Weekly DeFi/NFT News — January 17, 2022

Weekly DeFi/NFT news is a collection of major weekly events/announcements brought from the most trustworthy data sources, such as The Defiant, Spencer Noon, Week in Ethereum News etc. with comments and extra insight from the Bulldax DeFi labs.

Platypus: Avalanche native protocol to challenge Curve with new type AMM and tokenomics.

• The Platypus Finance protocol is a single-side AMM (decentralized exchange) designed for exchanging stable cryptocurrencies (ERC20 tokens) on the Avalanche blockchain.
• After the official beta launch on January 14, its TVL increased from $10M to $754M TVL. Token price increased from $2 to $12 in the same time period.

• Current APRs for stablecoins range from base APR of 15% to an average boosted APR of 313%.

https://app.platypus.finance/pool

• The key concept underpinning Platypus’s design is asset liability management (ALM). Most DeFi protocols today do not use the concept of liability.
• For instance, once liquidity providers have made deposits, they will be given the ”LP Tokens” which represent a partial ownership of a pool. However, pools are often composed of multiple assets, and any user actions may change the relative percentage of tokens ratio in a pool. Consequently, liquidity providers may find that upon withdrawal, they will get a different amount to what they have deposited.
• Platypus is different in that liability is recorded. Upon deposit, liquidity providers will be given LP tokens to specify the exact amount and the exact token that they have deposited. As a result, if the system is liquid, they will get back the exact amount of the same token upon withdrawal + pool rewards.
• By introducing the concept of ALM, Platypus allows each token to grow organically based on its natural supply and demand. This is notably different from Curve or Saddle which requires all tokens to have the same liquidity, thus making the least popular token the bottleneck for the growth of the pool.
• PTP is the native token to Platypus Finance. It can be staked to generate vePTP, the voting scrow token, that also boosts your rewards when staking your stablecoins on Platypus.
• The Boosting Pool utilizes an additional token, voting escrow PTP (vePTP), inspired by voting escrow CRV (veCRV) of Curve Financ. PTP can only be obtained by staking PTP. The longer the staking period, the more vePTP the user gets.
• Unstaking even 1 PTP would reset the vePTP balance to 0, reducing the boost APR.

Source: https://platypus-finance.gitbook.io/platypus-finance-docs/

YFI founder Andre Cronje building a new AMM for “projects” built on Fantom to improve on Curve and Uniswap design.

• According to Andre “[c]urrent AMMs are primarily for LPs, this is natural because when most AMMs launched, token incentives did not exist. Today, AMMs are primarily for projects, either through token incentives, bootstrapping liquidity, or even protocol owned liquidity. Other protocols are the new AMM users.”
• The new AMM will allow to easily add token incentives to your liquidity, bribe token emissions onto your liquidity, accrue fees from liquidity you incentivize and permissionlessly deploy your liquidity.
• Andre claims “we did not want to launch an AMM to compete with existing projects, for that reason it was designed with protocol 2 protocol architecture in mind. Existing AMMs can integrate the new AMM into their own design, still accruing all fees to their own systems without losing out any fees, volume, or liquidity.”
• Liquidity mining will distribute 2,000,000 new tokens as liquidity incentives to protocols on Fantom.

• “Locked ve(3,3) tokens will be given to each project in the top 20, it is then up to each project to create their pools and vote for their initial distribution or have their communities vote for their initial distribution. It is up to them to decide what they will incentivize, be it their own token, stable coin, or other liquidity. The timeline for this will thus be 2 weeks post protocol launch until distribution starts.”

Source: https://andrecronje.medium.com/ve-3-3-curves-initial-distribution-competition-building-a-protocol-for-protocols-79a1ff1cf1a1

Defi Project Triggers Uproar by Charging .01 ETH Fee to Join Airdrop — The Defiant

• Fees.wtf, which started as a community tool to horrify Ethereum users by showing them how much money they had spent in gas, announced an airdrop on Jan. 13. Unlike other airdrops, this one came with a .01 ETH fee, a break from the norm in crypto.

• The move had some people up in arms.

