DeFi in Ether: Chicago DeFi Alliance launched, Nuo Exchange released, Augur v2 details published, Bancor Katana Pools and Zaps are live, Synthetix considers new liquidity incentives

Paradigm

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Paradigm

16 min readApr 15, 2020

Biweekly update on Ethereum DiFi ecosystem, 1st April — 15th April

TL;DR

Volt Capital, Jump Capital, CMT Trading and DRW Trading launched the Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA). Inaugural members of the alliance include TD Ameritrade, DV Trading, Arca, dYdX, and Compound.
Nuo launches gasless Nuo Exchange: The DeFi lending protocol expanded its product offering with a new DEX, allowing users to easily swap DeFi assets like DAI, KNC, SNX, and others.
The first thirteen Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) have been posted to the Forum. Read more about the MIPs below.
The March Set Community Update is now live: the team launched new Social Trader features, introduced their new TokenSets Ambassadors and launched LINK-based Sets.
Bancors’ Katana Pools are live: the first self-service portal for creating customizable AMM liquidity pools. Moreover, Bancor Zaps are here.
The Augur team shared some details around the Augur v2 deployment: v2 scheduled for June, v1 cutoff now May 15th, 2020. Augur App v1.16.11 released.
ConsenSys’ CodeFi released a new risk management tool for DeFi lending protocols. Users can now have a better understanding of how lending protocols stand relative to each other.
Exodus launches Compound integration.
Bacon Labs, the same team behind Betoken and Fantastic12, has released 88mph, an app that provides fixed-rate DAI interest.
One week into launch and Balancer has hit $500,000 in liquidity.
Avantgarde Finance has published v1.0 of MelonJS. This release is in the spirit of making the Melon protocol more easily accessible for dApp developers. Also, the Melon Café launched, an exclusive channel for Melon Managers to meet one another, discuss new feature priorities & interact with Melon Council DAO members on anything user-related
Nexus Mutual is proposing a sustainable revenue model for its non-profit Foundation. The proposal would re-allocate the 2.5% sell spread on NXM towards the core team.
0xpo videos are now out. Check out 0x most recent Developer Call to learn about meta transactions, 0x API updates, and the results of the ZEIP-76 vote.
The Gnosis Safe now supports gasless confirmations/rejections which means you don’t need to pay a transaction fee and you don’t need to wait for confirmations to be mined.
The Set team released new features for Social Traders on TokenSets, announced the deprecation of the Range Bound Sets and onboarded a new Social Trader (SW Capital). TokenSets breaks a new record with 22,900 ETH locked in Set Protocol.
Aave flirts with its previous ATHs as total value locked soars to $31M. The latest addition to their blog is a development update, highlighting what’s new for Aave: parameters updates, a history page, and some sweet new design features.
Dharma Announces work on a layer 2 solution: it has set out to build their own layer 2 system, based on the Optimistic Roll-Up scaling paradigm.
The Kyber team has been making good progress on Katalyst. In the latest post in Kyber blog, the team does a quick progress update, jump right into understanding some of the key design principles and mechanisms of the KyberDAO, including details on how staking, voting, and delegation works. Check it out!
The Loopring team completed a relayer upgrade. Moreover, Loopring Exchange has just released an improved UI that supports Wallet Connect.
Ethereum based DeFi project volumes increased 800% compared to 2019 Q1.
Coinbase USDC Bootstrap Fund invests in Uniswap and PoolTogether.
The Raiden Trust announced it’s first grant of 100k USD worth of RDN to PISA.
Zerion Acquires MyDeFi.
dPiggy, a no-loss crypto investing platform built on top of Compound and Uniswap, live on mainnet.
Dedge,a new DApp that allows you to swap both collateral and debt via Compound, introduced.
Atomic Loans raises $2.45 million to build native DeFi solution for Bitcoin.
Research: Compound reaches $1.5B in total deposits.
DEX monthly volumes reach new all-time highs in March.
DeFi Rate has compiled a shortlist of the best accounts on Twitter.
DeFi Market Cap is live.

Debt

Aave:

Development Update: New Features for Aave: The latest addition to the Aave blog is a development update, highlighting what’s new for Aave: parameters updates, a history page, and some sweet new design features.

Aave Ecosystem Grants: Grants will range in size between 500 aDai to 5,000 aDai and will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

— The status and progress of the team’s MVP (or previous projects).

— The execution capability of the team (or individual).

— The extent and use of Aave Protocol features.

— The benefit the project provides to Aave ecosystem participants (e.g. lenders, borrowers, LEND holders, etc).

— Potential for the project’s longevity and /or business viability.

— The efficiency of the capital / grant usage.

