Recap: DeFi Week of Oct. 12 🦄
Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up this past week: Filecoin launched on mainnet after three years of development, with the FIL’s fully diluted market cap ballooning to over $200B. Coinbase Wallet is testing Optimism’s scaling solution, while Synthetix moved to phase two of its own trial of the network and prediction market Polymarket also moved to Layer 2. Uniswap’s decentralized governance kicked off with a proposal from Dharma, while competing AMM Bancor’s upgrade promised to reduce impermanent loss. Aave raised $25M, while boardroom raised $2.2M from venture investors.
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 (only $10/month, $100/year) get everything. Click here to pay with DAI.
🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, Perpetual Protocol, which provides decentralized perpetual contracts for any asset, and HackAtom V, a two-week virtual hackathon organized by Cosmos.
Interview
"Fintech Can Be a 1.5 Bridge Into 2.0 DeFi:" 11:FS Co-Founder Simon Taylor
Simon Taylor has the rare quality of being very knowledgeable about decentralized finance but also about fintech. He is the co-founder at fintech consultancy firm, 11:FS, and he previously led blockchain research at Barclays. He also leads the excellent newsletter Fintech Brain Food. Simon points to a world where fintech and defi start to converge. All the capital and users in the traditional finance will have to bridged into crypto at some point and that bridge can be fintech.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
Friday
Dives
Filecoin Early Investors Closer to Cashing Out: FIL jumped to as high as $114 in the hours after it was listed, according to Coingecko. That’s about 100 times higher than what early VCs and accredited investors were able to buy three years ago. On Thursday the clock for the day to cash out started ticking, as early investors have 6-month to 3-year vesting periods.
Bytes
Rally Launches RLY Token with Delegated Vault Mining: Rally has released its native governance token RLY to become a backbone for creators to issue their own tokens.
Lido Enters the ETH2 Staking Conversation: Lido wants to make it easier to stake ETH during the initial phase of Ethereum’s biggest-ever overhaul.
Prediction Markets Platform Polymarket Joins Layer 2: Rising prediction market Polymarket has taken their talents to Layer 2 to offer free trades with instant execution, credit card support and email logins.
Wednesday
Dives
Coinbase on Layer 2 is Latest in Ethereum’s Scaling Boom: There’s been an explosion of Ethereum scaling developments this past week, with the latest and arguably biggest one announced yesterday: Coinbase Wallet is integrating with Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup testnet.
Bytes
Bancor Aims to Eliminate Impermanent Loss With Upgrade: Bancor has unveiled the next step in their new AMM design. The 2.1 release introduces an elastic BNT supply, used to cover impermanent loss for LPs through a mechanism called Liquidity Protection.
Links
Boardroom Raises $2.2M for Blockchain Governance Toolset: CoinDesk
Tuesday
Dives
Blue Kirby Signs Off as Anon Coins Sink: Here’s the fable of Blue Kirby, the anonymous, video-game based character, who rode the explosive rise of the most popular DeFi token to the top and crashed back to earth along with it.
Bytes
Uniswap Governance Kicks Off: Uniswap’s first UNI governance proposal is now live for voting thanks to the mobile wallet Dharma.
RAC Breaks SuperRare Primary Sale Record: Grammy-winning musician RAC set a record for the highest primary sale price on an NFT sold through SuperRare over the weekend.
Links
Aave Raises $25 Million to Bring DeFi to Institutions: Decrypt
Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust Granted SEC Reporting Company Status: CoinDesk
💜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.
