This Week in DeFi – October 29

To the DeFi community,

This week, Osmosis DEX announced a $21 million fundraise, led by Paradigm. Funds will support development of the Osmosis protocol on Cosmos, where the Osmosis DEX allows users to trade without being impacted by MEV and provides greater flexibility for developers to innovate with DeFi. Osmosis DEX also enables Superfluid staking, whereby users can stake their LP tokens directly with Osmosis to earn OSMO rewards.

The Osmosis Foundation just conducted its first ever sale, raising $21M in a strategic round led by @paradigm! (number not an accident 😉)

Funds will support the many dev teams and DAOs building Osmosis into the leading DEX in the Interchain!https://t.co/eS84634Hry

— Osmosis (@osmosiszone) October 27, 2021

Project Serum, the on-chain liquidity routing protocol for Solana DeFi applications, announced a community vote approval to offer liquidity mining rewards worth $100 million, paid in SRM tokens to liquidity providers on protocols that interact with Serum, beginning with Atrix Finance.

It’s like mining for gold but it’s crypto! Project Serum is incentivizing users to use its liquidity mining tool to both supply liquidity and enhance operations. https://t.co/86bXIlUnOM

— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) October 29, 2021

0x Labs announced a partnership with decentralized financial data distributor Pyth network to provide real-time crypto pricing data from the 0x network. Pyth already aims to bring real-world financial trading data to its decentralized network, and the addition of crypto pricing should make Pyth another formidable oracle data provider.

🔥 @0xProject joins @PythNetwork!https://t.co/b70t1SjAbX

— Peter Johnson (@TheChicagoVC) October 27, 2021

And NEAR protocol announced a huge $800 million funding initiative to support developers and accelerate growth on the four-year old blockchain. Funds will be available to developers throughout the ecosystem, with a particular emphasis on DeFi. NEAR also shared loose guidance that $100 million will be allocated for startups, $250 million will go towards helping existing projects scale up, and $100 million will be split among regional funds in Asia, Europe, and the US. 

📣 Early #NEARCON Announcement! 💥

Learn more about @NEARProtocol‘s $800M Global Ecosystem Fund. 🔽https://t.co/00UaiA3jC1

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) October 25, 2021

When I first started working on This Week in DeFi, just about all the good stories, innovation, and capital were connected to the Ethereum ecosystem – it’s the birthplace of DeFi, and work done there in the months and years leading up to 2020’s DeFi Summer has been essential to the success of DeFi in the public conscious and on all the other infrastructure to which it spread.

But this week, practically no headline stories for DeFi on Ethereum at all! It’s not to say that major development isn’t still taking place there, and much of the mature ‘inflection point’ innovation is within the Ethereum ecosystem. And to be sure, counting Eth L2 solutions, the Ethereum network is capturing a sizable majority of activity and developer interest.

But unlike just one or two years ago, we’re no longer in a one horse race for prizes like ‘most innovative’, ‘most adopted’, and ‘best developer environment’. Ethereum has little competition in the ‘most decentralized’ category, but it’s less and less clear, at least in the medium term, how much such technical aspects will truly impact user adoption and user experience.

Outside money keeps pouring in, but as ETH and BTC push for new all-time highs, old guard crypto foundations holding those tokens could see their firepower balloon as well. When there’s a big party there’s almost always a big hangover to follow, but right now is truly one of the most exciting times to be in the crypto space in history. Decisions and bets made today will play out years or decades into the future, and the biggest constraint is how much information you can stand to drink from the fire hose while the taps are open. This time next year, they could be closed. Don’t take it for granted!

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $106.03B (up 27.12% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $155.18B (up 14.30%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $23.44B (up 63.23%)

DAI Supply: 7.78B (up 5.56%)

Total DeFi Users: 3,704,900 (up 2.78%)

[Owen Fernau – The Defiant] – OlympusDAO’s Success Inspires Dozens of Forks

[Brooks Butler – Crypto Briefing] – Beginner’s Guide: How to Hedge Your Crypto Portfolio

[Samuel Haig – The Defiant] – First Uniswap ETP Goes Live as Institutional DeFi Products Proliferate

[Brian Hoffman – Bankless] – Ultra Scalable Ethereum 

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Security Conscious – The Daily Gwei #366

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.