Compound:

Exodus Wallet Release, 88mph App Insights, and MetaCartel Virtual Hackathon:

Compete for Compound bounties in the Dragon Quest Hackathon:

MetaCartel’s latest virtual hackathon, Dragon Quest, is taking place throughout the month of April. In addition to competing for the main prize, developers can compete to win two Compound bounties:

750 DAI for the most original use of the cToken Borrow function
750 DAI for the most original use of the Community Governance contracts

To be considered for Compound bounties, hackathon projects must use the Compound smart contracts in a practical application, SDK or API.

Exodus Wallet launches Compound support:

Exodus is a desktop and mobile wallet that supports over 100 different cryptocurrencies. The team strives to remove the “geek requirement” and eliminate confusing steps when using cryptocurrency.

See their video for using cTokens.

88mph Launches:

Bacon Labs, the same team behind Betoken and Fantastic12, has released 88mph, an app that provides fixed-rate DAI interest. A user’s deposits are locked in 88mph’s pool for a minimum of 91 days. The DAI earns interest at a fixed-rate, instead of the varying interest rate like the DSR.

Dharma:

Dharma Announces work on a layer 2 solution: it has set out to build their own layer 2 system, based on the Optimistic Roll-Up scaling paradigm.

Maker:

A Guide to Dai Stats: To examine that data all in one place, there’s no better resource than daistats.com.

Executive Vote: Adjust the USDC, Sai and Dai Stability Fees: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

Raise the USDC Stability Fee from 12% to 16%
Raise the Sai Stability Fee from 8% to 8.5%
Raise the Dai Stability Fee from 0.5% to 1%
Note: This will set the DSR to 0.5%

The Executive Vote (FAQ) will continue until the number of votes surpass the total in favor of the previous Executive Vote. This is a continuous approval vote.

Top 10 Use Cases and Benefits of the Dai Stablecoin: Each day, people all over the world discover the top 10 use cases and benefits of MakerDAO’s Dai stablecoin. Join them to unlock money’s true potential.

The First 13 Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) To Further Decentralization of MakerDAO: The Maker Foundation introduced the first 13 Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) to the Maker community.

Governance Polls: Vault Compensation, IRV Ranked Choice Voting, Dai Stability Fee, and more — April 6, 2020: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system.

What Will Maker Governance Look Like After Complete Decentralization? The Maker Foundation continues its efforts to prepare the voting community to govern the Maker Protocol after complete decentralization.

Executive Vote: Adjust Multiple Risk Parameters: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

Making Maker: March 2020: Here at Maker, the month brought another problem: a plunge in the markets that eventually developed into an outright collapse over a 36-hour period. Human and system resilience were tested in the wake.

Beyond Holding MKR: The Responsibility of Decentralized MakerDAO Governance Voting: Over the next three months, the Maker Foundation and the community will engage in several important governance discussions around decentralization.

The Market Collapse of March 12–13, 2020: How It Impacted MakerDA: Nearly month ago weeks ago, the Maker Protocol and the Maker Governance community were tested by a severe downturn in the capital and crypto markets.

xDai:

The new Chainbeat integration with xDai makes dashboard creation super easy:

xDai as a dPOS chain. Related: Apple killing local storage frustrates Burner Wallet.

Nuo Network:

Nuo Launches Gasless Nuo Exchange: The DeFi lending protocol expanded its product offering with a new DEX, allowing users to easily swap DeFi assets like DAI, KNC, SNX, and others.

DeFi DEX packed with features including:

- Gasless transactions

- liquidity aggregation for the best prices

- Custom slippage preferences

The team has also reduced the minimum trade limit to 25 DAI:

Derivatives, Swaps and Prediction Markets

Augur:

Augur v2 Deployment Details: When v2 is deployed, all current token balances must be migrated to a new REP token contract. The team will soon be sharing details for exchanges and individuals to manage the migration process, so please hang tight.

Augur’s v2 contracts will be deployed to the Ethereum network and go live during the first weeks of June, pending finalization for v1 markets ending before the cut-off date, with the REP migration beginning on a similar timeline.

The bulk of the remaining engineering work for the initial v2 launch involves polishing the Augur UI, preparing for integration with the launch of Uniswap v2, and performance and end to end testing of the contracts on Mainnet.The Augur team is in communication with the Uniswap team and will gauge their launch situation to determine the best course forward.

At this time, they’ve decided to extend the v1 cutoff date until May 15th (12:00pm UTC). This allows users to continue to create markets through the UI while also budgeting a good deal of time between then and the anticipated deployment (to ensure resolution).

Further details on the deployment procedure and REP migration will be released over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, the bounty program for finding vulnerabilities in the contracts is live, and the team has recently announced bounties for finding vulnerabilities in market template logic. All feedback can be reported on Discord, HackerOne, or Github in their appropriate repository.

