13 DeFi Notifications Ethereum Needs Today
Exploring notifications DeFi needs today!
DeFi or decentralized finance has been one of the biggest crazes in the crypto space. With most of the Defi applications being built on top of Ethereum, it has become one of the leading platforms to lead the next step to the evolution of Financial Technology since the release of Bitcoin 11 years ago.
Although the DeFi space has been expanding, we can already see the difficulties faced by the average Defi user and even serious Yield Farmers, when it comes to keeping track of what is going on and being able to get real-time alerts and information when important events go down.
This article will show how Decentralized Notifications can enhance the overall DeFi experience. It is said that sometimes you don’t know you need something until you actually get it.
To show you what we mean, here are 13 DeFi Notifications Ethereum needs today:
1. Lottery win on PoolTogether:
PoolTogether is a no-loss Defi Savings Lottery, which allows users to win a prize every week. Currently, there is no way to know if you’ve won the lottery for that week until you log in to the dApp again.
Notifications can alert you if you win the lottery right when it is announced and you can unleash your inner Uncle Scrooge and dive right into your riches!
2. C-Ratio and Liquidation Penalty
C-ratio or Collateralization Ratio is the ratio between your collateral assets compared to any open loans you have against them. In DeFi, collateralized loans are the backbone of open lending protocols.
There is a liquidation penalty that applies to you when you take a loan, and if your c-ratio drops lower than the allowed ratio, then your asset will be liquidated. In order to avoid this, as a user, you would also want to be notified when your c-ratio starts to drop significantly so that you can avoid liquidation.
Recently, Synthetix.io had changed its liquidation penalty to below 200% c-ratio. This means that if you stake on synthetix.io and your c-ratio drops below 200% then you will be liquidated.
This is crucial information that needs to be known to anyone who stakes on any protocol and not only Synthetix. One cannot expect a user who stakes to keep checking your site for updates on crucial things such as this. Notifications can help solve this by notifying stakers as and when something like this happens.
3. Boosts and Repays CDP from DefiSaver
CDP stands for Collateralized Debt Position. In layman’s terms, it’s when you put up assets as collateral in order to take out a loan or debt against said collateral.
With DefiSaver you are able to Boost or Repay your CDP either in the Standard way or by Flash Loans. Flash Loans allow the provision of a 1-transaction CDP settlement.
If you choose to repay or boost your CDP, you would want to get notified when the transaction has been done, and to let you know what your CDP position is at. Notifications can be crucial to let you know.
4. When Yearn Finance lists a new yVault
Vaults employ strategies to automate the best yield farming opportunities available.
They were designed so that the community could work together to build new strategies to find the best yield. Currently, all vaults are made by the original creator of the yearn.finance, but in the future users will be able to submit their own strategies to compete who can come up with the best one.
If you are interested in increasing your yield and want to keep track of the new vaults that are listed on Yearn Finance, then notifications can help you to do so. This allows you to be up to date on what are the available options to you and make decisions on where you want to stake your assets.
Yearn Finance even recently started a weekly series on Medium called Yearn State of the Vaults — a weekly update that will include yVault-related updates from the previous week as well as more in-depth information about Yearn’s yVaults such as current vault strategies, etc.
By pushing updates such as Weekly APY, Current Vault Strategies, etc through decentralized notifications, Yearn can make sure that all their users “stay in the game”.
5. When LoopRing lists a new Trading Pair
Loopring is an Ethereum based decentralized exchange protocol that is being created to allow users to exchange assets across various exchanges. It allows anyone to build high-throughput, non-custodial, order book-based exchanges on Ethereum by leveraging Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
Currently, LoopRing announces new trading pairs on Medium. This is obviously not an efficient way to convey information. Wouldn’t it be much more convenient for you to get notifications when new trading pairs are listed instead? Exactly.
6. $MEME NFT: Your Daily Pineapples 🍍🍍🍍
$MEME is an experimental protocol mashing up some of the most exciting innovations in DeFi and crypto collectibles. Meme enables you to stake tokens to farm limited edition NFTs, bringing accessible DeFi to the community.
You are allowed to stake anywhere from 1–5 MEME tokens and you receive a proportional amount of Pineapples every day. (If you stake 1 MEME, then you receive 1 Pineapple per day. But if you stake 5 MEME then you receive 5 Pineapple per day).
With decentralized notifications, you can be notified when the Pineapple you deserve to get has been credited to your wallet!
7. $MEME NFT: When you have enough Pineapple to buy an NFT
Continuing from the above point, when you have a certain amount of Pineapple with you minted from the daily rewards, then you will be able to buy an NFT. The price can vary based on the type of NFTs offered, (Relic, Common, Rare, Legendary).ranging from 1 PNPL for a Relic NFT to 75 PNPL to be able to claim a Legendary NFT.
With notifications, you can be alerted when you are eligible to buy the different types of NFTs at their price points. This can also be extended to notify when new artists join the protocol and list a new pool to create new crypto collectibles and thus add excitement and hype. For example,
“ARIST DROP 0 — SVEN: The Meme team is proud to announce our first exclusive digital artist drop with Sven Eberwein. Earn enough PNPL, to mint a brand-new, exclusive MEME x SVEN crypto collectible.”
