Kyber Ecosystem Report #19

Hello fellow Kyberians,

Welcome to the Autumn edition of our ecosystem report. A year ago this autumn we were busy formulating our ideas around what turned into the KyberDAO and our Katalyst release. A year on, after a successful launch and the distribution of more than $1M to KyberDAO participants, we are once again formulating our ideas around the future of Kyber and what 2021 and beyond holds. Guiding narratives for us continue to be:

• Enhancing liquidity by optimizing network fees and growing our dedicated reserve ecosystem
• Shifting control of governance to the KyberDAO (including allowing it to make decisions on new token and reserve additions)
• And creating a more open system of permissionless liquidity contribution that is accessible to anyone in DeFi

Going into Q4, key initiatives for Kyber revolve around launching the Professional Market Making Framework, supporting developers through an Open Reserve Ecosystem, and introducing Permissionless Liquidity Contribution.

And in the short term we are introducing a trio of important KIPs to be voted by the KyberDAO with the aim of increasing immediate competitiveness:

KIP-3: Reduce Kyber Network fees from 20bps to 10bps (0.2% → 0.1%)
KIP-4: Apply network fees to all reserves (including for the first time bridge reserves)
KIP-5: Allow the KyberDAO to approve new tokens and reserves

In an environment where we are seeing various DeFi trends come and go we believe our plans put us on a strong path towards a sustainable liquidity infrastructure. As always, communication with you, the Kyber community and its stakeholders, is paramount to Kyber’s growth and success and within this ethos we’ve published a detailed blog post laying out both our short term plans and what we are working on beyond 2020. We highly recommend a read here.

KyberDAO Governance Snapshot

The KyberDAO is currently (up to the 16th of October) voting on the 7th BRR (Burn-Reward-Rebate) as well as on KIP-3 which will lower network fees from 20bps to 10bps with the aim of increasing volumes. The network parameters as decided in the last epoch’s BRR vote are:

• 5.77% burn (% of ETH rewards converted to KNC and burnt)
• 62.75% reward to KNC stakers who vote in the KybeDAO (rewarded in ETH)
• 31.48% rebate to FPR liquidity providers (rebate in ETH)

Kyber Network Stats

Although Kyber Network had its second highest month in terms of volume with $369M traded in October and a strong ETH volume performance, the total trades and unique address numbers tell us that swapping activity has dipped over the last two months. We believe this is due to a number of factors we highlight in our aforementioned Kyber: Delivering a Sustainable Liquidity Infrastructure for DeFi blog and include previously unseen high gas prices (at its peak surpassing500gwei) as well as liquidity mining’s popularity sucking up a lot of the liquidity. We look forward to the implementation of KIP3, KIP4, and KIP5 and other initiatives in the pipeline to alleviate some of these issues.

Most integrations that consume Kyber’s liquidity saw a drop in both USD and ETH volumes with only the unregistered wallet addresses segment and Fulcrum seeing substantial growth from August to September .

New DeFi Integrations

Regardless of gas prices and volumes we continue on our mission to bring Kyber’s liquidity far and wide across the Ethereum ecosystem and September saw a diverse range of dapps integrate Kyber.

DEXTF Protocol
DEXTF is an on-chain non-custodial asset management protocol that allows institutions and professionals to create and manage digitally-native funds. Integrating Kyber’s liquidity into DEXTF will allow for automatic portfolio rebalancing as opposed to the current system of multiple manual transactions. The integration generally simplifies the subscription and redemption process. More info can be found here.

Pine.finance

Pine.Finance is a protocol for automated and decentralized limit orders. Kicking off as an ETHBerlin 2019 hackathon participant under the UniSwapEx name, it has now expanded to support Kyber as a new direct execution path when executing limit orders. More info

The Sandbox

The Sandbox is a community-driven gaming ecosystem where creators can share and monetize voxel assets and gaming experiences. They’ve been partnering with a wide range of projects from both within crypto and outside it to bring various services and functionality to their ecosystem and Kyber will be bringing liquidity to $SAND and claiming a part of the metaverse. Announcement

SafePal

SafePal is a crypto mobile wallet that is compatible with the SafePal S1 Hardware Wallet. It supports over 10,000 crypto tokens and it recently opened up its UI to DeFi dapps and users can now swap within the wallet through KyberSwap.

