To our DeFi Community,
This may have been the craziest week in DeFi to date.
It kicked off with the launch of Yam Finance, a meme-driven elastic supply DeFi protocol taking some of the best practices in governance and token distributions to rival Ampleforth. Similar to YFI, there was no pre-mine, no VC tokens, no founder tokens, just pure permissionless yield farming. Users could stake their favorite DeFi tokens like YFI, LEND, COMP, SNX, LINK, and others and receive four-digit annualized returns in YAMs. And it’s safe to say that things got pretty wild. In less than 24 hours, the unaudited protocol accrued half a billion dollars in value locked.
But the party didn’t last long. Less than 48 hours later, a bug was revealed within the protocol’s rebasing contract. In short, the first rebase minted an excessive amount of YAM tokens which overflowed into the protocol’s reserve. What resulted was a significant portion of YAMs stuck in the reserve, making it impossible for governance to ever reach a quorum. This bug effectively rendered the protocol useless as it was now impossible to implement any future upgrade via governance.
And while the DeFi community scrambled to coordinate the salvation of Yam, unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. All in all, the yam finance experiment ended in a blowout. Now a handful of individuals behind the protocol are setting their eyes on V2. You can read more about that here.
As if that whole ordeal wasn’t enough, Curve Finance also launched its highly anticipated CRV governance token. But the launch didn’t happen as intended. Rather than the core developers launching the contracts live on mainnet, an anonymous account – 0xChad – found the code on Github and spent over $8,000 to deploy it. While there was an awkward period on whether or not it was legit, Curve Finance confirmed the legitimacy of the contract and now we’re off to the races with DeFi’s next crop rotation. Since the launch, around $500M of new capital has flowed into Curve in less than 24 hours as the protocol races Compound, Aave, and Synthetix to $1B in value locked. Insane.
Yo, @CurveFinance ! Saw your DAO is ready to rock and I gots to MAXIMIZE MY ALPHA ! So I went ahead and deployed it for you. Get at me in DM to verify and lets get this party started!! pic.twitter.com/D0KqEg4Ldr
— 0xc4ad (@0xc4ad) August 13, 2020
What a wild week in DeFi. But we’re not done. The cherry on top for this week was the Founder of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy, publicly buying 7-figures worth of crypto following a meeting with the Winklevoss twins. It’s rumored that he’s in on BTC, ETH, and apparently, LINK. With Barstool’s recent rise to prominence in the stock market and its growing army of retail traders, we can imagine that the Portnoy effect is having its moment on the crypto markets as prices soar.
???>? https://t.co/x0dcJ5aGFh
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 13, 2020
There’s never a dull moment in DeFi. And the bull run has barely started.
Oh…and we reached $5B in TVL. But what’s another billion or two these days right?
See you next Friday!
– Lucas
P.S. We’re migrating over to Substack! Sign up to receive This Week in DeFi directly to your inbox.
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DAI
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- MakerDAO Updates
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- Cheapest Loan: Fulcrum at 5.42% APY or Aave at 6.10%
Find more lending & borrowing rates on our Rates page!
Introducing YAM Finance: Yield Farmers Paradise
The meme-driven DeFi protocol took over DeFi for 24 hours
Yam Finance Shuts down within 48 hours
Yam finance abruptly ended in less than 2 days following a rebase bug in the contract. $750,000 yCRV was lost. Plans for Yam V2 are in the works!
Coinbase showcased BTC-backed loans
The leading US crypto banked announced support for BTC loans for US customers.
Curve launches CRV governance token
The third-largest DeFi DEX launched its highly anticipated CRV token. But it didn’t happen as intended.
Aave announces V2 upgrade
The money markets protocol announced its V2 upgrade following the recent Aavenomics token & governance upgrade
In Other News…
- 1inch exchange closes $2.8M seed round led by Binance
- Introducing APY.Finance – Tokenized Yield farming
- Curve showcases Pre-Launch CRV rewards for liquidity mining
- We launched a funding rates page for the best rates on perpetual swaps
- Check out our Earn page featuring a dozen yield farming tutorials
Stat Box
- Total Value Locked: $5.56B (up +25% from last week)
- DeFi Market Cap: $9.8B (up +30%)
- DEX 7 Day volume: $2.4B (up +60%)
- DAI supply: 412.3M (up +10%)
- Total DeFi users: 262,000 (down -12%)
Bonus Reads
- [David Hoffman – Bankless] The Three Nation Problem
- [Deniz Omer – Kyber Network] Kyber Ecosystem Report #17
- [Jake Brukhman – CoinFund] The 9 core value propositions of crypto networks
- [Yam Finance] YAM Post-Rescue Attempt Update
- [Wilson Withiam – Messari] How ChainLink paved the way for 625% YTD return
Thanks to our sponsor Aave
Aave is a leading lending protocol supporting dozens of the top DeFi tokens. Just today, Aave showcased their V2 upgrade complete with gas optimizations, new lending features, and governance upgrades in preparation for the LEND token migration to AAVE in the coming weeks.
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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Analyst at Bankless – one of the leading resources for open finance. Lucas is an active contributor to the DeFi ecosystem with appearances in other notable DeFi outlets including The Defiant and Our Network. He has years of experience working with dozens blockchain and token startups where he focused on token economics, marketing, and growth.
