DeFi in Ether: >$81B TVL in DeFi, MetaMask crosses 5 million MAUs, Uniswap v3 is now live on Ethereum mainnet, 1inch launches Wallet App, Balancer and Gnosis join forces to launch new DeFi protocol, Polygon announces DeFi fund, The Q1 2021 DeFi Report from ConsenSys, and more!

Paradigm

Published in

Paradigm

18 min readMay 11, 2021

Biweekly update on Ethereum DeFi ecosystem vol.29, 27th April — 11th May

TL;DR

More than $81B in DeFi this week, currently at ~ $81.50B, with Maker dominance 17.93%.
MetaMask crosses 5 million monthly active users: In the past 6 months, MetaMask has grown 5x, and is now used by more than 5 million users every month.
Uniswap v3 now on mainnet: Uniswap v3 is the most powerful version of the protocol yet, with Concentrated Liquidity offering unprecedented capital efficiency for liquidity providers, better execution for traders, and superior infrastructure at the heart of decentralized finance. What is Uniswap v3?
Gnosis Protocol v2 announced: Gnosis Protocol V2 leverages batch auctions to provide MEV protection, plus integration with liquidity sources across DEXs to offer traders the best prices. Balancer and Gnosis team up: The Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol (BGP) alliance combines the best of both protocols, with Balancer V2’s flexible liquidity pools enabled by a single-vault architecture and asset managers, in combination with Gnosis Protocol v2’s price-finding mechanism and MEV protection. New Apps added to Gnosis Safe: Aave, ENS, dHedge and Liquidity were added this week with a lot more dApps coming soon. Magnet beta launched: Magnet is a workflow tool that makes it easy for a Gnosis Safe Multisig to create and review compensation packages.
Balancer Labs launches Incentive Program for IDO’s: In order to help incentivize the continued growth of LBPs as a leading token distribution platform in DeFi, Balancer Labs is announcing an incentive program for referring projects that execute an LBP sale. #OpenScience for DeFi: Balancer Labs Partners With TokenEngineering Academy. The latest Balancer Report is here.
mStable <> dHEDGE Cross-DAO Collaboration: The mStableDAO has acted upon this recent vote by Meta Governors to allocate a portion of their idle treasury funds into the recently launched dHEDGE Top Index Pool. PDP 21 Migrate DAI and WBTC to Aave v2 successfully passed by MTA governors.
Aave April update: Record growth, liquidity incentives, governance power distribution and more updates in this April monthly recap from Aave. The Aave Grants DAO vote has passed. ARC: Add LINK liquidity mining rewards. Aave’s Stani Kulechov and Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov discuss DeFi’s mass adoption. Latest Aave weekly.
In the last Yearn Finance Newsletter #31: Total Value locked has exceeded $3.3B; yvBOOST introduced; deposit caps lifted for Yearn & Badger WBTC Vault; several new yVaults launched; vaults at Yearn.
Compound Proposal 44 Legacy market maintenance: WBTC and REP executed on May 5th, 2021: In Proposal 41, the team began the process to migrate WBTC to a modern upgradable cToken contract. This proposal continues the deprecation process for the legacy WBTC market, following the process established for SAI and REP.
Making Maker: April 2021: Last month, the Maker community focused on learning more about, voting on, and eventually ratifying a significant upgrade to the Maker Protocol’s Liquidations System — Liquidations 2.0. The Maker Foundation Returns Dev Fund Holdings to the DAO: The Maker Foundation returned 84,000 MKR from the Development Fund to MakerDAO. Maker Governance Votes on ETH and WBTC Collateral Integration with Liquidations 2.0: Maker governance votes on integrating ETH and WBTC collateral types into Liquidations 2.0, the most recent upgrade to the Maker Protocol’s Liquidations system. Governance Polls: Inclusion Polls and Parameter Changes. Executive Vote: Liquidations 2.0 Activations, Transfer May Core Unit Budgets. The Maker Foundation Meetup Grants Program comes to an end. A guide to MakerDAO.
