This Week in DeFi – June 18

To the DeFi community,

This week, Gelato Network launched the G-UNI Uniswap LP token, one of the first projects designed to take advantage of the advanced rebalancing and price range specification capabilities introduced in Uniswap V3. G-UNI also automatically reinvests LP fee earnings, increasing capital efficiency and overall returns even further.

1) With the launch of @Instadapp‘s INST, a new era of liquidity bootstrapping for crypto teams has just started on @Uniswap V3.

How? With the use of something, we at @gelatonetwork have been working on for a while called 🦄G-UNI🦄!

Curious how G-UNI works? Check it out👇 https://t.co/jT39LYjvPz

— Hilmar X 冰淇淋 团队 (@hilmarxo) June 16, 2021

BitDAO, spun off from derivatives exchange ByBit, raised $230 million in a funding round led by Peter Thiel, Pantera Capital, and Dragonfly Capital. BitDAO plans to use the funds to support DeFi growth and set up DeFi R&D centers around the world. 

BitDAO initiated by Bybit completed a financing of $230m. Bybit promised to donate 0.025% of its futures trading volume which expected to exceed 1b per year. This means that Bybit’s one-year contract trading volume is 4 trillion US dollars.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) June 16, 2021

The Polygon ecosystem keeps on growing, with bZx officially launching on the Eth sidechain scaling solution and Kyber announcing big plans to bring more liquidity to DeFi on the network. Polygon Scan, a block explorer in the style of Etherscan, is also now live, making it easier to follow token movements and block activity on the most popular Eth scaling option to date.

1/ Kyber’s vision to deliver a sustainable liquidity infrastructure for #DeFi extends to popular ecosystems such as @0xPolygon. With its capital efficiency & flexibility, Kyber DMM caters to Polygon’s diverse ecosystem of Dapps and enables LPs to maximise the use of their capital

— Kyber Network (@KyberNetwork) June 16, 2021

And derivatives exchange dYdX raised $65 million in a series C funding round led by VC firm Paradigm, along with CMS Holdings, CMT Digital, and Electric Capital. dYdX will use the fresh capital to improve liquidity during high volatility, expand perpetual contract offerings, develop a mobile app, and further decentralize the protocol.

We’re excited to announce that dYdX has raised a $65M Series C round led by @paradigm!

Read the announcement: https://t.co/QMPwYyhkOq

— dYdX (@dydxprotocol) June 15, 2021

By now you’ve heard about dozens of DeFi rugs, and if you’re an adventurous investor may have even been impacted by one yourself. If so, you may feel a bit better being in good company; even the likes of Mark Cuban, a high profile celebrity investor that’s finally seen the crypto and DeFi light, can be taken for a ride and forced to watch their investment dissolve before their eyes.

Nevertheless, if you’ve been in the DeFi space for more than a few months, there’s a good chance your portfolio is up, or at least still intact. Mark’s sad tale is a reminder that the most experimental projects might not be the best place to park capital even as a simple LP, and that astronomical APY figures should serve more as a warning than a potential ticket to financial freedom. 

Algorithmic stablecoins have proven incredibly tricky to nail down, and various iterations have mostly ended in losses for experiment participants. If you’re looking into DeFi, this category might be best left to those with capital to burn until a more reliable framework is established and battle tested. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs 🙂

 

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