To the DeFi Community,

Crypto is crossing the chasm.

Paypal’s recent announcement will put digital assets directly in the hands of 364M people and 26M companies across the globe. All of these customers will be able to purchase Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash through their Paypal accounts and eventually, Venmo too. That’s millions of millennials, the most attractive target market, with the access to the digital assets through their mobile devices. It won’t happen overnight (it’ll only start in the U.S.) but this is a massive win for the crypto ecosystem.

And no, it’s not perfect. Paypal’s system acts as a walled garden as users won’t be able to transfer their assets out of the Paypal ecosystem – they’re stuck in there. This closed-off nature goes directly against the core ethos of open finance. But it does get millions of people familiar with holding and using crypto assets. It’s undeniable that a portion of those Paypal users will eventually trickle out of the system and opt-into the better, more open system that we all know and love.

Equally as important, Paypal will have to buy up crypto assets at unprecedented levels for those millions of customers. Something that only leads to one thing: number go up.

Outside of DeFi, projects like Audius are tapping into an entirely new demographic of artists touching crypto for the first time. They airdropped 5% of the supply to their top 10,000 accounts, notable artists like deadmau5, Skrillex and RL Grime a very warm welcome to web3.

We did it.

?? $AUDIO – the Audius platform token – is officially live!

Check your Audius dashboard to see if you’re one of the 10,000 power users who now own a piece of Audius ??

Read all about it ??https://t.co/D70WGr8Hvw

— Audius Music ?? (@AudiusProject) October 23, 2020

At the end of the day, we’re starting to reach that inflection point in crypto. An inflection point that the entire industry has been working for years to reach. And it’s finally coming into fruition.

Adoption in coming.

– Lucas

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Paypal Announces Support for Crypto

Paypal announces support for its 324M users for BTC and ETH.

PoolTogether Launch V3 Protocol Upgrade

PoolTogether updated its no-loss lottery protocol to support new ways to earn prizes for saving in DeFi.

Yield Protocol Showcases Fixed Lending

Yield Protocol unveils its fixed lending protocol with an interest-earning wrapper of Dai, fyDAI.

Immutable Launches Immutable X for Layer 2 Scalability

Immutable showcases their layer 2 scaling solution with StarkWare for Gods Unchained.

Circles Teases Universal Basic Income

Circles takes crypto twitter by storm with their approach to Universal Basic Income

In Other News…

• MetaMask reached 1M users and native token swaps
• Filecoin investors experienced wild first day of trading
• Coinbase L2 is latest in Ethereum scaling boom

Stat Box

• Total Value Locked: $12.28B (up +11.4% from last week)
• DeFi Market Cap: $15.9B (up 0.0%)
• DEX Weekly volume: $2.9B (up +3.5%)
• DAI supply: 935.9M (up +3.3%) 
• Total DeFi users: 691K (up +11%)

Bonus Reads

• [Vitalik Buterin – Ethereum] A Retrospective on Gitcoin Round 7
• [Andrew Steinwold – Bankless] Into the Metaverse
• [Jerry Brito – CoinCenter] The Case for Electronic Cash
• [Spencer Noon – Our Network] Issue #44: tBTC, Stablecoins, 0x, and Curve
• [Kain Warwick – Synthetix] Why Optimism?

Shoutout to Aave for supporting This Week in DeFi!

Aave is a leading lending protocol supporting dozens of the top DeFi tokens. Aave is currently undergoing its migration from LEND to AAVE which you can do directly through the migration portal!

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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