Recap: DeFi Week of Nov. 23 🦄
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up: The past week was rough for DeFi as the broader crypto market pulled back after rallying for much of November. Market volatility was especially high on Thanksgiving, causing the most collateral ever to be wiped out of DeFi protocols. The biggest hit was Compound Finance, which had $88.6M in Dai collateral liquidated after the stablecoin jumped on Coinbase and Uniswap, the only exchanges where the lending protocol gets its prices.
On better news, the threshold of ETH deposits for Ethereum’s proof-of-stake chain to launch next week was met, prompting ETH2 to already be among one the largest PoS blockchains. Yearn is on its way to becoming a DeFi conglomerate after merging with Pickle and Cream, but YFI isn’t celebrating. Gnosis and Idle announced their plans to decentralize governance. 12 digital NFTs linked to The Rug Pull experiment were sold in an auction; there’s a bitcoin in one of them and none of the owners have taken a peek to see if it’s in theirs (yet). This week’s podcast was with Mona El Isa, who revealed plans for Melon’s v2, and also the project’s new name.
We also kicked off our DeFi 101 series! We’ll be dropping 30 episodes, 2 minutes each explaining the DeFi basics, every two days. Subscribe so you never miss one.
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, and 1inch.exchange v2, which aims to provide the best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes across all leading DEXes.
Interview
"You Can Wake Up With an Idea for a Fund and Deploy it in Minutes:" Melon's Mona El Isa
This weeks podcast episode is with Mona El Isa, the co-founder of Melon, a decentralized asset management protocol. Mona tells the story of how she started her career at Goldman Sachs trading equities, derivatives, and all kinds of financial instruments, for a decade. She then went to work with one of Goldman’s hedge fund clients, where she managed a long-short portfolio.
With all that experience and $20 million dollars from a seed investor, she ventured on her own to launch a hedge fund —but failed. The time, costs and administrative hassle were too much to handle even with an investment of millions, which in that world, is actually pretty tiny. She came to the conclusion that the next step for her would be to build a blockchain-based protocol so that nobody would have to experience what she did when trying to set up an investment fund. A platform that made the process so much cheaper, faster and easier, that anybody could become a hedge fund manager. That’s how Melon Protocol came about.
🎙Listen to this week’s podcast episode with Melon’s Mona El Isa here:
Friday
Dives
Traders Have Poured Over $200M Into New Risk Hedging DeFi Protocols in Two Weeks: There’s a new investment category rising in DeFi: yield optimized by risk level.
At least two projects, Saffron Finance and Barnbridge, have started to offer investors the ability to earn differing yields in accordance with their risk tolerance.Yearn is Becoming a DeFi Mega Bank as YFI Slumps: Yearn Finance announced a partnership with Cream, the latest of a series of mergers and partnerships that’s making Andre Cronje’s project into a multi-purpose DeFi platform —but token holders aren’t celebrating.
Thanksgiving Day Selloff Triggers Record DeFi Liquidations: The most collateral ever was wiped out from DeFi protocols yesterday amid a broader market sell-off —so much for gloating about crypto at the Thanksgiving table.
Bytes
GnosisDAO Community Now Controls Most of its Treasury: Gnosis joins a wave of DeFi companies launching decentralized autonomous organizations to give control of their communities over governance.
Idle is Latest DeFi Protocol to Unveil DAO and Token: Idle Protocol yesterday announced it will be managed by a decentralized autonomous organization powered by the IDLE token.
Wednesday
Dives
NFT Collectors Snatch Up “Rug Pull” Art for $65k: 12 non-fungible tokens were sold for $65k in an auction yesterday. But there’s more to this collection than cool digital crypto art: There’s 1 BTC hidden in one of the pieces. Nobody, not even the owners, knows which one.
Links
Bancor’s BNT Holders Add New Tokens to Rewards Program: Bancor users are voting to add two new tokens to the initial eight liquidity pools eligible to receive BNT rewards.
Tuesday
Dives
Eth2 is Already Among the Largest PoS Chains: Phase 0 of Eth2 is set to kick off on its targeted launch date of Dec. 1 now that more than 584,224 ETH (or about $350M) is staked in the deposit contract.
Yearn and Pickle Merge After a $20M Attack: Yearn Finance and Pickle Finance today announced a merger where the teams are consolidating resources and technical stack. Just a few days earlier, Pickle was attacked and ~$20M Dai was drained.
Bytes
Evil Pickle Jars Makes Off with $20M: The latest affected project in a series of DeFi exploits is Pickle Finance - an automated yield aggregator with a mission to make stablecoins stable.
Links
💜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.
