Recap: DeFi Week of Aug. 31 🦄
Hello Defiers, hope you’re having a great weekend!
Summing up: This past week was all about SushiSwap and meme coins. The SushiSwap saga is turning into the most dramatic moments in DeFi this year. Sushiswap’s stated goal at launch was to capture and migrate Uniswap’s liquidty into a new protocol which would give liquidity providerds greater upside and particpation thanks to its native SUSHI token. The initial idea was able to rally support from the DeFi community, but that good will has quickly turned after the anonymous developer behind it sold all their SUSHI and gave up control of the platform.
Meanwhile, food-themed meme tokens kept popping, claimign to deliver increasingly impossible yields — we break down how that’s just a mirage. And the token born to make fun of it all, called MEME, is instead delivering actual innovation, beyond just farming a token. We did deep dives on how to use DeFi privately, and how in spite of the recent movement towards fair launches and community-owned tokens , DeFi VCs are stronger than ever. For this week’s interview, we chatted with the anonymous dev behond the latest DeFi fork, Swerve, a spinoff of Curve Finance.
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Interview
A Chat With John Deere, The Anonymous Dev Behind Swerve, The Latest DeFi Fork
This week’s interview is with the anonymous developer behind Swerve, a fork of Curve Finance. Activity on already popular Curve skyrocketed recently thanks to the launch of its native CRV token. But arguably, that’s when the troubles started, at least for some DeFi users, when an anonymous farmer launched the token without warning. The next incident came when the team gained more than 70% of voting power after locking up their CRV in the protocol, and more recently the controversial addition of a Huobi BTC pool.
This is what John Deere claims Swerve is here to fix. The protocol was unveiled Friday— not without a few hiccups with the UI, which had some calling “pre-mine,” while others attributed to an honest mistake. The issue was fixed and in the two days since launch there’s almost $400M in the protocol’s pool of stablecoins.
Friday
Dives
DeFi VCs are Stronger Than Ever: DeFi projects just crossed half a billion dollars raised in venture capital funding. Deep dive into the projects and categories which received the most amount of venture funding, and the most active funds.
Thursday
Dives
Degens Pioneer NFT Mining With $3M Actual Meme Coin: This is a story of Meme Protocol - a community-conceived project spawned out of a Telegram airdrop that’s since blossomed into a team of highly creative contributors pushing forward the potential for tokenized farming opportunities.
Bytes
Yearns’ yETH Vault is a DeFi Liquidity Vortex: Yearn Finance’s yETH vault is sucking up massive amounts of ETH and issuing loads of Dai in return.
SushiSwap Wants to Accelerate Uniswap Liquidity Drain: The anonymous developer behind SushiSwap, who goes by the name Chef Nomi on Twitter, today proposed to migrate Uniswap liquidity before the initial plan.
Zug to Accept BTC and ETH for Tax Payments: The Block
Wednesday
Dives
The Mirage of Emojis Delivering Million-Percent Yields: Hotdog, Kimchi, Noodle, and Harvest, all sprung up in the past day or two. But what’s more impressive is this: Some claim to offer annual yields in the seven figures. That’s 1,000,000% APYs.
Bytes
Aave Brings Asset-Backed Lending to DeFi: DeFi users will now be able to borrow against tokenized real estate. The new market will allow users to deposit their RealT ERC-20 tokens, which represent ownership over real estate, and borrow stablecoins against them.
yEarn Launches Permissionless Insurance: yEarn has deployed a KYC-less yInsure product with coverage for Aave, Balancer, Compound, Curve, Synthetix and yEarn.
Ethereum miners generated all-time high fee revenue of $17 million yesterday: The Block
Loopring Taps Chainlink Competitor for Price Data: Decrypt
Tuesday
Dives
For All You Degens Farming in Public: Here's Your Privacy Toolbox: While a major improvement from centralized exchanges, all your DeFi transaction history and assets are open for the world to see —they can be even linked to your IP address.
Bytes
Monday
Dives
Uniswap Fork is Coming for the DeFi Darling’s Liquidity: A liquidity war is brewing between Uniswap and a fork of DeFi’s darling DEX, called SushiSwap.
Bytes
Yearn Launches yETH Vaults: Yearn Finance, the DeFi protocol which allocates digital assets to the platforms which offer the most yield, added an ETH-based strategy.
bZx Relaunches With Focus on Security: After suffering a critical loss to the tune of $1M back in February, lending and margin protocol bZx is back with vengeance with the relaunch of its products, Torque and Fulcrum this afternoon.
💜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.
