Hello dear Kyberians!
Welcome to another action-packed ecosystem report as we kick off the year with a bang. Yes, we had our best monthly volume since mainnet launch, and yes, we reached the half a billion dollars volume milestone, but we have a long way to go yet, mainstream adoption is still far off, and that’s why we’re heads down working non-stop on our next milestones.
Our preparations for Katalyst carry on full-steam with various teams around the world working on different aspects of this Katalyst vision. In the next few months we’ll be reaching out to you to provide you with more info on how everything will work and how you can participate from day 1. Stay tuned!
Kyber Network Stats
What a way to start the year, highest unique number of addresses, highest first time addresses, highest ETH and USD volumes, and highest total number of trades in a single month! We couldn’t have asked for better validation of our direction as we hit 2020 running. Thank you for using Kyber!
With activity across Kyber reaching all time highs, many integrations saw equally strong growth with Fulcrum and MyEtherWallet both reaching over 250% month-on-month growth:
KyberSwap’s Geographic Distribution
After a long absence, we thought we’d bring back a metric to refresh our memories on KyerSwap’s geographic data. From the charts below, we can see that KyberSwap users come from a very diverse range of countries across the globe with users from more than 100 countries trading on KyberSwap in the last 90 days.
37% of users come from Europe, 35% from North America, 17% from Asia, 5% from Oceania, 3% from Africa, and 3% from South America. The US makes up the single largest country and accounts for just under a third of KyberSwap’s volume:
Kyber DeFi Updates
DeFi dapps saw their volumes double from $7.8M to $15.5M although Fulcrum’s explosive growth accounts for a large portion of this increase:
New DApp Integrations
Sablier
One of crypto’s main value propositions is its programmable money aspect and nothing exemplifies this better than Sablier. Sablier is an Ethereum dapp that allows for DAI, WBTC, and other tokens to be streamed to Ethereum addresses incrementally over time.
For example, a company can stream an employee’s salary over the period of a month with the employee able to withdraw any accumulated amount whenever he or she wants instead of having to wait until the end of the month.
We expect Sablier to act as a decentralized primitive for value streaming within the Ethereum ecosystem and for many use cases to flourish around it. Kyber does its part to reduce user friction by allowing Sablier users to quickly convert any ERC20 in their wallets into one of the streamable ERC20s supported by Sablier.
0x
The dex aggregator space keeps expanding! 0x announced its pivot towards a “liquidity API powering DeFi” essentially meaning like Dex.Ag and 1inch.exchange, it will be accessing liquidity from Kyber, Oasis and Uniswap and providing it downstream.
We should point out though that unlike Kyber which doesn’t charge protocol fees for liquidity it sources from Uniswap and Oasis, 0x charges its own protocol fee on top of these dexs’ own fees, making it slightly more expensive for end users to take 0x API liquidity all other things being equal.
rTrees
Crypto is so empowering that simply hodling can result in actual real forests! rTrees, based on rDAI directs interest received by lending DAI on Compound towards planting forests through the Trees for the Future organization. Locking up just 17 DAI on rTrees leads to 10 trees planted per year. We’re looking forward to a nice picnic in our very own Kyber Forest one day in the future.
Wallets
Wallets on Kyber also had an impressive January with an 132% volume increase in USD terms, and 114% increase in ETH terms over December. MyEtherWallet achieved an impressive $8.5M volume, by far the highest a wallet has ever achieved on Kyber (and higher than some dex’s total monthly volumes!)
Reserve and Token Metrics
New Tokens
January saw 4 new tokens added to Kyber Network:
Ekon Gold [EKG] — EKG is digital gold 100% backed by physical gold with 1 EKG equaling 1 gram of real gold. Announcement
Global Digital Content [GDC] — GDC is a utility token within Rankingball, an e-sports gaming contents service. Announcement
Aragon [ANT] — ANT is the governance token of the Aragon Network. ANT can also be staked to participate in the Aragon Court. Announcement
Ampleforth [AMPL] — AMPL is a ‘commodity-money’, like Bitcoin or gold, but with near-perfect supply elasticity, like fiat. Announcement
All four tokens above will be serviced by Automated Price Reserves maintained by the respective teams.
