ConsenSys – the Brooklyn-based Ethereum venture studio – acquired Fluidity, the team behind the Airswap DEX, and multiple asset tokenization technologies for the DeFi ecosystem.
AirSwap was initially founded as a joint venture between ConsenSys and Fluidity back in 2017. The acquisition comes three years later after Fluidity completed its initial AirSwap roadmap as well as having built a range of money legos on Ethereum.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However, the team will now be able to build AirSwap and other DeFi technologies with the full support of ConsenSys’ development, engineering, and marketing teams. The team will also be able to leverage ConsenSys CodeFi’s commerce and finance platform.
"The team has built best in class token trading technology for different niches that ConsenSys can now help bring forth at scale." @EthereumJoseph on the latest Fluidity acquisition. Excited to bring @Airswap into the ConsenSys product suite! https://t.co/sBZ3elTSc6
— ConsenSys (@Consensys) May 22, 2020
Fluidity’s Tokenized Asset Portfolio (TAP)
One of the key technologies built by Fluidity within the past two years includes the Tokenized Asset Portfolio (TAP), a standard model to enable real assets to be deposited as collateral in decentralized credit protocols – namely MakerDAO. Ultimately, the goal with TAP is to bridge the gap between traditional capital markets and DeFi.
Why it’s important
The acquisition comes at a time when Maker is quickly expanding its supported assets for Multi-Collateral Dai. Since March, we’ve seen the protocol add Coinbase’s USDC and Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) as new collateral types. Since their integration, both assets combine to supply over 15M in DAI or ~12.78% of the total supply.
With both assets serving well for Maker, we can expect more assets to be supported in the coming future. One of the more notable additions in Maker’s long-term roadmap is the addition of real-world assets. Given that traditional financial assets comprise for trillions in market cap, the integration of real assets like U.S. treasuries, corporate bonds, real estate, equities, and others could be a driving catalyst for the proliferation of Dai and DeFi at large.
As a result, Fluidity’s TAP model could serve as a critical piece to that adoption and is likely one of the core reasons behind ConsenSys’ acquisition. While AirSwap is seen as a robust technology for peer-to-peer token swaps on Ethereum, the DEX has yet to garner any significant adoption. According to Dune Analytics, Airswap holds a ~0.01% market share in the DEX sector. With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine that ConsenSys acquired Fluidity strictly for AirSwap. While the DEX could serve as a vital piece for regulated, peer-to-peer security token transfers, the technology today has minimal adoption when looking at the broader DEX ecosystem.
With the acquisition, we may see a bigger push from the Fluidity to garner some support for TAP and supporting real assets in the Maker Protocol. In the past few weeks, the Maker community has greenlighted polls for numerous collateral types including tBTC, ZRX, UNI-V1-DAI, and others.
??Numerous Community Greenlight polls on the following types of collateral: tBTC, ZRX, UNI-V1-DAI, PC-DROP, DMM, FIAT, FTM, MANA, CHZ, and CF-DROP
Read all here: https://t.co/9E3ErITdLJ
MKR holders can signal their support at https://t.co/g9vSgxm089
— Maker (@MakerDAO) May 25, 2020
Now that Maker Governance is getting more aggressive with expanding its supported asset types, we should expect a push for real-world assets once Fluidity’s TAP is in full production on main-net.
All in all, it’ll be interesting to see how Fluidity’s role in the DeFi ecosystem evolves in the coming future following the acquisition from ConsenSys.
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