To the DeFi community,
This week, popular DeFi tracking platform Zerion closed a series A funding round for $8.2 million, led by Mosaic Ventures and joined by DCG, Placeholder, Lightspeed, and others. The funds will go towards scaling infrastructure to meet growing demand for Zerion desktop and mobile tracking services, expanded multichain support, and optimising the Zerion user experience for novice crypto users.
Congrats Zerion team for the raise – product I use _every_ day 👏🚀 https://t.co/iSNEfQ8Lkb
— stani.eth rAAVE 👻 =(⬤_⬤)= 👻 🦇🔊 (@StaniKulechov) July 7, 2021
Enzyme Finance added access to Yearn vaults to the asset management platform, unlocking new ways for Enzyme strategy managers to generate returns on pooled capital. The move should help increase Yearn vault TVLs while bringing DeFi even closer to parity with existing asset management platforms, with completely decentralized infrastructure.
Another integration down ✅
And it wasn’t even on the initial Sulu roadmap 😊This is also good news for $MLN holders, since Enzyme earns a share of the profit generated via Yearn through the ‘Yearn Partners’ program 💸https://t.co/qNpyA4UyKG https://t.co/xLojUhZJmK
— Giel Detienne ⟠ Deepcryptodive.eth (@deepcryptodive) July 5, 2021
Aave announced the impending release of Aave Pro, an offshoot of the Aave platform geared towards institutional investors. Aave Pro will have distinct liquidity pools from the rest of the protocol, and will provide regulatory cover by only allowing KYC’d institutions and entities to participate in the program.
$AAVE Pro coming in July.
For those that didn’t attend the “NExt Steps in Institutional Defi” Zoom with Stani, here’s a recap email I received. pic.twitter.com/ClwlBkXh2r
— Noah Goldberg (@TraderNoah) July 4, 2021
And oracle competitor API3 announced the release of the API3 Authoritative DAO, handing governance control over to the API3 tokenholder community. The DAO will use staked tokens as insurance for oracle data services, with stakers receiving weekly token rewards and voting rights to the future direction of the protocol.
Since the authoritative DAO launch 24 hour ago, a total of 4.7 Million API3 tokens have been staked.
Please make sure to check out our tutorial series, if you have any questions regarding the authoritative DAO: https://t.co/I5QyguNosA pic.twitter.com/Z7AfwtHN9e
— API3 (@API3DAO) July 9, 2021
There’s a tug-of-war going on in DeFi, but it goes back further into the history of crypto itself and beyond. It’s the competition between small numbers of participants with deep pockets like VC funds and crypto whales and the widespread community of smaller users, who’s individual contributions combined give them power to impact and direct the market. But coordinating the teeming masses can be a unique challenge, even with all the modern conveniences of communication and execution.
As with NFTs and the primordial early iterations of DeFi protocols in 2017, DAOs are an intriguing but largely untested, unrefined piece of the crypto economy, known well mostly only to those deep down the rabbit hole. But they represent perhaps the most compelling answer to the question of how to combine the expertise and financing of venture investment with the broad-based support and equitable distribution of bottom-up crypto participation.
It will likely be another few years before DAOs gain ‘celebrity’ status now enjoyed by protocols like Aave or Yearn, but the implications and possibilities of well designed autonomous organizations is hard to overstate. Looking to get in on the ground floor of something truly revolutionary? It might be time to start browsing DAOs.
Thanks to our partner:
Highest Yields: BlockFi at 8.50% APY, Nexo Lend at 8% APY
Cheapest Loans: Aave at 3.61% APY, Compound at 4.06% APY
MakerDAO Updates
DAI Savings Rate: 0.00%
Base Fee: 0.00%
ETH Stability Fee: 5.50%
USDC Stability Fee: 0.00%
WBTC Stability Fee: 4.50%
Highest Yields: Celsius at 8.88% APY, BlockFi at 8.31% APY
Cheapest Loans: Aave at 3.20% APY, Compound at 3.28% APY
Total Value Locked: $54.8B (up 4.78% since last week)
DeFi Market Cap: $77.56B (up 17.07%)
DEX Weekly Volume: $13.05B (down -20.0%)
Total DeFi Users: 2,975,760 (up 1.86%)
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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.