Augur App Release: v1.16.11

Gnosis:

Gnosis Safe Updates: The Gnosis Safe now supports gasless confirmations/rejections which means you don’t need to pay a transaction fee and you don’t need to wait for confirmations to be mined.

Fund Management

Melon:

MelonJS — release of version 1: Avantgarde Finance released the first version of MelonJS.

MelonJS is a convenient JavaScript interface to the Melon protocol smart contracts on Ethereum. Today’s release is in the spirit of making the Melon protocol more accessible for dApp developers.

The Melon Terminal is using MelonJS and it has been the main driver for defining the functionality of the new MelonJS.

What’s in it?

JavaScript methods to interact with all contracts in the Melon protocol
Written in modern TypeScript
Well documented (individual methods, but also example code)
Part of our initiative to make the Melon protocol more accessible
MelonJS is published as an NPM package @melonproject/melonjs

What can you do with it?

As a developer, you can write scripts and dApps to e.g.:

Set up a fund
Manage your funds
Write a trading bot

As an end user:

There is no need to use MelonJS directly, but you can go to the Melon Terminal, which is a nice interface to the Melon protocol

The Melon Café launched: an exclusive channel for Melon Managers to meet one another, discuss new feature priorities & interact with Melon Council DAO members on anything user-related:

Set Protocol:

Set Community Update #9 — March 2020:

- The team launched new Social Trader features

- Introduced their new TokenSets Ambassadors

- Launched LINK-based Sets

Deprecation of Range Bound Sets.

Andrew Wilkinson (Tradespot) — Set Social Trader AMA Series.

ICONOMI:

Learn from ICONOMI experts. Crypto Market happenings March 2020:

March was a paradise month for all the crypto traders who take advantage of the extreme volatility cryptocurrencies has to offer. Take a look at what the most popular headlines in the news were, and what the teams’ observations are.

Securities, Insurance and NFTs

Nexus Mutual:

Nexus Mutual is proposing a sustainable revenue model for its non-profit Foundation.

The proposal would re-allocate the 2.5% sell spread on NXM towards the core team.

Liquidity Relays

0x project:

Check out 0x most recent Developer Call to learn about meta transactions, 0x API updates, and the results of the ZEIP-76 vote:

1inch.exchange:

IdleDAI and IdleUSDc are now live on 1inchExchange:

Balancer:

One week into launch and Balancer has hit $500,000 in liquidity

Bancor:

User-Generated Liquidity Pools: New Self-Service Portal For Creating On-Chain AMMs: Automated market-maker liquidity pools have proven to be tremendously useful instruments for creating transparent, permissionless liquidity for tokens. As a result, there is now a growing need for user-facing tools that allow for the creation and customization of AMM liquidity pools.

The team announced Katana Pools, a self-service portal for creating liquidity pools with:

unlimited reserve tokens (any ERC20)
custom reserve weights
adjustable fees

Developed by Pritam Roy, Katana recently won 1st prize in the Sustain Web3 Gitcoin hackathon.

It is Beta software, so use it at your own risk. (Github).

Bancor Staking Rewards: This post introduces the concept of BNT Staking Rewards as a mechanism for incentivizing users to provide liquidity to Bancor.

Users who provide liquidity to Bancor, also known as “liquidity providers”, help the system flourish. More liquidity means Bancor can offer cheaper prices to traders and generate more trade volume and revenue.

With staking rewards, Bancor seeks to create an incentive for users to participate and contribute to the system by performing a specific action the system requires: providing liquidity.

Bancor Zaps:

You can now “zap” into a Bancor liquidity pool by buying its Pool Token on 1inch.exchange.
Zaps allow users to add liquidity to a Bancor pool in a single action with one ERC20 token that is automatically split across the pool’s reserves.
Zaps are not limited to funding 2-token pools with 50/50 weights. You can zap into a Bancor pool that contains any number of reserve tokens and is set with custom reserve weights (e.g., 80/20 or 60/20/20 pools).

Bancor Dynamic Reserve Ratio (DRR) Liquid Tokens: recently, the hot-from-the-oven Bancor Dynamic Reserve Liquid Tokens were launched on EOS mainnet by EOS Nation.

As a reminder, Bancor Liquid Tokens maintain a reserve in BNT (or the stablecoin USDB), and can be purchased directly from their smart contracts by end-users, meaning no need to rely on exchanges or third-parties for their liquidity. The Bancor Formula used in liquidity pools continuously adjusts the token price based on these real-time market dynamics. Until now, Bancor Liquid Tokens have maintained a constant ratio between their reserve and their market-cap, and price the token accordingly to keep this ratio constant.

Last week, the team introduced the next generation of Bancor Protocol’s capabilities: a Dynamic Reserve Ratio, or DRR. Simply put, this means that the reserve ratio can be altered algorithmically, rather than only held constant.

