This Week in DeFi – August 7th

Reading time: 8 min.   

To our DeFi Community,

Another week is in the books and the creative niches of DeFi are starting to explode.

What started as liquidity mining for DeFi protocols like Compound and Balancer has now turned into a full-on trend for other tokens to use to their advantage. At its core, the premise of rewarding users for value-added actions makes perfect sense. We’ve seen many projects reward LPs for DEX liquidity and this doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

At the fringes of DeFi is the rise of a new sub-sector called SoFi, short for social finance. More commonly known under the umbrella of “personal tokens”, what once was criticized as a vanity play is starting to grow and adapt to rising trends. Looking at Alex Masmej and his new ALEX Yield Round, LPs will share rewards for seeding Uniswap liquidity over the course of the next month.

This notion was quickly picked up by WhaleShark.Pro, offering similar incentives to WHALE LPs for his NFT-collateralized personal token. Creators like Brian Flynn are navigating new waters through the advent of JAMM – a personal token focused on growing his crypto-adoption based newsletter JammSessions. Now, before you write these off as fringe use cases, prominent Ethereum community members like Evan Van Ness are starting to get involved too. His newly launched EVAN token offers placements in his coveted Week in Ethereum newsletter, part of his wider ambition to monetize without putting up a paywall.

This rise of personal tokens is one which I’ve been watching closely for quite some time. While the space is still extremely early, it’s clear that savvy crypto-native creators are leaning into these new experiments by fusing governance with a strong catalyst to grow their brand. I decided to double down on this trend by launching the Personal Token Agency – a management project focused on community growth over capital metrics.

In the spirit of open finance, the ability for any creator to tokenize themselves or their brand and tie it to a specific mission is a premise that has far-reaching potential beyond the crypto rabbit hole.  As DeFi tooling continues to grow, it’s not impossible to envision a future in which a creator can open a Maker Vault against his or her reputation in the form of personal token collateral. With the advent of Aave’s Credit Delegation, we can even imagine a situation in which two parties open a credit line to snag a meeting with a top DeFi VC by buying some of their personal token (Cc: Jake Brukhman, Tom Schmidt).

Until then, we’ll keep a close eye on their developments to keep you in the loop on what’s actually working.

See you next Friday!

– Cooper

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We’d like to take this section to welcome our first exclusive sponsor Aave!

Aave is a leading DeFi lending protocol that recently unveiled it’s Aavenomics governance upgrade. Outside of migrating from LEND to AAVE, Aavenomics will feature a Safety Module that allows AAVE holders to stake as protection against protocol deficits. In tandem with pioneering new money markets for composable lending to unsecured loans through Credit Delegation, we’re keeping a close eye on how the protocol with $641M in AUM evolves.

Aave recently introduced their governance forum with a suite of discussions on how it’s newly introduced Aave Ecosystem Rewards will be allocated to staking and ecosystem incentives post-migration. If you fancy yourself to be a yield farmer, head on over on to the forum or get started with Aave lending today!

Visit Aave to lend and borrow over 20+ top DeFi tokens!

Interest Rates

DAI

  • Highest Yields: Bitfinex at 67.8% APY (not recommended) or Aave at 7.9% APY
  • Cheapest Loan: Maker at 0% for any collateral type!
  • MakerDAO Updates
    • Dai Savings Rate: 0.00%
    • Base Fee: 0.00%
    • ETH Stability Fee: 0.00%
    • USDC Stability Fee: 0.00%
    • WBTC Stability Fee: 0.00%
    • Updates: Base fee has been reduced to 0% for all asset types, dYdX oracle was also whitelisted!

USDC

  • Highest Yield: Nuo at 12.0% or BlockFi at 8.6% APY
  • Cheapest Loan: Aave at 3.0% APY

Find more lending & borrowing rates on our Rates page! 

 

Uniswap closes $11M Series A

The leading DEX closed $11M Series A from leading investors as Uniswap experiences over $1.5B in July alone.

Aave showcases credit delegation

Rising money markets protocol Aave showcases credit delegation with $500K unsecured line of credit to DeversiFi

Set Protocol shares v2 details

DeFi asset management protocol shared details for the upcoming v2 upgrade, including a yield farming mechanism!

dYdX releases ETH perpetual

Decentralized margin exchange released the ETH-USD perpetual contracts collateralized by ETH.

Alex Masmej launches $ALEX liquidity mining 

Alex Masmej – Rocket NFT founder and creator of personal token $ALEX – is launching Uniswap liquidity incentives.

 

In Other News…

Stat Box

  • Total Value Locked: $4.42B
  • DeFi Market Cap: $7.8B
  • DEX 7 Day volume: $1.5B
  • DAI supply: 373.6M
  • Total DeFi users: 298,300

Bonus Reads

  • [Calvin Liu – Bankless] 8 things stopping CeFi from integrating DeFi 

  • [Spencer Noon – Our Network] Issue #33: Aave, Balancer, Compound, Set Protocol, and Lending Rates (DFR Feature!)

  • [Kain Warick – Synthetix] State of Synthetix (H2 2020)

  • [Evan Van Ness – Week in Ethereum] $EVAN is live on Balancer

  • [Ryan Watkins & Wilson Withiam – Messari] The Rise of DeFi on Cosmos (paid piece)

Thanks to our sponsor Aave

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 08.08.2020

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