xDai weekly recap focuses on network and protocol metrics, projects & more.
dYdX: AVAX-USD Perpetual Markets are live for trading on Layer 2. AMA with Wintermute — Market Making on a DEX.
uLABS: How Uniswap v3 Will Level Up UMA and DeFi: Uniswap v3 will improve capital efficiency and liquidity for synthetic tokens built on the UMA infrastructure. The defining feature of this upgrade is “concentrated liquidity” which grants individual liquidity providers more control over how they provide liquidity. The team outlines in this article at a high level how Uniswap v3 opens new possibilities for synthetic tokens and also how it can revolutionize DeFi in general. ICYMI #13 & ICYMI #12. UMA KPI Options for INDEX holders.
Enzyme’s new trading interface released. Unslashed X Enzyme team up to build superior insurance infrastructure. Enzyme will provide the asset management infrastructure enabling Unslashed to leverage the security, maintenance and development work around the Enzyme ecosystem. Unslashed will be able to focus on creating diversified Buckets of insurance with different risk profiles as a product which is totally un-correlated to anything else in DeFi.
1inch launches Wallet App: The app, 1inch Wallet, is meant to provide customers with a mobile-friendly way to perform token swaps, trades, and other transactions. Dive into the 1inch Wallet for iOS. New joint liquidity mining program with Wirex: The program kicked off on May 7 and will run for 8 weeks, featuring the 1INCH-WXT pool. How the 1inch Network ensures the best swap prices: The first post in a series on the 1inch Network’s advantages explains how split swaps enable users to get the best token exchange prices. 1inch AMA: key takeaways: On April 30, the 1inch Network co-founders Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov did an AMA. In this post, the most important takeaways from the AMA are gathered. 1inch Network integrated Uniswap V3. 1inch Network successfully surpassed 200K in total users.
Going Live with RenVM v0.4: This article will provide an overview of the upgrades taking place as part of the release of RenVM Mainnet V.04. As part of the RenVM v0.4 upgrade, the team will be upgrading the Ethereum contracts for BTC, BCH, and ZEC on Ethereum. The new version is the same as those that have been running smoothly in production for other assets/chains for several months. April Development Update. Ren Ecosystem Update: April 2021. Value DeFi Integrates RenVM: The First RenVM integration on Binance Smart Chain.
$300m TVL between Index Coop products. DPI/ETH and MVI/ETH rewards have been extended. The Coop is 2,000 INDEX short of quorum on Aave Proposal #18.
0x closed last the week out at $3b in trading volume. 0x Community and Governance meeting — May 2021 recording is here. Uniswap V3 is now available through 0x API and 0x API integrators. Over $500M have been traded on Binance Smart Chain through 0x Project API.
Announcing NFT Awards for Bancor Traders with Chainlink VRF: The team launches a new trader incentives program that awards bancor.network traders with limited edition NFTs throughout the month of May. Bancor Progress Update (April 2021): In April, Bancor continued to see rapid growth in trade volume, # of LPs and whitelisted assets. Weekly Dev Update: Bancor Dev Update for the week of May 2–7: Trading competition, pool space notifications & more. New proposals live on Bancor governance.
Loopring Smart Wallet Now on iOS: The smart wallet comes with social recovery, daily limits + whitelist addresses and access to the whole Loopring ecosystem. Loopring L2 Liquidity Mining: Round 7. Loopring Subgraph + Hackathon Bounties: The zkRollup data is now easily available as a subgraph. You will now be able to parse through zkRollup blocks dynamically. Be one of the 200 winners in Loopring & OpenOcean Trading Giveaway.
KyberDAO Community Call #4 Recap: Kyber 3.0 Phase 1, Kyber DMM launch, KNC token migration, and more. Kyber Weekly Blitz (3–9 May).