8. Uniswap adds a new token list
Uniswap is a Decentralised Exchange Platform built on top of Ethereum. It automates liquidity and allows you to swap between different ERC20 tokens. Token lists on Uniswap are essentially just lists provided by different projects containing different ERC20 tokens whose reputation is backed by the reputation of the project that lists them. This is done to minimize and differentiate between high quality and legitimate ERC20 tokens from scams that have become a problem with the rise in popularity of Defi.
With the help of notifications, you can be alerted when a new token list is added to Uniswap hence allowing the user to check it out and see if there are any tokens in that list that might catch their attention to invest in.
9. Voting Period for On-Chain Governance
As described in our On-Chain Governance article, governance is an aspect that immediately requires the use of notifications.
If you run a Defi-based service, what if your service has an On-Chain Governance model and you wanted to inform users to vote on a really important or critical and emergency proposal that could decide the future of the protocol in the near future? What if your protocol was about to be compromised because of a bug and wanted to reach out to as much as your User base as you possibly can to reach quorum as soon as possible to vote on the bug-fix proposal? Or you want some way to know the general preferences of your token holders by ‘Signalling’ before actually making the users vote in order to ensure a fork doesn’t occur?
Decentralized Notifications are crucial in this context, and it shows why protocols must choose more efficient communication mediums for Governance related matters than what they have now (Twitter, Medium, Telegram, etc.)
10. DEX Limit Orders
When you buy or sell a token on a DEX, you have two main ways to determine the price you’ll trade at, these are the market order and the limit order. With market orders, you trade the token for whatever the current market price is. With limit orders, you can list your preferred price, and if the token hits it the trade is usually executed.
With notifications, you can immediately get notified when and if the trade has been executed, if you’ve listed your price as a limit order. This ensures that you don’t have to keep checking your wallet to see if a transaction has gone through.
11. Gas Price Tracker
One of the major concerns that plague Ethereum today is its arbitrarily high gas costs. Sometimes these gases can go through the roof and makes it completely undesirable to trade or exchange on the platform during these peaks. As a DeFi enthusiast, you would want to know when the Gas is high and when is it low. This would allow you to make decisions to transfer and send funds, etc all the while maximizing your returns. With decentralized notifications from EPNS, this is totally possible, and you will be notified when the GAS is peaking and when it is not, hence giving you the power to make decisions on what to do with your assets.
Also, look out for the Gas price tracker channel by EPNS coming soon!!
12. Exit Game on Layer 2
There are currently Layer 2 protocols built on top of Ethereum to facilitate scalability and faster throughput on the chain. Some layer 2 solutions for example, basically function on the notion that within a certain time frame any transaction on the layer 2 protocol is true until proven otherwise by a validator. But these transactions are not stored on the main Ethereum mainnet during this validation period yet. And only after this time frame does the whole bunch of transactions be sent over to the mainnet and stored on the blockchain indefinitely, this is called the end game or the exit game of layer 2.
The idea behind this being, DeFi protocols can make use of this layer 2 functionality to increase their throughput and thus enhance scalability. But the time frame between the exit games of such layer 2 solutions often take several days, and could probably go up to a week.
With the help of notifications, one may be notified when the exit game has been executed successfully in order to finally confirm their transactions on-chain.
13. Prevention of Rug Pulls in AMMs
Rug Pulls or exit scams are one of the biggest issues in Defi today. There are a lot of people preying on unsuspecting newbie crypto enthusiasts all the while promising them great ROIs, and then draining the liquidity pool when the “harvest is ripe” and when the other Liquidity Providers least expect it.
One novel solution implemented by BUILD Finance for this was that there could be a 2 day grace period from the time of minting until the tokens enter the AMM (Automated Market Maker). Subsequently, when the tokens are minted, the LPs (Liquidity Providers) are notified via decentralized notifications like EPNS. Hence disincentivizing rug-pulls since the LPs can dump their tokens if they see an exit scam going on right under their nose!
The need for notifications can be applied to many different areas and in with much utility that one may not be able to imagine. The above utilities of notifications in DeFi are just the beginning. With the rapid pace at which the DeFi space is expanding, it is going to be much more important for notifications to help users keep track of everything going on. EPNS does just that and allows you to receive notifications in the most decentralized way possible, abiding by everything DeFi stands for.
Decentralized Notifications with EPNS
EPNS (Ethereum Push Notification Service) is a decentralized notification protocol that enables users (wallet addresses) to receive notifications. Using the protocol, any dApp, service or smart contract can send notifications to users in a platform-agnostic fashion (mobile, tablet, web, user wallets, etc). The DeFi aspect of the protocol ensures that the user receives notifications and also earns from them.
With EPNS, we can be assured that sooner than later Defi will receive the notifications that it absolutely needs.
EPNS is the hero we need and deserve in DeFi.
References: Market Order vs Limit Order | Loopring Review | Yearn Vaults | CDP Defi Saver | Collateralized Loans | PoolTogether
