Recap: DeFi Week of Nov. 30 🦄 The Defiant

Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.

Summing up the past week: The biggest news this week for the Ethereum ecosystem was the successful launch of the first phase in the transition to ETH2, the proof-of-stake chain. Anyone can become a validator in the network by depositing ETH in multiples of 32, and earn ETH rewards in exchange. Another consequence for crypto traders is that we will start to see many versions of staked ETH derivatives being traded on exchanges. The other news that dominated the week was a proposal by US lawmakers, which would make issuing and transacting with stablecoins require a banking license. This has the potential to upend much of DeFi activity and make even running an Ethreum node illegal. It also reveals how deeply regulators misunderstand open source and distributed networks.

Yearn Finance continued with its “merger” spree. Check out the related video on The Defiant’s YouTube channel; a rap on how Andre Cronje, aka Dr. Dre, got one of the recently hacked DeFi projects out of a “pickle” with a partnership. Aave released its V2, with flash-loan-powered innovations meant to make DeFi more seamless. Also, the latest and largest round of Gitcoin grants started. In this week’s podcast, we spoke with EG Galano, the cofounder of Infura, about running Etheruem nodes, claims of centralization in the Ethereum network, and how this DeFi and crypto rally is different from 2017. And there’s even more 🙂

💗 You Can Contribute to The Defiant’s Gitcoin Grant Here: Huge thanks to the 46 contributors so far. Your support for high-quality, DeFi-focused journalism makes a huge difference.

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🙌 Together with Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance, 1inch.exchange v2, which aims to provide the best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes across all leading DEXes, and DeversiFi’s Nectar Beehive V1, which allows traders to provide liquidity & earn Nectar ($NEC) tokens.

Interview

“This Boom Feels Organic; Traffic’s Not Coming Out of The Blue Like With ICOs in 2017:” Infura’s EG Galano

In this week’s episode I speak with E.G. Galano, cofounder of Infura, an infrastructure provider for Ethereum and other blockchains. Many Ethereum applications depend on Infura to run their nodes, and it became apparent why that’s problematic recently, when the service provider was having trouble connecting to the Ethereum blockchain, causing much of DeFi to break down. E.G. dives into the recent outage; he goes into what went wrong and what Infrua is doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. He also talks about DeFi from the backstage perspective of an infrastructure provider, and what he says might get you feeling even more bullish on this space.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

📺 Be ready to get your mind blown by the latest Defiant video on Pickle

The Defiant’s video mastermind Robin Schmidt already did the first DeFi ballad. You’ll have to see the first-ever DeFi rap, ft. Simon Wan and Cooper Turley.

Friday

Dives

• YFI Holders Have Strong Hands and Bought the Dip: The last time YFI was around $29,500 less than 50% of holders were in the money, or profiting from their positions. This percentage has grown significantly to approximately 73%, suggesting that new holders were able to buy at lower prices while some existing ones decreased their average cost.

• US Regulators Propose Stablecoin Crack Down With STABLE Act: A new bill by US lawmakers has DeFi up in arms after proposing that all stablecoin issuers need to obtain a bank charter, which would potentially make much of DeFi trading and even running an Ethereum node, illegal. 

Bytes

• Gitcoin’s Biggest Ever Round of Grants Kicks Off: Gitcoin’s eighth round of grants for Ethereum-based public goods and projects kicked off this week with a matching pool of $1M, the largest ever. Funds will be distributed across six categories: Infrastructure, Liftoff, Community, Dapps, East Asia and Apollo.

• Initial ETH2 Network Participation is Still Fairly Centralized: Bison Trails: The initial network participation is still fairly centralized among a small number of large depositors, Bison Trails reported.

Wednesday

Dives

• Wall Street’s ETH Gateway is Getting Ahead of Itself Again: Grayscale’s ether-based investment vehicle ETHE is surging above ETH itself as institutional appetite for crypto increases.

Bytes

• Aave Aims for a Seamless DeFi With Flash Loan-Driven V2: Aave, the third-largest DeFi lending protocol by assets, today unveiled its V2 revamp, where it leverages flash loans to make DeFi more seamless and composable.

• Nexus Mutual Offers Cover on Centralized Exchanges: Cryptocurrency investors are now able to buy insurance on centralized exchange deposits via Nexus Mutual.

•  A Breakdown of Yearn Finance’s Latest Mergers:

  SushiSwap is Largest Target in Yearn Merger Wave

  Yearn Partners with Akropolis in Move for Institutional DeFi

  Yearn Merges With Cover to Make DeFi Safer

Tuesday

Dives

• Genesis Block Signals There’s No Stopping Ethereum Now: The first phase, or Phase 0, in the transition to Ethereum 2.0/ aka Eth2.0/ aka Serenity successfully launched today.

• Crypto is About to Get Many Flavors of Staked ETH Tokens: Coinbase and Binance plan to enable staking on Ethereum’s just-launched Beacon chain, and trading of their own ETH2 wrappers. The move is a sign that becoming an Ethereum validator is increasingly easy, and that soon many such tokenized versions of staked ETH will start circling the crypto market.

Bytes

• Yearn Merges With Three DeFi Projects in Four Days: Yearn Finance has partnered or merged with at least six different DeFi projects, three of which have been announced in just in the past four days.

• Curve Distributed Protocol Fees to veCRV Holders: Curve passed a unanimous governance vote to distribute $3M worth of protocol fees to CRV holders staked into the CurveDAO over the weekend.

Links

• Facebook-Backed Crypto Group Libra Changes Name to Diem Network: Bloomberg

• ETH 2.0: The Next Evolution of the Cryptoeconomy: Messari Report

💜Community Love💜

Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.

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About the founder and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.

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