This Week in DeFi – September 10

To the DeFi community,

This week, Harmony unveiled a $300 million fund to support development of startups working in the Harmony ecosystem, with specific funding for DAOs, bug bounties, hackathons, partnerships, and more. The fund will plan to pay out more than $180 million in its first year, with the full amount to be disbursed over a four year period.

Today, we are announcing our $300 million ecosystem fund to accelerate 10,000 builders.

The @harmonyprotocol ecosystem has been growing exponentially and we aim to fund 10,000 more crypto founders, builders and creatives.

Let’s build the future together: https://t.co/6Yb9DoAa65

— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) September 9, 2021

Tempus Finance has received a Balancer Grant for $50,000 to build an AMM for future yields, splitting deposited interest-bearing tokens like stETH into principal and yield tokens that can be independently traded. It’s fascinating that yield and interest rate swaps are starting to crop up all over DeFi, as these instruments are some of the most recent and complex innovations in traditional financial markets.

We’re stoked to announce the approval of the #grant application by @tempusfinance to build their secondary markets on yield on top of #Balancer V2!

Tempus and @BalancerLabs will be on the forefront of exploring the financial primitive of future yield.
https://t.co/34WKucrQrf

— Balancer Grants ⚖️ (@BalancerGrants) September 3, 2021

Lido announced the launch of SOL staking, allowing SOL holders to earn staking rewards while retaining the liquidity of their underlying tokens in the form of stSOL. stSOL will be integrated into DeFi applications throughout the Solana ecosystem, and governance will be decentralized with execution managed via a multisig on Solana.

Liquid staking on Solana is built around the stSOL token.

Use stSOL to earn staking rewards, contribute to the security of the Solana network and take part in the flourishing Solana DeFi ecosystem!

Learn more: https://t.co/kE30XGPWGC

— Lido (@LidoFinance) September 8, 2021

And of course, this week Bitcoin became a national currency in El Salvador, with every citizen eligible for $30 worth of BTC and, notably, a substantial price dip just as the national currency designation came online. With merchants like McDonalds and Pizza Hut accepting Bitcoin payments at scale with the backing of a national government, it’s more proof that cryptocurrencies are going mainstream and will impact the world in massive ways.

Just walked into a McDonald’s in San Salvador to see if I could pay for my breakfast with bitcoin, tbh fully expecting to be told no.

But low and behold, they printed a ticket with QR that took me to a webpage with Lightning invoice, and now I’m enjoying my desayuno traditional! pic.twitter.com/NYCkMNbv7U

— Aaron van Wirdum (@AaronvanW) September 7, 2021

The world of crypto and DeFi in particular is one of the fastest-paced, most exciting industries humanity has ever developed. It’s also highly contentious and experimental, with lots of competing ideas over the best way to do just about anything. The good news is, lots of investors both big and small are ready to put their money where their mouths are, in the form of several new funds just in the past few weeks totalling well over a billion dollars to be directed at DeFi development. It’s especially exciting to see these funds being organized at the protocol and project level, where they can interface directly and deeply with builders and better align long-term incentives of users, investors, and the push for future growth. It’s good for innovation, good for adoption, and might just start to help straighten out wealth distribution over time, too.

It seems unlikely that BTC transaction volume for everyday payments in El Salvador will become a significant factor in the national economy for the same old reasons; volatile assets are never a good fit for casually spent currency, because users quickly develop an expectation that what’s in their pocket could buy either much more or much less a year from now, fostering all kinds of perverse incentives not compatible with stable economic life. But the adoption is a crucial symbolic victory, making it far easier for additional nations to adopt or take a closer look at blockchain-based answers to their needs. How long before the massive innovation and increased efficiency of DeFi for asset management, financial inclusion, and fair governance make the same kind of inroads? It just might be faster than you think.

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $86.58B (down -12.1% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $123.42B (down -2.26%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $21.01B (up 35.5%)

DAI Supply: 6.20B (up 1.81%)

Total DeFi Users: 3,298,200 (up 0.87%)

[Ben Giove – Bankless] – The Essential Guide to Arbitrum

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Web3 is Coming – The Daily Gwei #331

[Justin Barlow – The TIE] – A Deep Dive into the Polygon (Matic) Ecosystem

[Brady Dale – The Defiant] – Coinbase Braces for SEC Action as Regulatory Crackdown on DeFi Intensifies

[Fabian Klauder – DeFi Times] – El Salvador Recognizes Bitcoin As Legal Tender

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.