To the DeFi community,

This week, Optimism raised $150 million in a Series B round that valued the Ethereum scaling solution at $1.65 billion. Optimism says they’ll continue improving the protocol to reduce transaction fees, including by adding additional developer talent to the team.

After over a year on mainnet, our milestones keep adding up: $1B in gas fees saved for users, thousands of smart contracts deployed, three separate forks…

And now: funds raised to the tune of $150M, giving us runway to keep shipping rain or shine.https://t.co/pBC2jmXtnh

— Optimism ??? (@optimismPBC) March 17, 2022

Sushiswap launched a new AMM aggregation framework, Trident, on Polygon, aiming to consolidate the functionality of Ethereum-based AMM apps into a more cohesive environment for developers and users. Pools using Trident will be accessible using the IPool interface, and new pools will be required to pass an audit and internal review to be added to the interface.

?? Trident is live on @0xPolygon ??

’Tri’ our phase 1 Trident release at https://t.co/pWkBIPgcOw (Switch network to #Polygon)

Read more at https://t.co/FNvsrQK1Rf

?? Important: This launch is a preview release – use at your own risk. For questions head over to Discord! ?? pic.twitter.com/Ihuzh8r99e

— SushiSwap (@SushiSwap) March 16, 2022

Aave launched V3 of its DeFi lending protocol across Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Harmony, adding cross-chain ‘portals’ between supported chains, gas optimizations, a redesigned user interface, and other new features.

1/ Aave V3 is here! ??  

The most powerful version of the Aave Protocol to date, V3 brings groundbreaking new features than span from increased capital efficiency to enhanced decentralization. Read what's new in V3 in the thread below??or visit https://t.co/H3jTyKRqNs to dive in! pic.twitter.com/LXzn7660nA

— Aave (@AaveAave) March 16, 2022

And the Kiln Ethereum testnet successfully executed the long awaited ‘merge’, combining existing transaction processing with the Beacon chain to power network consensus entirely through Proof of Stake. Kiln is the final merge related testnet created before existing public testnets are upgraded- barring any technical issues, that means Ethereum PoS on mainnet could be just a few months away.

The #Ethereum Kiln Merge testnet just successfully completed the Merge and has fully transitioned from PoW to PoS!

So excited to be a part of this momentous occasion! pic.twitter.com/O2sz2kftec

— Crypto-Gucci.eth ?????? (@CryptoGucci) March 15, 2022

DeFi has come a long way in a very short amount of time. That’s a result of big investments by crypto participants and venture capital alike, but also speaks to some of the key advantages that make decentralized development so powerful in the first place. An emphasis on open-source development means that builders aren’t required to reinvent the wheel, or even the engine to try out a new idea. Deconstructing these components is also a huge opportunity for those learning to build in the crypto industry, and tooling is also rapidly maturing and more widely available every day.

It all adds up to an orders of magnitude increase in the pace of development and the potential for revolutionary products to be created, both for a wide audience but also for hundreds or thousands of edge cases around the world. Crypto and DeFi, alongside the open source movement and the revolution of the Internet itself, have massively increased humanity’s capacity to creatively tackle our problems and build a world that is both more expressive and unique while being more inclusive and equitable than ever before.

It won’t happen in a day, or even a year- even baseline internet access is still in the process of proliferating, and many aspects are truly generational shifts. But to stick with DeFi will be to have a remarkable front-row seat to one of the most exciting periods of development in human history. Born too late to explore the Earth, born too soon to explore the stars. But born just in time to see humanity break free from centralized, institutional control of economic life and join in revolutionary ways of organizing work, relationships, and play. It’s a good time to be alive.

Author’s note: This will be my final edition of This Week in DeFi- a new writer should take over soon. Thanks very much for reading, it’s been great fun and an honor keeping up with the best of DeFi over the weeks. Follow me on Twitter @Watch_Crypto or reach out at [email protected] if you’d like to get in touch. Cheers!

Top Stories

ConsenSys Raises $450M Series D Funding

FTX Ventures and 3AC Bet on Mina Ecosystem

ConsenSys’ Lubin Confirms METAMASK Token in the Works

DeFi Analytics Firm Treehouse Raises $18M Seed Funding

Stat Box

Total Value Locked: $77.35B (up 3.97% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $119.75B (up 5.03%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $14.03B (up 2.78%)

DAI Supply: 9.44B (up 0.32%)

Bonus Reads

[Timothy Craig – Crypto Briefing] – Ethereum Gas Fees Are Cheap Again. Why?

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – ApeCoin and the number of bridges in a multichain world

[Donovan Choy – Bankless] – Why DAOs are the new firms

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – The DeFi Renaissance – The Daily Gwei #459

Alexander Behrens

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.