📣 Announcing: The Defiant's DeFi 101 Series. Watch The Pilot Episode!
Also, MKR holders vote to not compensate Black Thursday victims, Synthetix moving to Optimism's Layer 2
Hello Defiers! This is what’s going on in decentralized finance,
MKR holders choose to not compensate Balck Thursday Vault owners
Synthetix takes first step in move to Optimism’s Layer 2
Secret Network releases roadmap for private DeFi
Fairmint launches CAFE, a rolling equity offering
You’re a free subscriber, which means you’re getting a partial version of today’s newsletter.
The open economy is taking over the old one. Subscribe to keep up with this revolution. Click here to pay with DAI.
🎙Listen to this week’s podcast episode with Jihoz from Axie Infinity:
📺 Check Out The Pilot Episode of The Defiant’s DeFi 101 Series!
DeFi 101 will serve as an introduction into decentralized finance, with 30 planned episodes. This is not intended to be the first episode of the series but rather a standalone episode to test the ground for the future of this series. So feel free provide feedback. The video was produced in partnership with Alp Gasimov, Robin Schmidt of Harmony Protocol and DeFi Tutorials with DeFi Dad.
🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, Perpetual Protocol, which provides decentralized perpetual contracts for any asset, and HackAtom V, a two-week virtual hackathon organized by Cosmos.
Maker Votes to Not Compensate Black Thursday Victims
MakerDAO traders who had their collateral wiped out during DeFi’s so-called Black Thursday, received bad news from the protocol’s decentralized court this week: they won’t be getting a penny (or gwei) back. Their only hope now lies in traditional/centralized courts.
On March 12th, DeFi experienced its worst day on record as prices tanked by more than 50%. Amidst the crash, projects offering leverage were hit the hardest. In particular, MakerDAO and its Vault owners using ETH as collateral to mint DAI were wiped out with mass liquidations as collateral ratios quickly dropped below the 150% minimum threshold.
100% Loss
Instead of the collateral being liquidated for a 13% haircut, the system resulted in a shortage of Keepers - or actors who purchase collateral at a discount to collateralize the system - which allowed one actor to purchase ~$6M worth of ETH for just 1 DAI.
In the wake of this event, hundreds of Vault owners lost 100% of their collateral, leaving the system with $2.5M in bad debt. Maker quickly recovered by hosting a series of auctions where new MKR was minted and sold for DAI to recapatilze the system.
Since Black Thursday, a select few ‘victims’ have been working on a class-action lawsuit to compensate those affected by faulty Keeper auctions.
On Tuesday, the hopes of those pleas to be resolved through decentralized governance came to a close with less than ideal outcomes. While a discussion with the Maker Foundation is still ongoing, MKR holders will not be reimbursing losses through newly minted tokens.
Compensation Plan
“Vaults that were liquidated at auction or self-liquidated their positions between 3/12/2020 12:00 UTC and 3/13/2020 13:40 UTC will be considered for compensation.” Source.
While the details of the plan have changed over time, the latest proposal suggested that new MKR would be minted and distributed to Vault owners who could prove they were wrongfully liquidated for 100% of their collateral.
Outlined in the latest forum post, the amount of MKR to be minted was put to a poll, with the winning result moving to an executive vote to ratify the decision.
0% Compensation Won
Of the 10 options available, “0% compensation” won with 65% in favor, while the next most popular option at almost 17.6% was for 18% compensation.
Image source: vote.makerdao.com. 12%, 21%, 9%, 6%, 3%compensation (which all got 0% of the vote) missing from the image.
It’s important to note that this decision was not made by the Maker Foundation, rather by MKR holders, who stood to be diluted if the options to compensate Vault owners passed. There was no hack or exploit and this compensation was a sign that the MakerDAO community recognized that the Keeper auctions did not pan out as intended.
“While the vault compensation plan didn't pass, the ability of a protocol to consider actions beyond its core code is already kind of revolutionary,” Vault Compensation lead MonetSupply told The Defiant. “I'm optimistic for the future of decentralized governance.”
Vote With Their Feet
Still, some Vault owners aren’t as sanguine, with a few of them criticizing that the poll was decided by a few large holders, and questioning the validity of this week’s vote after a separate poll showed most were in favor of compensation.
“Lawsuit or not, people will vote with their feet if there is no trust,” Vault owner who goes by the name of ItsGus in the forum wrote. “People should take note and be wary of future interaction as Maker has proven to go against its own decisions.”
For MKR holders, the common theme appears to be ‘know the risks’ of using leverage.
DeFi’s poster child is going through a difficult time in terms of community support, at a time when it continues to slide in DeFi Pulse’s TVL leaderboard and as MKR lagged other DeFi tokens which went parabolic over the summer, even as Dai supply is at an all-time high.
Synthetix Takes First Step in Move to Ethereum Layer 2
Synthetix said it’s planning to move to Optimism’s Layer 2 scaling solution, with the first phase of the transition starting today.
This first phase is a testnet to trial SNX staking on Optimistic Ethereum, an L2 solution developed by Optimism, which uses Optimistic Rollups to take computation and transactions off the Ethereum network.
Privacy-Preserving DeFi is Being Built on Secret Network
Secret Network, a proof-of-stake blockchain built on top of the Cosmos SDK, yesterday released its DeFi roadmap, detailing how it hopes to become the rails of a privacy-preserving open financial system.
Fairmint Launches Continuous Equity Offerings
DeFi primitives are revolutionizing legacy fundraising vehicles.
Fairmint, a platform for innovative funding mechanism,yesterday released its blueprint for Continuous Agreement for Future Equity, or CAFE.
Liquality is Latest Bitcoin to Ethereum Bridge
ConsenSys-backed Liquality launched on mainnet yesterday, enabling users to hold balances across BTC, ETH, and ERC20s and swap between those pairs without going through KYC and always maintaining control of their private keys and funds.
Brice Berdah from Monolith highlights that Dai is now mostly backed by USDC and not ETH.
The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.
About the founder: I’m Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum. I was previously at Bloomberg News in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires covering markets. I’ve extensively covered crypto and finance, and now I’m diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.