• Despite the backlash against the fee, people were paying it — Etherscan showed tens of .01 ETH fees streaming into wtf.fees’ team wallet every second on Jan. 13, shortly after the tokens became claimable.
• Others questioned the utility of the fees.wtf token, whose ticker is WTF. Fees.wtf uses Etherscan’s API to fetch the total amount a user has spent on gas and multiples that by ETH’s current price ito show the dollar-denominated amount a wallet has spent to transact on Ethereum.
• Feenix (fess.wtf team) justified the .01 ETH fee by saying the claim of WTF tokens came with an NFT which will give the holder access to the pro version of the project. Fees.wtf describes their pro version on their FAQ page as “an updated, multichain version of fees.wtf that will have metrics, charts and useful insights into how and where you got rekt by fees.

• WTF token has been going downhill since launc with fully diluted valuation at $11,927,802 USD.

Source: https://thedefiant.io/airdrop-eth-fee/

OHM LP fees pass $31m & DAO treasury reaches ~$635m — Spencer Noon.

• OlympusDAO introduced one of the most revolutionary tokenomic models of DeFi 2.0: by offering high APY staking rewards and the option to purchase OHM at a discount via a bonding mechanism, the protocol has been extremely successful at controlling its own liquidity.
• Currently about 90% of OHM’s circulating supply is staked on the protocol. Additionally, many in the community copied their model of protocol owned liquidity (POL), and the project had numerous forks, notably KlimaDAO and RomeDAO.

• Olympus generated ~$31m in total revenue and ~$190k daily in January through LP fees due to owning virtually all its liquidity. Owning liquidity is fantastic for the protocol because, during periods of high volatility like recently, Olympus can earn substantial fees from trades.
• As of January 17th, however, OHM has dipped by 25% and is now out of top 100 tokens by market cap.

• Still, the market value of the Olympus Treasury is currently ~$635m; assets are acquired via bonds. While the data shows a drop in the last 30 days, this metric also captures the volatility of all assets in the Treasury (including tokens and stablecoins). Olympus has also recently been migrating from OHM v1 to OHM v2, and during migration, bonds were disabled for about a week.

• Olympus Pro continues to be an exciting service for partners, with the Pro Treasury tracking around $1m, up ~99% and ~800% over the past 30-days and 3-months, respectively. The program allows the Olympus Treasury to acquire tokens via a 3.3% fee in the native token of the partner’s protocol.

Source: https://ournetwork.substack.com/p/ournetwork-issue-104

Associated Press Doubles Down on NFTs and Launches Marketplace for Iconic Images — The Defiant

• With NFT trading volumes surging, the Associated Press will launch an NFT marketplace to showcase its library of historic photographs, and it will do so on a system built by blockchain provider Xooa.
• The marketplace is set to launch on Jan. 31. AP’s initial collection will be released over several weeks, with NFTs minted on the Polygon blockchain to minimize transaction fees. Proceeds from NFTs sold will be used to fund AP journalism, with the photographers who created the images also receiving a share of the revenue.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a Jewish settler challenging Israeli security officers in the West Bank settlement of Amona, Feb. 1, 2006, will be among the first NFTs available on AP’s NFT marketplace. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

• AP’s collection will host a selection of digitally enhanced images from across its 176-year history, including several photographs that have received the Pulitzer Prize. The NFTs tackle subjects ranging from war to space exploration to climate change, and highligh bodies of work from AP photographers.
• “Pulitzer Drops” are expected to take place within fortnightly intervals.
• The NFTs will feature unique metadata detailing the context surrounding each image, including time, date, and location information alongside the equipment and technical settings that were used to capture the photo.
• The marketplace will allow collectors to both purchase NFTs and conduct secondary sales, supporting payments via credit card or third-party wallet providers including MetaMask, Fortmatic, and Coinbase. Reselling the NFTs will incur a 10% fee which is split between Xooa and AP.
• AP sold its first nonfungible token in September for $180,000. The token is a one-of-a-kind and features a digital artwork depicting the electoral college result map from the 2020 U.S. presidential election.