Zerion

We were very pleased to see that Zerion, one of our favourite DeFi portfolio management and tracking dapps, will be plugging into 1inch’s automated liquidity router and therefore accessing Kyber’s liquidity when Zerion users want to swap one token to another. Zerion is a very simple interface that pulls in portfolio data from the dozens of DeFi, yield farming, and borrowing and lending platforms.

Dune Analytics

And lastly we wanted to highlight Dune Analytics’ new community dashboards and analytics for Kyber. Dune Analytics are a great team and have built a data analytics platform that’s allowed thousands of dashboards for hundreds of projects to be created to follow key metrics. You can see the various Kyber dashboards here.

Reserves and Token Metrics

One of Kyber Network’s key advantages over other on-chain liquidity providers is the ease with which existing liquidity sources can be plugged into Kyber Network and therefore benefit end users with better prices while allowing liquidity to be quickly scaled up. We saw a great demonstration of this with the deployment of a Curve-Kyber bridge reserve which enhances liquidity for ETH-stablecoin pairs while also bringing in multiple new tokens (see New Tokens section below) by tapping into Curve.

The new Sushiswap and Curve liquidity bridges saw significant volumes right from the get-go and within their first week of going live had a combined volume of $23M. OneBit Quant on the other hand was the fastest growing FPR with an impressive 240% increase in trading volume.

Stablecoins continue to dominate the top steps of the trading ladder and now account for 68% of all volumes. ERC20 tokens follow that with another 25% tokens and ERC20 versions of BTC make up another 7% of volumes on Kyber.

September’s New Token Listings

Genesis Vision [GVT] — Genesis Vision is a social trading platform where users can invest in managers or trade themselves with GVT providing discounts and other benefits to its holders. Announcement
Cream Finance [CREAM] — CREAM is distributed to liquidity miners as rewards for supplying inventory.
Uniswap [UNI] — UNI is the governance token of the Uniswap Protocol
Sushiswap [SUSHI] — SUSHI is the incentive token distributed for providing liquidity on Sushiswap, a Uniswap fork.
Curve Finance [CRV] — CRV is the governance token of Curve Finance
Yearn [YFI] — YFI is yEarn Finance’s native token distributed for providing liquidity to the platform.
YFValue [YFV] — YFV is the governance token of the YFValue Protocol
Swerve Finance [SWRV] — SWRV

GVT liquidity is served by an AMM while the remaining seven tokens are served by dex bridges.

KNC

KNC widened its reach in September through its addition to both Gemini, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US after Coinbase, and Binance US. In on-chain usage, KNC was added to Set Protocol’s DeFi Pulse Index Set (DPI) as part of a DeFi basket including tokens like COMP, MKR, SNX and LEND.

KNC was also added to ChangeNOW allowing users to purchase KNC with credit card.

KyberWorld

If you’re going to catch one online conference or talk in October we highly recommend tuning in to Liquidity2020 on the 17th of October to hear from our very own Head of Trading and liquidity expert Spyros Vrettos about the intricacies of on-chain passive vs active market making and why professionals should use Kyber.

Apart from Spyros, you can also catch us at keynotes and panels at the Decentralized Finance Global Summit, IOSG 7th DEFI Summit, Unagii Profile Series, and MoneyDance Virtual Hackathon and Summit.

Media Highlights

With another media-intensive month behind us you could have come across Kyber in any of the following publications:
Cointelegraph: Powering DeFi market: Overview Of Top 5 Dex
CryptoCompare: Ethereum’s DeFi Dominance Is Here To Stay

Altcoinbuz, Altcoingazette, bitcoin.com, BitcoinExchangeGuide, CrowdfundInsider, CoinTurk, CryptoBriefing, Decrypt, DigitalMarketNews, iHodl, Somagnews, Publish0x

Conclusion

And that wraps up another busy month of updates and activity from the Kyber family. The next few months are important to us as we kick off the various initiatives that will serve the DeFi and Ethereum ecosystems and continue to make Kyber Network a sustainable and antifragile liquidity infrastructure. As with all our previous goals, we are incredibly excited to tackle this head on and solve the challenges on the way, and look forward to coming through this one step closer to mass adoption.

September Photo Album