Reserve Metrics
Reserves on Kyber saw another stellar month with increased USD volumes across all fed price reserves, dex bridges, and automated price reserves (SNX proving the only exception after its strong December volume):
Token Volumes
The growth of the DeFi space has increased the appetite for stablecoins that can be used for borrowing and lending and Kyber itself has seen an increase in demand for DAI, USDT, USDC and other stablecoins. 7 stablecoins now account for 60% of Kyber’s trading volume with DAI+SAI/ETH making up 38% of all volume.
KyberWorld
Kyber in the media
With 2019 behind us, many publications took this opportunity to look back at the year and assess just how far we’ve come in the Ethereum space. Unsurprisingly given last year’s results, Kyber was extensively featured in many of these reports.
Binance’s 2019 DeFi report featured Kyber as “the most used project in DeFi, with a total of 35,570 unique users in 2019”
DappRadar’s 2019 dapp Industry Review reported Kyber as the most popular liquidity provider with over 600 unique wallets per day.
Dapp.com featured Kyber in its Best Ethereum Dapps list
DeFi Rate talked about Kyber’s surge in integrations and volumes
TokenInsight described Kyber as the best performing dex.
Flipside Crypto added Kyber to its fundamentals-based top FCAS 25 list
Our Network highlighted Kyber’s impressive growth metrics (data contributed by Kyber)
Podcast — If you listen to podcasts, you can catch my interview on Samuel McCulloch’s great End of the Chain podcast. We talked about how Kyber has become such a vital liquidity provider for DeFi and how it acts as the oil in the DeFi engine, what we have planned for 2020 and bounced off ideas on what crypto adoption looks like in the next 10 to 20 years. Link
Youtube — If you’re more into videos, we have a great video from DeFi Dude about the benefits Katalyst will bring to both stakeholders and Kyber Network as a whole, the mechanics of it, and how the new governance model enables all this:
Kyber Upcoming Events
EthDenver —It’s happening! We’re heading back to EthDenver. We’ll be sponsoring EthDenver between the 14th and 16th of February. We have $5k worth of bounties up for grab and plenty of cool Kyber swag to give out at our booth. We’ll also be participating on panels, giving a workshop on integrating Kyber and participating in the world’s first large-scale event DAO. You can read more here.
End of February and beginning of March we’ll also be at EthLondon and EthCC Paris.
London has one of the largest Ethereum communities in the world (and host of the largest Ethereum meetup!). It’s also where many popular teams like Aave, Argent, Monolith and others are based and we highly look forward to attending this first EthGlobal hackathon in London.
EthCC is another fan favourite conference and brings together a very high concentration of Ethereum minds into one place. And of course, tickets to the conference can be bought at discount with any ERC20 you want thanks to the Kyber & Unlock Protocol integration.
Lastly, it was our pleasure to meet so many of you in Singapore at the Scaling DeFi in 2020 event we co-hosted with Synthetix and Ren Protocol. We got to hear about the state of DeFi, what Katalyst means for Kyber, Synthetix’s 2020 roadmap, and how Ren enables inter-blockchain liquidity.
Conclusion
And there you have it dear readers, another month has passed by in a flash. Every passing month also means we are that much closer to Katalyst and we can start to feel the excitement gradually ratcheting up within our communities and across our offices. Please join our Kyber Network Official Discord server if you haven’t already done so to participate in discussions and brainstorming around all aspects of Katalyst, we love to hear from you.
Until then, see you and we hope you all stay safe from the Coronavirus!
January Photo Album
Kyber Ecosystem Report #11 was originally published in Kyber Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
