0x Ecosystem Update, August 2020

Welcome 👋 to the August 2020 ecosystem update from 0x Tracker, a monthly review of happenings from the 0x ecosystem. Each month we provide 0x trading insights and news from across the 0x ecosystem.

📈 Trading Insights

• A huge milestone was hit in August with over $520 million in trading activity 🎉. Roughly 18% of this ($95 million) was sourced from other DeFi liquidity providers through bridging contracts.
• This $520 million figure was a huge leap over the previous all-time high in July of $278 million, however the number of actual trades stayed fairly steady at 60k. This represents a jump in average trade size from $4,692 in July to $8,753 in August.
• August saw a repeat of the large multi-million dollar trades we saw in July, with five trades over $1 million in size. These trades still make up a small portion of overall volume however at ~$9 million. The majority of trades sat in the 10–100k bracket (see below).

• Protocol fees collected (for redistribution to market makers) saw a 40% increase over July from 178 ETH to 252 ETH (over $100k). This was fuelled partly by increases in gas prices and partly by 0x v3 continuing to eat away at v2 market share (protocol fees are not charged in 0x v2).
• There wasn’t much movement around staked ZRX, however the price of ZRX jumped from $0.27 at the beginning of August to a high of $0.83 before finishing at $0.53 by the end of August.
• CRV (Curve DAO Token) was the new kid on the block this month with over $11 million being traded after its introduction on 14th August. This activity was largely driven by trading on Matcha and 1inch Exchange who were quick to adopt it at launch.
• Other popular tokens in August included WBTC, LINK, YFI, and LEND. There were 26 tokens which traded over $1 million in August — an increase from 14 tokens in July and 9 tokens in June. The ecosystem appears to be rapidly diversifying across many assets! 💵

🗺 Ecosystem News

• The August Ecosystem Developer Meeting recording is now available on YouTube. Topics this month included 0x API improvements, gas cost reductions, and the Augur v2 launch.
• Matcha gave us a sneak peak at their slick new depth chart which provides an x-ray view into the various DeFi liquidity sources which Matcha aggregates to execute trades (via 0x smart contracts).

• 0x API added support for three new liquidity sources — Bancor, mStable and Mooniswap; bringing the total number of sources to twelve.
• RADAR RELAY launched margin trading powered by 0x and dYdX
• Prysm integrated 0x for one-click trade execution into their Idea Board and Token Discovery features. Prysm is a new collaborative trading community which launched in August.
• The 0x core team introduced a new Request for Quote (RFQ) system which helps market makers who traditionally prefer some of the risk-reducing properties of CEX/OTC platforms to provide 0x liquidity. Not only does this open up the 0x ecosystem to new market makers but it also encourages better pricing for medium-to-large size trades.

• Theo Gonella from the 0x team published an in-depth update around ZRX staking and governance for Q2 .
• The 0x team has begun using bounties to incentivise community contribution to the core codebases starting with a migration of the ZRX Portal over to the web3-react library.
• Popular crypto tracker CoinGecko has begun surfacing 0x metrics using the 0x Tracker API endpoints. Interested in using 0x Tracker data? Check out the docs to learn more!

🎬 Wrapping Up

That’s it for August, stay tuned for another update next month. If you enjoyed this update then consider subscribing to the newsletter to receive the monthly update direct to your inbox.