Recap: DeFi Week of Aug. 24 🦄
Hello Defiers, hope you’re having a great weekend!
Summing this past week up: Aave is now the DeFi protocol with most assets locked; CEO and founder Stani Kulechov spoke about the project’s milestones and DeFi’s future on this week’s podcast. yEarn and Curve token holders decided to funnel part of their treasuries to fund public goods on Ethereum. Fair Launch Capital wants to give out no-strings-attached grants to DeFi teams can audit their code; funded projects can then vote to pay it forward. dYdX launched a LINKperpetual contract and Akropolis launched a yield farming aggregator. Centrifuge’s Cassidy Daly did a Q&A to explain how the project wants to bring real assets to DeFi. And more:)
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Interview
“What We're Building is Very Big and We Should Have the Least Concentration Possible:” Aave's Stani Kulechov
This week’s episode is with Stani Kulechov the founder and CEO of Aave, the DeFi platform with the most assets held in its smart contracts, at over $1B. It’s been an exponential rise from its launch just eight months ago. It’s done so pushing DeFi forward by driving innovation in interest-generating tokens, flash loans and delegated credit lines. We also get into all the recent yield farming craziness. Stani believes projects should build communities first, which can help fund audits, before launching protocols into the wild and risk losing users’ funds. There’s no trade-off between safer launches and fast growth; he believes DeFi can attract an even larger amount of users and funds by providing safer applications. If it doesn’t, it will end up losing credibility and users’ trust.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
📺 Watch New Video on The Defiant’s YouTube Channel and Subscribe
Check out the just-released video on The Defiant’s YouTUbe channel, covering the latest on this week’s governance wars involving Yearn Finance, Curve and 1inch. The video was produced in partnership with Robin Schmidt of Harmony Protocol.
Friday
Dives
Centrifuge Wants to Bring Real-World Assets to DeFi: Centrifuge, which wants to bring real-world assets to DeFi, published its design proposal, which you can read here. To break it down, we did a Q&A with Cassidy Daly, who leads token design and research for the project.
BTC on Ethereum Gets Yield Farming Boost and It’s Just Getting Started: IntoTheBlock digs into the spike of tokenized bitcoin on Ethereum following the yield farming boom. Here’s one insight: Bitcoin deposits on Curve surged faster than stablecoins deposits
Thursday
Dives
Fed Chair Says Money Printer Will Go Brrr Faster; Bitcoiners Not Surprised: Markets rallied on the Fed’s policy shift, but Bitcoin quickly lost most of its gains, a sign the news was already incorporated in the price. The fact that the Fed can and will make the money printer go brrrr even faster isn’t surprising to the crypto market and only deserved a knee-jerk reaction.
Yield Farmers Show They’re Not Just Degen Gamblers: Yam Finance - a yield farmers paradise which aggregated $600M in TVL in less than 48 hours - will direct 1% of its future treasury to Gitcoin Grants public goods funding upon its forthcoming V3 migration.
Bytes
Changes to Accredit Investor Definition Are Laughable: While the new rules broaden the definition a tiny* bit, the accredited investor definition continues to leave the large majority of the population out. ––this is why DeFi.
DefiDollar Reaches Debt Ceiling Within Hour of Launch: DefiDollar - a new stablecoin index behind DUSD - has hit its $3M debt ceiling within an hour of launch this morning.
Akropolis Launches A Yield Farming Aggregator: Akropolis launched Delphi, a yield farming aggregator that offers different investment options according to users' risk appetite.
Wednesday
Dive
DeFi Frenzy Prompts Call for Safer Token Launches: Here's the problem that Fair Launch Capital is trying to solve: In the past few weeks the broad sentiment in DeFi has gone from anti-token; to tokens only when it’s absolutely necessary in a tried and tested platform; to tokens designed to drive (crazy) activity which results in (crazy) speculation; to tokens before there’s even a platform.
Aave Climbs to the Top of DeFi Amid a List of Firsts: Aave yesterday became the DeFi protocol with the most value held in its smart contracts at $1.5B, overcoming the sector’s founding protocol, MakerDAO.
Bytes
dYdX Offers the Ability to Short LINK: Non-US users can now trade LINK with up to 8x leverage and no expiry date.
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
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.
