced in partnership with Celo the allocation of $4.5 million to the 0xCommunity DAO, intended to help onboard the next wave of crypto users to Celo’s mobile first decentralized ecosystem. Funds will go towards promoting adoption of 0x-powered apps on the Celo platform.

We’re proud to expand our partnership with @CeloOrg to allocate $4.5M in joint funding to the @0xCommunityDAO 🤝

The funding will be used to bring 6 billion new users onto 0x-powered apps running on the Celo blockchain!https://t.co/CU3GlRCmHE

— 0x (@0xProject) December 3, 2021

Pods Finance announced the launch of their decentralized options platform on Arbitrum, bringing new crypto hedging opportunities to the Arbitrum L2 ecosystem. Pods also announced they plan to build on both optimistic and zk rollups to make their products available to as broad an audience as possible.

⚡️ Pods is now live on @arbitrum ⚡️

Our first deployed option is a Put Option ETH:USDC with strike $3500 expiring on December 23rd with a cap of $1MM

1/ pic.twitter.com/Ia3K3237Ra

— Pods (@PodsFinance) December 8, 2021

Liquidity aggregator Woo Network announced support for Avalanche, with WOO tokens being added to the Avalanche Bridge and seeded with $15m in stating liquidity. The smart liquidity protocol will direct funds across a multichain ecosystem, with new Avalanche support for the WOO X professional exchange.

$WOO 🔺 $AVAX

WOO Network’s liquidity will now be supporting the development of the @avalancheavax Ecosystem by bridging applications, users, and assets to the network.

A thread on $WOO x $AVAX (1/5) 👇https://t.co/WSzXhoKDDn

— WOO Network (@WOOnetwork) December 8, 2021

And popular DeFi indexing products DPI and MVI from DeFiPulse’s Index Coop are now natively available on Polygon, making it cheaper and easier to bet on the broad success of DeFi and the metaverse without tracking down individual gems and managing a personal DeFi portfolio.

DPI and MVI now available on Polygon…#TheIndexCoop@indexcoop @SetProtocol #DeFi $DeFihttps://t.co/gN5SJtZxiP

— DeFi BlogNews 🌍 (@defiblognews) December 8, 2021

Crypto markets have been choppy this week, and if there were any questions about correlation with the broader financial markets, by now they’ve been all but quashed. It may be surprising for some, but the integration of Bitcoin and crypto into the real economy was always going to come with some trade-offs compared to early days.

Another unwelcome correlation is that of many front end access points to DeFi falling victim to the AWS outage that took down dozens of popular mainstream sites and services. AWS has become such a commoditized resource that it’s hard to blame developers for leveraging the service, but outages like the one this week show the risk in that approach. While crypto projects have some options that can replace the functionality of AWS, few are robust and reliable enough to service even the existing DeFi users today, let alone the millions more that will join the ecosystem in the coming years.

With DAOs proliferating at a rapid pace and remote work trends making talent and opportunities more accessible than ever before, we’re likely to see new organizations arise in the coming years to take on precisely these type of large scale technical challenges – some of the final components in achieving a truly decentralized foundation for the internet and digital asset ecosystems.

The big question is, will DAO-style coordination really be able to effectively build a business that Amazon has come to dominate? It seems far-fetched today given the scope of the task and the resources available to existing players, but this industry iterates and improves so quickly, I wouldn’t rule anything out just yet. Just keep building.

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $99.95B (down -7.96% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $137.03B (down -15.36%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $35.61B (up 35.3%)

DAI Supply: 8.91B (up 0.11%)

Total DeFi Users: 4,137,800 (up 1.07%)

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – DAO Sovereignty and Why It’s Important

[Brady Dale – The Defiant] – Balancer DAO’s Treasury Is Rapidly Diversifying Across DeFi

[Evan Fisher – Bankless] – How to value DeFi tokens (Part II)

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Proof of Profit – The Daily Gwei #396

[Fabian Klauder – DeFi Times] – Ethereum Loses TVL Market Share

Alex is a Content Writer at Circle, with previous experience at tech startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and as a freelance writer and analyst. Interests include cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and he has been in the crypto community since 2014.