Update 169 of the Raiden Weekly is out. This issue covers: Testing of the Bespin alpha release is going well; Light client is getting ready for mainnet and is seeing improvements to WebRTC; Scaling Ethereum hackathon is ending.
The Alnair release: On May 10th several new updates were added to the Synthetix protocol. The Regor release: Two new equity Synths went live — sMSFT Synth and sCOIN Synth. sCOIN & sMSFT pool incentives are now live on Balancer. The Synthetix Ambassadors governance portal is now live. sLINK has overtaken sBTC to become the second-largest volatile Synth in the Synthtetix debt pool. The largest volatile Synth remains sETH. Synthetix Weekly — May 5th 2021.
Nexus Mutual to support Anchor Protocol under its new Protocol Cover.
VanEck files for an Ethereum exchange-traded fund: Exchange-traded fund (ETF) startup VanEck has filed for an ether-based ETF, public records show. The company, which currently has a proposed bitcoin ETF under review by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed an ether ETF on Friday that would allow retail and institutional traders to gain exposure to the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap without requiring them to directly invest in it.
Polygon announces DeFi fund: The $150 million fund which will be focused on making DeFi more accessible and cost-effective to bring the next million users to DeFi.
PoolTogether launches on Polygon: The first Aave powered no loss prize pool is live on Polygon with $100,000 of MATIC rewards in the first 35 days.
The Graph mainnet migration update: The first 10 subgraphs migrated from The Graph’s hosted service to mainnet this wek including Gnosis, mStable, UMA and more.
Celer and StarkWare partner up: Users can seamlessly use both OP rollup and ZK rollup for diversified DeFi use cases. Coming this summer.
Alpha Grants Program announced: Alpha Grants Program is a program in which Alpha Finance core development team will give grants to Alpha Builders, well-organized development teams and individuals with a proven track record of building in DeFi who want to contribute to building the Alpha ecosystem.
B.Protocol governance launched: The B.Protocol community proposed to launch the BPRO token and give it control over the protocol (currently the protocol is under the control of the user Score, and thus users have to hand it over with an onchain vote).
ParaSwap 4 now live: With this update ParaSwap is now 10% cheaper than Uniswap (gas-wise), a new gas token has been introduced, a new algorithm has been launched and more.
Sudoswap v2 now live: New features include an upgraded swap mechanism with unlimited combination trading, order expiration dates and more.
Introducing zkDAI: zk.money from Aztec now supports private, scalable DAI transactions and to celebrate the launch, users can shield and send zkDAI for free for the next 7 days (up to a total of 1000 DAI txns).
Hashflow announced: Hashflow is a decentralized exchange that lets users trade trustlessly with crypto’s top market makers. It allows for better prices, no slippage, and rock-bottom gas fees.
Dopex announced: Dopex is a decentralized options exchange that aims to address all of the issues with the existing options protocols within DeFi.
Splits introduced: Splits are a way to route ETH continuously to an unlimited number of Ethereum addresses, according to a set of percentage allocations.
Notional Finance raises $10 million: Notional Finance closed a $10 million Series A round from Pantera, ParaFi Capital, 1Confirmation, Spartan Group, Nascent, and other big names following a seed round from Coinbase Ventures.
PayPal is holding exploratory talks about launching its very own stablecoin.
How MetaMask Grew Its Monthly Active Users By 5X in the Last 6 Months on Unconfirmed.
Legitimacy | Vitalik Buterin on Bankless.
The Q1 2021 DeFi Report from ConsenSys.
Yet another guide to yield farming.
DeFi explained in gamer terms.
And more!