Read more>>>

Bancor is Live on Dune Analytics: The new Bancor Dashboard on Dune allows you to view key Bancor metrics on Ethereum including:

Total Network Volume
Total Network Fees
Fees Per Token
Number of Traders

Kyber:

KyberDAO: Staking and Voting Overview: KyberDAO considerations, KNC staking, voting, and claiming rewards. In this post, the team does a quick progress update, then jump right into understanding some of the key design principles and mechanisms of the KyberDAO, including details on how staking, voting, and delegation works. For those who wish to take a deeper dive into the technical details, they can refer to Kyber Beta staking documentation.

Kyber Ecosystem Report #13: The team has been making good progress on Katalyst. First round of smart contract audits are complete, they’re on-boarding staking partners, and making progress on UI/UX as launch date gets closer and closer. In on-chain news, they’ve had another record breaking month in terms of volumes, trades, and user numbers. And as always, the team has had new integrations, tokens, and reserves join the Kyber ecosystem over the last month.

Kyber Network Q1 2020 Recap:

BandProtocol (BAND) is now available on Kyber Network.

Loopring:

The team completed a relayer upgrade:

Moreover, Loopring Exchange has just released an improved UI that supports Wallet Connect.

Loopring’s zkSNARK Prover Optimizations: The team optimized libsnark and reduced Loopring’s total settlement cost to $0.000124 per trade or $124 per 1,000,000 trades. The prover cost is now just $0.000042 per trade or $42 per 1,000,000 trades, a 15x improvement compared to our previous proving costs.

Loopring Exchange Trading Competition Recap: From March 16th to March 31st, to further test the usability and performance of Loopring Exchange, they held a two-week trading competition and issued LRC rewards.

The total number of trades was 538,327, or an average of 33,645 trades per day. The maximum number of trades reached in a single day exceeded 80,000.

The total volume was $7,866,735 or an average of $491,670 per day. The highest volume reached in a single day exceeded $1.93 million.

Uniswap:

Coinbase USDC Bootstrap Fund invests in Uniswap and PoolTogether.

Payments Networks

Raiden Network:

The Raiden Trust announced it’s first grant of 100k USD worth of RDN to PISA:

Synthetix:

New Frontend Release Process: Information about Synthetix new process for frontend updates.

Synthetix.Exchange Discord + Trading Competition Round 4: All the details about our new Discord server and trading comp.

Use sAUD for payments with RelayPay: Learn how you can start using your sAUD.

SNX is now listed on Poloniex!: SNX listing on Poloniex

More Information on the new Equity Indices: Further details about the new equity index.

Other

Chicago DeFi Alliance Launched: A group of Chicago-based crypto trading shops is coming together to connect more closely with Open Finance (DeFi) projects.

Volt Capital, Jump Capital, CMT Trading and DRW Trading launched the Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA). The organization, announced late Tuesday in a blog post, seeks to bring together the Chicago-based trading firms and DeFi projects from the world.

Inaugural members of the alliance include TD Ameritrade, DV Trading, Arca, dYdX, and Compound.

The alliance aims to help DeFi projects understand the Chicago trading ecosystem, a major financial hub famous for its derivatives market. As DeFi projects look to bootstrap liquidity and onboard professional traders, CDA provides them a platform to communicate with trading firms, liquidity providers, and over-the-counter desks.

DeFi Trust Spectrum on Bankless: Different Ethereum applications require different amounts of trust, depending on how each app is designed. This episode discusses how to think and measure the trustlessness of each app, and where the humans and computers meet.

CodeFi Launches Inspect — A New DeFi Lending Risk Management Tool: ConsenSys’ CodeFi released a new risk management tool for DeFi lending protocols. Users can now have a better understanding of how lending protocols stand relative to each other.

Coinbase Adds Liquidity to Uniswap and PoolTogether: Coinbase has used their USDC Bootstrap Fund to add $1.1 million worth of USDC liquidity to both Uniswap and PoolTogether.

Zerion Acquires MyDeFi: The acquisition was formally accepted in January 2020 and involved a combination of cash and stock. MyDeFi’s founder, Baptiste, will continue providing his support and guidance to the Zerion team as they continue their work on MyDeFi.

Zerion Returns of DeFi vs HODLing Q1 2020 report is out:

Zerion Mobile App Gets an Upgrade.

dPiggy Live on Mainnet: dPiggy is a no-loss crypto investing platform built on top of Compound and Uniswap. It allows users to automatically direct interest earned to things like buying ETH or other tokens.

Introducing Dedge: Dedge is a new DApp created by the StudyDefi team that allows you to swap both collateral and debt via Compound. It does this by leveraging flash loans from Aave, token liquidity from Uniswap, and loan positions from Compound.

Atomic Loans Raises $2.45 Million to build native DeFi solution for Bitcoin: