SushiSwap has moved away from its troubled past, and has now been integrated into Coinbase. At the same time Bancor and Polygon are also pushing for innovation and adoption. Both are doing this in different ways.
The DeFi sector can’t catch a break, as another week brings another hack, this time Dodo was exploited for around $3.8M. It is troubling how often attacks are executed against DeFi protocols, but the community seems to be shaking it off quickly, preoccupied with other news about Bancor, Polygon and SushiSwap.
Bancor is looking to introduce a number of improvements to its platform including a fiat onramp. Lack of fiat onramps may be considered a major entry barrier for non crypto savvy users. If the upgrade is successfully introduced it may start a trend among the DeFi protocols.
At a time when transaction costs are one of the biggest pain points for the Ethereum ecosystem, Polygon (formerly Matic Network) is looking to gather all scaling solutions under one roof and offer developers an SDK.
SushiSwap embraced by COINBASE
Coinbase has added support for Polygon’s, Skale’s and SushiSwap’s native assets. The company continues to expand its offering of assets available for trading. Of the new additions SUSHI may be the most interesting additions given its complicated history.
SushiSwap launched as a fork of Uniswap, and had a tumultuous early start. Launched by an anonymous team it made noise by going after Uniswap liquidity. This was before the UNI token, and it was seen as SushiSwap “vamping” liquidity from its predecessor.
On top of that, the project became mired in controversy when its lead developer took resources from the developer fund. Even though the founder later returned the funds, reputational damage has been done.
Nevertheless, the project was rescued by influential community members, notably Sam Bankman-Fried. Eventually, SushiSwap completed the liquidity migration and proceeded to grow. Some members of the DeFi community continued to criticize SushiSwap for being a copycat project, but it is clear that it has gone far past its early beginnings.
One of the key events in the growth of the projects was its merger with the Yearn ecosystem. The ecosystem which now also includes projects like Cream, Pickle, Cover and Badger DAO offers numerous synergies and may be seen as one of the factors SushiSwap being a top 10 project with respect to TVL.
SushiSwap started the year with an impressive roadmap, and has been continuously working futures such as MISO. SushiSwap has also not been shy about exploring possibilities outside of Ethereum including BSC and Polkadot.
SushiSwap may have started out as a copy of Uniswap, but it has gone far beyond that initial stage. Its willingness to innovate and explore, as well as a track record of deployments has made it a key project in DeFi.
It started by catering to DeFi farmers with attractive yields, but it has understood that these are not stable users and proceeded to add features for long-term engagement. The project has gone through a number of major ups and downs and has faced many of the prototypical challenges of the DeFi space, but it has adapted and evolved.
Quick look at DeFi Market
At the moment of publishing the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum is good for $52.4 billion TVL, according to the DappRadar DeFi Overview. Despite this tremendous value, the most activity is taking place on the BINANCE Smart Chain. PancakeSwap has more than 50 thousand active wallets per day, followed by other BSC DeFi dapps like Goost Finance, Belt Finance and Autofarm.
These dapps are only rivaled in the Exchange dapp category, where Uniswap steals the show with 51 thousand users in the past 24 hours. OpenOcean on BSC, JustSwap on Tron, and SushiSwap follow at a distance.
Investors and traders can keep a quick look at their portfolio through the DappRadar Portfolio Tracker. This page provides an easy overview for NFT and DeFi products on BSC and Ethereum.
The information provided here is for informational purposes only. This is not investment advice and should not be treated as such. Strategic Round Capital and/or the author of this article holds a position in ETH, YFI.