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Total Value Locked in DeFi

More than $81B in DeFi this week, currently at ~ $81.50B, with Maker dominance 17.93%.

Top DeFi Tokens by Market Capitalization

Total Market Cap: $104,186,276,959

DeFi Aggregators

mStable:

mStable <> dHEDGE Cross-DAO Collaboration: The mStableDAO has acted upon this recent vote by Meta Governors to allocate a portion of their idle treasury funds into the recently launched dHEDGE Top Index Pool.
PDP 21 Migrate DAI and WBTC to Aave v2 successfully passed by MTA governors.
mStable Live on Polygon: Users can now access the mStable protocol’s risk-minimized DeFi savings account on the Polygon network.

yEarn.finance:

In the last Yearn Finance Newsletter #31:

Total Value Locked Has Exceeded $3.3b
Introducing yvBOOST
Deposit Caps Lifted for Yearn & Badger WBTC Vault
Several New yVaults Launched
Vaults at Yearn

Lending

Aave:

Aave April update: Record growth, liquidity incentives, governance power distribution and more updates in this April monthly recap from Aave.
The Aave Grants DAO vote has passed.
ARC: Add LINK liquidity mining rewards.
Aave’s Stani Kulechov and Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov discuss DeFi’s mass adoption.

Latest Aave weekly:

Compound:

Compound Proposal 44 Legacy market maintenance: WBTC and REP executed on May 5th, 2021: In Proposal 41, the team began the process to migrate WBTC to a modern upgradable cToken contract. This proposal continues the deprecation process for the legacy WBTC market, following the process established for SAI and REP.

Maker:

Making Maker: April 2021: Last month, the Maker community focused on learning more about, voting on, and eventually ratifying a significant upgrade to the Maker Protocol’s Liquidations System — Liquidations 2.0.
The Maker Foundation Returns Dev Fund Holdings to the DAO: The Maker Foundation returned 84,000 MKR from the Development Fund to MakerDAO. In particular, these MKR tokens were transferred to the DSPause Proxy smart contract in the Governance Module, and are now under the control of Maker Governance.
Governance Polls: Inclusion Polls and Parameter Changes: The Governance Facilitators have placed a Governance Poll into the voting system on behalf of the MakerDAO Risk Domain Team. The community can vote in this poll to express support or opposition to these polls on the voting portal.
Governance Polls: Add Multiple Vault Types to the Liquidations 2.0 Framework, and more
Executive Vote: Liquidations 2.0 Activations, Transfer May Core Unit Budgets: The Governance Facilitator(s) and the MakerDAO Smart Contracts Domain Team have placed an executive proposal into the voting system. MKR Holders should vote for this proposal if they support the following alterations to the Maker Protocol.
Maker Governance Votes on ETH and WBTC Collateral Integration with Liquidations 2.0: Maker governance votes on integrating ETH and WBTC collateral types into Liquidations 2.0, the most recent upgrade to the Maker Protocol’s Liquidations system.
The Maker Foundation Meetup Grants Program Comes to an End
A guide to MakerDAO

xDai:

xDai weekly recap focuses on network and protocol metrics, projects & more.

Derivatives, Swaps and Prediction Markets

dYdX:

Gnosis:

Gnosis Protocol v2 announced: Gnosis Protocol V2 leverages batch auctions to provide MEV protection, plus integration with liquidity sources across DEXs to offer traders the best prices.
Balancer and Gnosis team up: The Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol (BGP) alliance combines the best of both protocols, with Balancer V2’s flexible liquidity pools enabled by a single-vault architecture and asset managers, in combination with Gnosis Protocol v2’s price-finding mechanism and MEV protection. Today, users can trade on the proof-of-concept CowSwap dApp.
New Apps added to Gnosis Safe: Aave, ENS, dHedge and Liquity were added this week with a lot more dApps coming soon.
Magnet beta launched: Magnet is a workflow tool that makes it easy for a Gnosis Safe Multisig to create and review compensation packages.

UMA:

ICYMI #13 & ICYMI #12
UMA KPI Options for INDEX Holders
uLABS: How Uniswap v3 Will Level Up UMA and DeFi: Uniswap v3 will improve capital efficiency and liquidity for synthetic tokens built on the UMA infrastructure. The defining feature of this upgrade is “concentrated liquidity” which grants individual liquidity providers more control over how they provide liquidity. The team outlines in this article at a high level how Uniswap v3 opens new possibilities for synthetic tokens and also how it can revolutionize DeFi in general.

