To the DeFi community,
The pace of shipping has picked up in stride with the booming DeFi bull market.
One of the oldest tools for swaps, Shapeshift, announced DEX integrations to offer increased transparency and better security. ERC20 token swaps are available now, with native Bitcoin swaps launching later in the first quarter. SHAPESHIFT has been around since 2014 and was forced by regulatory pressure to add KYC checks in October 2018, which they aim to eliminate thanks to DeFi integrations. This is particularly important as most legacy crypto projects have now accepted they need to integrate DeFi in some way shape or form to stay relevant.
AsDeFi increasingly becomes the de facto means to circumvent KYC regulations, it could find itself increasingly in the crosshairs of regulators in the US and the rest of the world. But developing and enforcing regulations that can tackle the intricacies of decentralized finance applications might not be so simple, especially with a growing army of crypto enthusiasts ready to stand up (or at least write in) to defend the emerging new economy.
So, a weird thing happened with the FinCEN rule…a lot more comments were filed this week.
Like, a *LOT* more. ??
The website only lets you read ~3k, maybe because the rest are duplicates (so not shown) or are still being loaded: https://t.co/6UOSJTxsKT.
But here's the total: pic.twitter.com/87IDYYCAAc
— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) January 7, 2021
In other news, funding continues to flow into the space, and projects are fighting for liquidity with the usual reward campaigns offering high yields to early risk takers.
FURUCOMBO announced a $1.8M seed round, detailing the upcoming transaction mining program beginning January 15, and announcing a series of grants to early protocol users and other community participants who contributed to FURUCOMBO in its early days. If you weren’t using FURUCOMBO before December 23, transaction mining will distribute 187,500 COMBO per week, so there’s still a viable path for stacking tokens from one of the leading no-code DeFi strategy building platforms.
Not ready to give up rewards driven liquidity just yet, 1inch Exchange also announced an extension of their liquidity mining program for another month, planning to hand out another 1% of the total 1INCH supply to LPs. 1inch claims average annual yields on the first round of the program sat near 300%, so humble farmers should be eager to keep the harvest running for another month as 1inch adds to their holdings.
Origin Dollar is making a comeback with new security upgrades after a November hack worth $7 million forced a temporary shutdown of the stablecoin-plus-yield protocol. After months of work revising the development process, multiple audits, and addressing the bug that allowed the attack to happen in the first place, OUSD is back, aiming to make it easier to earn DeFi yields.
Surging prices for Bitcoin and Ethereum are sucking up most of the attention in the crypto world as memories of 2017 begin to stir, and seemingly permanently elevated gas fees on Ethereum are making the DeFi yield calculation a bit more difficult. But rising prices also brings increased attention from the mainstream community, some of whom are bound to go looking for earlier-stage opportunities within the crypto landscape. That’s DeFi, and with new users comes higher locked value, better service, and ultimately a more robust foundation for the new financial paradigm.
Don’t get too distracted!
DAI
Highest Yields: dYdX at 13.21% APY, Nexo Lend at 10.00% APY
Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 3.00% APY, Compound at 7.49% APY
MakerDAO Updates
DAI Savings Rate: 0.00%
Base Fee: 0.00%
ETH Stability Fee: 2.50%
USDC Stability Fee: 0.00%
WBTC Stability Fee: 4.50%
USDC
Highest Yields: Fulcrum at 11.92% APY, Nexo Lend at 10% APY
Cheapest Loans: CoinList at 1% APY, Compound at 8.07% APY
Futureswap Announces V2 Beta
Futureswap V2 brings live pricing, a new Oracle Relayer Network, and the FTS governance token to the evolving futures exchange.
Airswap 2021 Revamp
Airswap readies a gas optimizations and staking for its AST governance token, improving the swap experience for METAMASK users.
Cover Migrates to New COVER Token
Cover protocol has migrated to a new token following an exploit last week.
$ESD Listed on C.R.E.A.M.
Algorithmic stablecoin protocol Empty Set Dollar is authorized for deposit in C.R.E.A.M Finance after a unanimous decentralized governance vote.
CoinGecko Formalizes Partnership to Support Band Standard Dataset
CoinGecko joins Binance, COINBASE Pro, and other big players helping Band Protocol provide price feeds for hundreds of digital assets.
Alpha Homora V2 Is Coming To Town
Alpha Homora prepares to roll out new leveraged yield farming strategies to supercharge DeFi returns.
Stat Box
Total Value Locked: $22.31B (up 55% since last week!)
DeFi Market Cap: $20.51B (up 30%)
DEX Weekly Volume: $12.9B (up 83.8%)
DAI Supply: 1.38B (up 16%)
Total DeFi Users: 1,221,700 (up 6.2%)
Bonus Reads
[Cooper Turley – Bankless] Crypto will Fix the Music Industry
[Ryan Adams, David Hoffman, Lucas Campbell – Bankless] – Bankless 2021 Predictions
[Cooper Turley – The Defiant] – Yam Finance Votes to Remove Rebase Mechanism
[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Staying Grounded – The Daily Gwei #153
[The TIE] – The TIE Weekly Insights (Jan 5)
[Curve Market Cap] – $DAI Another Day? MakerDAO considers a depeg
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Alex is an analyst and writer with experience at tech startups and Fortune 500 corporations. He’s focused on cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and has been in the crypto community since 2014.
