StakerDAO Scouts
July 2020
Proof of Stake:
This month in the PoS space, we saw two high-profile private token sales. The first was Avalanche, which raised $42mn in a little over 4 hours. The second was by Polkadot and the project raised $43mn over about 3 days. These raises signal that despite the monopoly Ethereum holds today, investors are looking at potential competitors. This is furthered by Alameda/FTX, which announced a ‘decentralized Bitmex’ type of entity named Project Serum. Project Serum raised at a whopping $750mn valuation, but to their credit, Alameda/FTX have demonstrated a strong ability to execute.
Governance:
The most interesting DeFi project to emerge this month was YFI. YFI had no pre-mine, no sale, and was available to those liquidity mining on Curve and Balancer. The project reminded investors of Bitcoin, but launched a bit more hastily. It currently trades at a $129mn market cap. In other news, Aave released further details about their new governance token and Synthetix moved more toward decentralization through the dissolution of their Foundation and the creation of 3 DAOs to govern the protocol.
Traditional Finance:
The best news outside of the world of crypto is that all nationally chartered US Banks can now offer custodial services for crypto. Grayscale also had record inflows into their products in Q2 2020 with Bitcoin receiving +$750mn in inflows and Ethereum receiving $135mn.