Fund Management

Enzyme Finance (formerly Melon):

Enzyme’s new trading interface released

Unslashed X Enzyme Team up to Provide a Superior Insurance Proposition for DeFi:

Enzyme + Unslashed are teaming up to build superior insurance infrastructure.
Enzyme will provide the asset management infrastructure enabling Unslashed to leverage the security, maintenance and development work around the Enzyme ecosystem.
Unslashed will be able to focus on creating diversified Buckets of insurance with different risk profiles as a product which is totally un-correlated to anything else in DeFi.
Providing capital on Unslashed now opens you up to 3 sources of Yield; USF Capital Mining program, DeFi returns via Enzyme plug-in AND insurance premiums. This is a unique and unbeatable proposition today that will boost the APY of Capital Suppliers on Unslashed.
This will bring lower insurance premiums and enable higher security guarantees to purchasers of insurance policies on Unslashed.

Set Protocol & Index Coop:

Securities, Insurance and NFTs

Nexus Mutual:

Nexus Mutual to support Anchor Protocol under its new Protocol Cover.

Liquidity Relays

0x project:

0x Community and Governance meeting — May 2021 recording is here.

Matcha:

1inch:

1inch launches Wallet App: The app, 1inch Wallet, is meant to provide customers with a mobile-friendly way to perform token swaps, trades, and other transactions.
Dive into the 1inch Wallet for iOS
New joint liquidity mining program with Wirex: The program kicked off on May 7 and will run for 8 weeks, featuring the 1INCH-WXT pool.
How the 1inch Network ensures the best swap prices: The first post in a series on the 1inch Network’s advantages explains how split swaps enable users to get the best token exchange prices.
1inch AMA: key takeaways: On April 30, the 1inch Network co-founders Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov did an AMA. In this post, the most important takeaways from the AMA are gathered.
1inch Network successfully surpassed 200K in total users.
1inch Network integrates Uniswap V3.

Balancer:

Balancer Labs launches Incentive Program for IDO’s: In order to help incentivize the continued growth of LBPs as a leading token distribution platform in DeFi, Balancer Labs is announcing an incentive program for referring projects that execute an LBP sale.
Balancer and Gnosis team up: The Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol (BGP) alliance combines the best of both protocols, with Balancer V2’s flexible liquidity pools enabled by a single-vault architecture and asset managers, in combination with Gnosis Protocol v2’s price-finding mechanism and MEV protection.
#OpenScience for DeFi: Balancer Labs Partners With TokenEngineering Academy.
The latest Balancer Report is here.

Bancor:

Announcing NFT Awards for Bancor Traders with Chainlink VRF: The team launches a new trader incentives program that awards bancor.network traders with limited edition NFTs throughout the month of May.
Bancor Progress Update (April 2021): In April, Bancor continued to see rapid growth in trade volume, # of LPs and whitelisted assets.
Weekly Dev Update: Bancor Dev Update for the week of May 2–7: Trading competition, pool space notifications & more.
Weekly Dev Update: Bancor Dev Update for the week of April 25–May 2: Limit orders, new protection contract, more Fiat Providers, new landing page & more.
New proposals live on Bancor governance:

Kyber:

KyberDAO Community Call #4 Recap: Kyber 3.0 Phase 1, Kyber DMM launch, KNC token migration, and more.
Kyber Weekly Blitz (3–9 May):

Loopring:

Loopring Smart Wallet Now on iOS: The smart wallet comes with social recovery, daily limits + whitelist addresses and access to the whole Loopring ecosystem.
Loopring Subgraph + Hackathon Bounties: The zkRollup data is now easily available as a subgraph. You will now be able to parse through zkRollup blocks dynamically.
Loopring L2 Liquidity Mining: Round 7
Be one of the 200 winners in Loopring & OpenOcean Trading Giveaway

Uniswap:

Uniswap v3 now on mainnet: Uniswap v3 is the most powerful version of the protocol yet, with Concentrated Liquidity offering unprecedented capital efficiency for liquidity providers, better execution for traders, and superior infrastructure at the heart of decentralized finance.
What is Uniswap v3?

