Recap: DeFi Week of Nov. 2 🦄
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up: The US presidential election marked this past week. With all eyes on ways to predict the outcome amid a slow vote count, we had an overview of Ethereum prediction markets, which had Biden winning by the widest margin relative to polls and other betting markets. Once election uncertainty cleared, crypto markets rallied, including DeFi tokens which had underperformed in September and October, while DeFi protocols’ fundamentals remained strong, according to IntoTheBlock data.
The other major news of the week for the DeFi space was that the deposit contract for Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake chain was released. We covered the potential risks and rewards of staking, and how to start. 1inch upgraded its DEX aggregator, while UMA introduced “developer mining,” and in less positive news, almost $1M was locked in Compound fork Percent Finance because of a bug. In this week’s opinion piece, Carolyn Reckhow of Keep Network wrote an excellent Bitcoiner’s guide to DeFi. This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries, one of the creators of Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, who isn’t actually human and wants to leverage crypto and web3.
That was just one week. Subscribe to get the latest DeFi news and analysis straight to your inbox and you don’t miss a thing. Free-signups get partial content, paid subscribers get everything. Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button below ($10/mo, $100/yr).
🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, Sorare, a fantasy football game with officially licensed cards on Ethereum, and Near, a high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain that interoperates with Ethereum.
Interview
"We've Been Creating Value for Instagram and TikTok With Very Little Actually Accruing to Us:" Trevor McFedries
This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries, who is behind Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, striking deals with Clavin Klein and Prada. But what’s more surprising is that she’s not human. She’s a computer-generated, character. The company that Trevor co-founded, called Brud, created her image and life story. It’s only fitting then that Lil Miquela, who lives in a digital world, will start to leverage digital tokens.
🎙Listen to this week’s podcast w/ Lil Miquela creator Trevor McFedries:
Op-ed
The Bitcoiner's Guide to DeFi by Carolyn Reckhow
Bitcoin is in a huge rally, crossing $15k for the first time since January 2018. As the number of holders grows along with interest for BTC, even more of the largest cryptocurrency is bound to end up in Ethereum, where it can be put to work. Bitcoin on Ethereum has already climbed relentlessly this year, recently crossing 150k, or $2B. Carolyn Reckhow, chief strategy officer at Keep, which helps run the BTC-ETH bridge tBTC, has an excellent guide for Bitcoiners coming to decentralized finance. Make sure to forward to your DeFi-curious BTC hodler friend.
Friday
Markets
DeFi Rebounds as Metrics Remained Strong in Selloff: DeFi tokens are rebounding after a slump in October. The stark contrast between DeFi tokens’ summer performance and the one seen in the fall denoted a change in positioning from investors due to macroeconomic risks. But DeFi protocol’s key metrics continued to grow, sustaining high levels seen prior to their tokens crashing.
Bytes
1inch Upgrades DEX Aggregator: DEX Aggregator 1inch has introduced its v2, which contains a new discovery and routing algorithm to execute swaps faster and at better rates.
$1M Locked in Percent Finance Due to Bug: A total of ~$970k in USDC, WBTC ad ETH is locked in Percent Finance, a Compound Finance fork, due to an error in its interest rate model update.
Vitalik Buterin Commits $1.5M for Staking on Eth2: Decrypt: Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has sent around 3,200 ETH, worth $1.5 million, to the platform’s newly established deposit contract in preparation for staking.
Wednesday
Dives
Hurray! You Can Now Stake ETH. But Should You?: The deposit contract for Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake chain was released today. If ~524k ETH is deposited this month, the new chain will go live on Dec.1. Potential rewards for contributing to that pile of ETH are enticing, but there’s also high risk.
Bytes
UMA Replaces Liquidity Mining with Developer Mining: UMA plans to allocate 50k tokens per week to developers who build synthetic assets on its permissionless derivatives protocol starting on November 10th.
Notional Showcases Fixed Lending AMM: Notional, a DeFi lending protocol, is rolling out its fixed-rate loans in a public beta with support from investors including 1confirmation, IDEO, Parafi, Nascent, Coinbase and Polychain.
Tuesday
Dives
Who Will Win the US Election? Eth Prediction Markets May Have the Best or Worst Answer: Biden is winning by a relatively wide margin across the board. But depending on where you are in the political spectrum you might get even more solace (or distress) from prediction markets on Ethereum, which show the Democrat beating Trump by the widest margin of all.
💜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 and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.
