To the DeFi Community,
Ethereum continues to act as a gravity well for global financial assets. And Bitcoin and US Dollars are the first victims.
There’s now over $1B in tokenized BTC circulating the Ethereum economy. At the beginning of June, Ethereum featured over 5,000 BTC on the network. Fast forward to today and there’s over 107,000 BTC, an increase of over 2,000% in a few short months. It’s undeniable that Ethereum creates a gravitational pull for these assets to integrate themselves into the growing DeFi ecosystem. While OG protocols like Compound and Aave offered an enticing incentive to lend out your BTC to earn interest or leverage its value as collateral to borrow other assets, the introduction of yield farming drove this incentive to new heights. And it shows in the data.
Today, we saw Three Arrows Capital execute the biggest mint in WBTC history, tokenizing over 2,300 BTC on Ethereum in a single transaction. The second and third highest were done by Alameda Research who minted 1,999 BTC and 1,799 BTC in two separate transactions just earlier this month. Both firms are well-known to be active DeFi participants, so we can only expect that this newly-minted Bitcoin will be put to work somewhere within the ecosystem over the coming days, weeks, and months.
And while DeFi still largely relies on the consortium-model BTC, we’re beginning to diversify our offerings. Ren Protocol‘s renBTC continues to see adoption as the protocol has now facilitated over $230M in tokenized Bitcoin since its launch in early June. Moreover, we finally saw the launch of Keep Network’s highly anticipated tBTC this week. In essence, tBTC is a trust-minimized version of Bitcoin collateralized by ETH. Since launching a few days ago, the community has tokenized nearly $2M in tBTC, likely a glimpse of what’s to come.
With a mere 0.5% of all BTC in existence currently living on Ethereum, this is only the beginning of BTC on Ethereum.
There’s still plenty of road ahead.
– Lucas
P.S. DeFi crossed $10B in value locked. Another amazing milestone for the community. We’re on to $100B.
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Aave unveiled its first Aave Improvement Proposal to ratify the migration from LEND to AAVE with Aavenomics upgrades.
Keep Network launched their trustless version of Bitcoin on Ethereum
Blockchain data analytics startup announces a $2M seed round led by DragonFly Capital along with other leading DeFi investors
The asset management protocol showcased its first automated yield farming strategy
The P2P commerce protocol announced an interest-bearing stablecoin called OUSD
- Total Value Locked: $10.7B (up +17% from last week)
- DeFi Market Cap: $16,14B (up +8%)
- DEX 7 Day volume: $4.76B (down -12%)
- DAI supply: 897.7M (up 37%)
- Total DeFi users: 486K (up +6%)
Shoutout to Aave for supporting This Week in DeFi!
Aave is a leading lending protocol supporting dozens of the top DeFi tokens. Aave recently showcased an EMI license, giving them the ability to onboard new users directly into DeFi through their parent company – Aave Limited.
We’ve done an extensive amount of coverage on Aavenomics – a new suite of protocol upgrades that incentives protocol safety through AAVE rewards and protocol fees. The best part about Aavenomics is that all of its parameters – including the logistics of Aave yield farming – are governed by tokenholders. There’s a ton of good activity happening on the Aave governance forum and we’d definitely recommend checking it out if you fancy yourself to be an Aavenger.
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Analyst at Bankless – one of the leading resources for open finance. Lucas is an active contributor to the DeFi ecosystem with appearances in other notable DeFi outlets including The Defiant and Our Network. He has years of experience working with dozens blockchain and token startups where he focused on token economics, marketing, and growth.