Kyber Ecosystem Report #25 March ‘21

Published in

Kyber Network

7 min readApr 15, 2021

Hello fellow Kyberians,

With so much going on this month where do we even begin! We’ve now launched the Kyber Dynamic Market Maker on mainnet, the KyberDAO has approved the KNC migration and is in the process of voting on the upgrade of the KyberDAO itself, we’ve released our Layer 2 rollup research, and a certain KyberSwap team announced the upcoming launch of a fully featured brand new wallet called Krystal! Lets jump right in..

Kyber Dynamic Market Maker Launch

And here it is, the most efficient and dynamic market maker in DeFi. Using programmable price curves and dynamic fees, DMM users benefit from lower slippage (and therefore better prices) and DMM market makers benefit from reduced impermanent loss (and increased LP profit) amongst many other improvements. You can read our deep dive here or watch the video below, but in the meantime, we recommend you try it out for yourselves and experience how easy and efficient it is to trade and provide liquidity on the DMM.

Feedback to the DMM launch has been great and within days of launch, more than $20M is already locked up and providing liquidity and we expect this number to grow as existing AMMs migrate and community LP providers join the pools or create their own unique pools. Creating your own pool is extremely easy and can be accessed here.

KIP-6 KNC Migration Proposal Approved

In other important news for Kyber, an overwhelming majority of the Kyber community decided to accept the team’s proposals to migrate KNC to a new token contract and we believe the whole Kyber ecosystem greatly benefits from this migration. As you will remember, this new KNC contract gives the KyberDAO more tools and mechanisms to mint/burn/upgrade the KNC token in order to bootstrap liquidity, support growth, and lead the way for further innovation in this fast moving DeFi landscape. For example if the Kyber community wished for, it could now provide extra incentives to LPs to lock up tokens in the DMM.

And this leads us to another important and exciting component of the Kyber 3.0 overhaul..

KyberDAO New Architecture Proposal

With the KNC contract upgraded and the completely new architectural changes and new capabilities introduced by Kyber 3.0, we believe it is important for the KyberDAO to also be upgraded to take advantage of all these changes, and KIP-7 is a proposal for just such an upgrade.

In a nutshell, KIP-7 will increase the KyberDAO’s role in the governance of Kyber Network by creating a new and streamlined system of decision making and enaction. The overall architecture is based off Aave’s governance model (which has proven very effective) and you can see an outline of how the Governance, Treasury, and Reward contracts interact with each other and with the community in the diagram below.

We encourage everyone to read the proposal here and vote on it through the KyberDAO here. The proposed KyberDAO smart contracts have also been audited by the reputable auditing firm Hacken who have found no critical issues.

Kyber Network & Layer 2

Unsurprisingly given the high gas prices prevalent on Ethereum, one of the most frequent questions we get asked by our community is what are the team’s plans for Layer 2. For the last 4 years, Kyber has inherited its security from the Ethereum mainnet and therefore, decisions such as moving to a Layer 2 is one of the most important decisions we will ever make. To lay the groundwork, Trong Nguyen and Loi have done extensive research on the existing flavours of Layer 2 solutions, and specifically of the Rollup variety. This research will help guide Kyber’s Layer 2 efforts and as you can read from the report here, Rollups are very complex with a multitude of considerations and trade-offs and it is worth taking our time in implementing this.

Krystal Launch

The KyberSwap team (independent from the Kyber Network team) have built KyberSwap into one of the most valuable decentralized token swap services over the last few years and they now turn their attention to building a best-in-class wallet and DeFi service .

Krystal is a brand new app that consolidates multiple DeFi DApp services under one platform and provides users with an immersive and frictionless crypto experience. Krystal will be one of the most powerful wallets available on the market and will allow users to swap tokens through Kyber and other liquidity providers, lend tokens through AAVE and Compound, and manage their portfolios hassle free.

The app will be available on Android and iOS within the next few weeks and we’d like to wish the Krystal team all the best in launching this app. You can read the announcement here.

Kyber Network Stats

Kyber Network’s total volume for March was $330M, making it the fourth best month by volume so far, but, it is far below the all time high volume of $858M set in January. This is why we are so focused on delivering a Kyber 3.0 that can reduce gas costs and increase capital efficiency, and together with the deployment of multiple liquidity protocols, we believe this should significantly increase trading activity and volume.

At an integration level, while there was a drop in volume for most DApps, there were a few standout DApps that managed to triple and quadruple their monthly volumes:

In line with general integration volumes, the maker side has also had lower volumes:

KNC

KNC is one of the most widely available and popular tokens in crypto with availability on over 75 centralized and decentralized exchanges. We were happy to see it added to a few more high profile exchanges recently including Bittrex, Crypto.com, and Bitstamp. You can see all KNC markets and pairs on Coingecko’s KNC Markets page here.

Kyber in the Media

With so much happening in Kyber world you could have come across Kyber in various publications including:

Coindesk, Defiant, EthHub, The Block, The Daily Gwei, DeFi Rate, AltcoinBuzz, Investing.com, BTC Manager, CryptoCoinNews, The Daily Hodl, FXStreet, KryptoMoney, Crowdfund Insider, ExxeNews, MoneyTimes, SmartCryptoNews, ViaNews, Somag News, CryptoNewsFlash, Inside Bitcoins, Up News Info, Invezz, TokenHell, CryptoNewsPipe

Conclusion

It is full steam ahead for Kyber 3.0 as we continue to launch more components of this large architectural change. The release of Katana, the first of two parts that make up Kyber 3.0, should be complete by the end of this month, and from there, the team turns its attention to delivering Kaizen. We will keep communicating all important updates and proposals through our social media channels (discord, telegram, and twitter) so please make sure to follow us there and thank you again for being part of the Kyber family and for supporting us 💪

Kyber March Photo Gallery

About Kyber Network

Kyber Network is delivering a sustainable liquidity infrastructure for DeFi. As a liquidity hub, Kyber connects liquidity from various protocols and sources to provide the best token rates to Dapps, aggregators, DeFi platforms, and traders.

Through Kyber, anyone can provide or access liquidity, and developers can build innovative applications, including token swap services, decentralized payments, and financial Dapps — helping to build a world where any token is usable anywhere. Kyber is powering more than 100 integrated projects and has facilitated over US$7 billion worth of transactions for thousands of users since its inception.

KyberDMM DEX, the latest protocol in the liquidity hub, provides the best rates for traders and maximizes returns for liquidity providers.