Recap: DeFi Week of June 8🦄
Hello Defiers, hope you’re having a great weekend!
Summing up this past week: Total unique Ethereum addresses surpassed 100 million, signaling accelerating growth of the network. An Ethereum paid $5.2 million in transaction fees for two transactions, spurring theories from money laundering, to black mail, to a code bug, to explain it. Balancer Labs metrics soaring after BAL token launch. ConsenSys launched a KYC service, The Graph integrated with Chainlink to improve smart contract data. Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende, who talks about the growth of DAOs and the long road ahead to mass adoption. And more :)
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Interview
"The World is Crying for the Tech We're Building But We're Nowhere Near Ready:" Aragon's Luis Cuende
Luis Cuende is the co-founder of Aragon, a platform for users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations. DAOS are organizations that have as much of its operations put into code as possible, and have smart contracts execute those operations. Cuende started this project in 2016, at a time when most had given up on these organizations after the crash of what’s likely the most well-known DAO so far, called The DAO. The space has recovered and in the past year, thousands of DAOs holding millions of dollars have flourished. The dream of more fair and open organizations, which anyone can access and create, is back at a time when the world seems to really need them. People are losing trust in institutions and crypto can provide an alternative. But Cuende says he’s saddened to discover the space is nowhere near ready.
Thursday
Dives
Balancer Growth Shows Tokens Are Steroids for DeFi: Balancer Labs’s so-called liquidity mining program is proving tokenized incentives can be huge drivers for growth. Metrics across the board for the new liquidity and asset management protocol spiked since the launch of the token-based incentives program.
Ethereum User Paid $5M+ in Txs Fees in One Day: Someone spent a record 2.6M in gas fees to send money over the Ethereum network. And they did it twice in one day. The user ended up spending ~$5.2M to send $84.5k.
Bytes
DeFi Protection on Nexus Mutual Surges to Record High: Nexus Mutual reached an all-time high in total cover amount. Total value more than doubled in the past 90 days to over $4M.
Sequoia-Backed Band Protocol Creeps Onto Chainlink’s Turf With Oracle Product: CoinDesk
Wednesday
Dives
DeFi Exchange Meets CeFi Liquidity —at a Cost: DeversiFi innovated by integrating a zk-Stark Layer 2 solution, scaling transactions per second dramatically. But the zk route means there is no composability to the main Ethereum chain.
The LAO Wants to Open For-Profit DAOs to Everyone: The LAO, a venture fund powered by MolochDAO and OpenLaw, is exploring ways to open up for-profit decentralized organization, such as theirs, to unaccredited investors.
Bytes
ConsenSys Launches DeFi-Focused Compliance Service: ConsenSys is rolling out a product focused on the know-your-customer regulatory compliance requirements that have proved to be a headache for many cryptocurrency firms.
Maker Community Votes on Potential New Collateral Types: The MakerDAO community this week voted for at least five tokens they’d like to add as collateral types in the system.
The Graph Announces Integration With Chainlink: The Graph is integrating with Chainlink to allow indexed data from The Graph’s APIs, called subgraphs, to be relayed to smart contracts via Chainlink oracles.
Rari Capital is the Latest DeFi Yield Robot: Rari Capital is the latest “yield robot,” a popular DeFi application which rebalances users stablecoin deposits into the highest-yielding opportunities.
Baseline Integrates Microsoft & Google Spreadsheets: CoinTelegraph
Tuesday
Dives
Ethereum Addresses Crossed 100 Million: Total Ethereum addresses just crossed 100 million. Metrics point to accelerating growth and adoption that’s beating even early internet use.
Whale Causes Dai in Aave to Temporarily 2x Overnight: There’s a whale lurking in DeFi waters and its latest move caused Dai locked in decentralized lending protocol Aave to more than double overnight — and then lose it all.
Bytes
DeFi Traders Can Now Access Tokens Before They List: Opium.exchange launched options markets for users to assign a value to Balancer’s BAL and Compound’s COMP before they start trading in secondary markets.
Loopring Launches Fast and Instant Payments: Loopring Protocol added zkRollups-based payments functionality to the Loopring.io frontend, so users can send payments instantly and for free.
💜Community Love💜
Especially thanking all the amazing Defiers on The Defiant’s 1st birthday week! Your comments to my post were incredibly encouraging and moving.
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About the founder: I’m Camila Russo, a financial journalist writing a book on Ethereum with Harper Collins. (Pre-order The Infinite Machine here). 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.