Payments Networks

Raiden Network:

Update 169 of the Raiden Weekly is out. This issue covers:

Testing of the Bespin alpha release is going well
Light client is getting ready for mainnet and is seeing improvements to WebRTC
Scaling Ethereum hackathon is ending

Synthetix:

The Alnair release: On May 10th several new updates were added to the Synthetix protocol.
The Regor release: Two new equity Synths went live — sMSFT Synth and sCOIN Synth.
sCOIN & sMSFT pool incentives are now live on Balancer: Balancer pool incentives for sCOIN and sMSFT are now live.
The Synthetix Ambassadors governance portal is now live: The new Synthetix Ambassadors governance portal is now live, brought to you by the Synthetix grantsDAO.
sLINK has overtaken sBTC to become the second-largest volatile Synth in the Synthtetix debt pool. The largest volatile Synth remains sETH.
Synthetix Weekly — May 5th 2021:

Privacy protocols for DeFi

Ren protocol:

Going Live with RenVM v0.4: This article will provide an overview of the upgrades taking place as part of the release of RenVM Mainnet V.04. As part of the RenVM v0.4 upgrade, the team will be upgrading the Ethereum contracts for BTC, BCH, and ZEC on Ethereum. The new version is the same as those that have been running smoothly in production for other assets/chains for several months.
April Development Update
Ren Ecosystem Update: April 2021
Value DeFi Integrates RenVM: The First RenVM Integration on Binance Smart Chain

More updates

MetaMask crosses 5 million monthly active users: In the past 6 months, MetaMask has grown 5x, and is now used by more than 5 million users every month.
VanEck files for an Ethereum exchange-traded fund: Exchange-traded fund (ETF) startup VanEck has filed for an ether-based ETF, public records show. The company, which currently has a proposed bitcoin ETF under review by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed an ether ETF on Friday that would allow retail and institutional traders to gain exposure to the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap without requiring them to directly invest in it.
Polygon announces DeFi fund: The $150 million fund which will be focused on making DeFi more accessible and cost-effective to bring the next million users to DeFi.
PoolTogether launches on Polygon: The first Aave powered no loss prize pool is live on Polygon with $100,000 of MATIC rewards in the first 35 days.
The Graph mainnet migration update: The first 10 subgraphs migrated from The Graph’s hosted service to mainnet this wek including Gnosis, mStable, UMA and more.
Celer and StarkWare partner up: Users can seamlessly use both OP rollup and ZK rollup for diversified DeFi use cases. Coming this summer.
Alpha Grants Program announced: Alpha Grants Program is a program in which Alpha Finance core development team will give grants to Alpha Builders, well-organized development teams and individuals with a proven track record of building in DeFi who want to contribute to building the Alpha ecosystem.
B.Protocol governance launched: The B.Protocol community proposed to launch the BPRO token and give it control over the protocol (currently the protocol is under the control of the user Score, and thus users have to hand it over with an onchain vote).
ParaSwap 4 now live: With this update ParaSwap is now 10% cheaper than Uniswap (gas-wise), a new gas token has been introduced, a new algorithm has been launched and more.
Sudoswap v2 now live: New features include an upgraded swap mechanism with unlimited combination trading, order expiration dates and more.
Introducing zkDAI: zk.money from Aztec now supports private, scalable DAI transactions and to celebrate the launch, users can shield and send zkDAI for free for the next 7 days (up to a total of 1000 DAI txns).
Hashflow announced: Hashflow is a decentralized exchange that lets users trade trustlessly with crypto’s top market makers. It allows for better prices, no slippage, and rock-bottom gas fees.
Dopex announced: Dopex is a decentralized options exchange that aims to address all of the issues with the existing options protocols within DeFi.
Splits introduced: Splits are a way to route ETH continuously to an unlimited number of Ethereum addresses, according to a set of percentage allocations.
Notional Finance raises $10 million: Notional Finance closed a $10 million Series A round from Pantera, ParaFi Capital, 1Confirmation, Spartan Group, Nascent, and other big names following a seed round from Coinbase Ventures.