This Week in DeFi – December 31

To the DeFi community,

This week, Centrifuge and Aave launched the Real World Assets (RWA) market, allowing users to borrow tokens against non-crypto collateral including trade receivables, cargo and freight invoices, and more.

We’ve launched the RWA Market with @AaveAave 🎉 🌀 👻

Let’s dive in on what this means for DeFi — and cryptocurrency as a whole!https://t.co/Va8rdbbJEw

— Centrifuge (@centrifuge) December 28, 2021

DeFi data aggregator and portfolio analysis tool DeBank raised $25 million at a valuation of $200 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital. DeBank supports nearly 800 protocols across 15 blockchains,allowing users to track DeFi positions across a wide swathe of the fractured ecosystem.

ICYMI: DeFi wallet DeBank raises $25 million in equity funding roundhttps://t.co/1znAF0Sg4r

— The Block (@TheBlock__) December 29, 2021

And airdrops have been in overdrive in the final week of 2021, with OpenSea users receiving SOS tokens based on their activity and amount spent on NFTs, and active Ethereum users receiving GAS tokens based on transaction fees accumulated on the Ethereum network. Both tokens are independent of the project their distribution is based on, and only time will tell if they develop utility or staying power in the highly competitive crypto markets.

I love that everyone has been waiting for Opensea to do a token drop and since they didn’t do it a couple people came together and did one for them using the Opensea data $SOS

That’s Web3 for you, if you want something done right, do it yourself!

— cr0ss.eth (@cr0ssETH) December 24, 2021

Free money is always exciting, but it’s worth considering if the spirit of airdrops is starting to trend more towards the first examples seen in the 2017 era, when the mechanism was used almost exclusively as a marketing tactic to raise awareness for a given project. In almost every instance, the tokens rapidly lost all value (if they had any to begin with) and left more clutter in wallets and little appreciable impact.

That’s part of the reason airdrops from the likes of Uniswap and ENS felt so exciting; instead of a shotgun strategy to all addresses on the chain, these tokens came from well established players already providing value and working hard to increase it. The addition of treasuries funded by these tokens also vastly expanded the potential to impact the future growth of a protocol, adding real economic considerations to the trading and allocation of protocol tokens.

Now we’re seeing a divergence in which projects like Paraswap tighten requirements for receiving an airdrop so severely that the community sees little growth and utility is for some in question, and others like GAS are distributed so widely and sold so quickly that they’re hardly worth the fees to claim and generate little interest in their nascent projects.

As we enter a new year, some reflection might be in order on why airdrops became popular in the first place; as a means of capturing and ultimately retaining the limited attention of users in the crypto ecosystem. Free money is nice, but creativity and a real product to believe in will be more rewarding for all in the long run. Happy New Year!

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $99.57B (down -2.19% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $153.31B (down -3.26%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $17.99B (down -14.9%)

DAI Supply: 8.92B (down -0.56%)

Total DeFi Users: 4,276,000 (up 1.45%)

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] – Layer 2s Showed Their Utility But TVL Growth Lagged 

[Stefan Stankovic – Crypto Briefing] – Sberbank Launches Russia’s First Blockchain-Focused ETF

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Good vs Evil – The Daily Gwei #405

[Stefan Stankovic – Crypto Briefing] – DeFi Blue Chips Tanked Against Ethereum in 2021

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.