🇸🇻 Did El Salvador Pick the Wrong Coin?

Hello Defiers! Here’s what we are covering today…

News:

• El Salvador Adopts Bitcoin But a Stablecoin May Have Worked Better
• Holaswap Enters Murky Waters After Challenging Uniswap License
• Stablecoins Prove Their Worth During Crypto’s Slide

Research:

• Not All DEXs are Created Equal: Here’s the Math

and more ;)

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• Kyber DMM, an automated market maker which prioritizes permissionless liquidity contribution and high capital efficiency

🦄 Holaswap Enters Murky Waters After Challenging Uniswap License

TLDR DeFi’s most well-known proprietary license is getting put to the test. A new project, Holaswap, has forked Uniswap’s V3, despite a license theoretically protecting decentralized exchange’s code from use in production settings.

TEST t’s the first major test of Uniswap’s license. The team deployed it to protect their code and encourage the Uniswap community “to be the first to build an ecosystem around the Uniswap v3 Core codebase.”

MASSIVE On Jun. 7, Uniswap V3 facilitated $1.24B in trades, more than 100,000 times more value than Holaswap. Holaswap launched a week ago, so the massive discrepancy between the two may change. Indeed, the forked exchange’s volume is over 29 times higher than it was two days ago.

👉 THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

📈 Stablecoins Prove Their Worth During Crypto’s Slide

TLDR If a long bear market is truly beginning in cryptocurrencies, then be thankful for stablecoins. With the Defi Pulse Index (DPI) down 40% on the month and the overall crypto market losing a third of its market value, the stablecoin supply has continued to march upward.

TWICE THE LEVEL Stablecoin supply grew 21% in the last 30 days to $69.92B, according to DeBank. That’s 4.56% of the market capitalization of the entire crypto space, almost twice the level one month ago.

SO WHAT Zooming out to a three month span, stablecoin growth has been steady even as benchmarks like DPI and ETH bounced around. Growth from Apr. 8 to May 8 was 26.23%, with the previous month hitting 20.54%

👉 THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

👀 El Salvador Adopts Bitcoin But a Stablecoin May Have Worked Better

TLDR Ever since El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele activated his laser eyes and made Bitcoin the nation’s legal tender this week, crypto communities have been gushing about this latest milestone. But in his bid to provide his citizens with more financial freedom, did Bukele pick the wrong token?

JUST THE TICKET Stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that peg their value to external assets such as fiat currencies — have far less volatility than Bitcoin, plus they permit users to tap an ever-growing list of financial applications that help people manage and grow their assets. If the goal is to help Salvadorans, 70% of whom don’t have bank accounts, get vested in the financial system then these staid cousins of the racier Bitcoin might be just the ticket.

DEFI LENDING For example, users can tap popular stablecoins like USDC and DAI, both of which aim to keep their value as close as possible to $1 USD. Even better, they can utilize DeFi lending protocols like Staked to generate annual return rates over 2% for their stablecoins, which trounces the average annual return of 0.06% offered by traditional fiat savings accounts.

👉 THE FULL STORY IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

🧮 Not All DEXs are Created Equal: Here’s the Math

Upshot: Uniswap and PancakeSwap have become household names in decentralized exchanges but a new crop of platforms are coming online with the promise of lower fees and more pricing transparency.

DEEPER DIVE With gas prices making headlines throughout the first half of 2021, it’s worth taking a deeper dive into what your options are when trading across DEXs (Decentralized Exchanges). DEXs aim to allow the same scale as centralized alternatives, but without a central layer of ownership to execute trades.

FIRST WAVE While Uniswap helped drive the first wave of DEX-mania, its popularity is waning. This is down to high gas fees, but also a number of competitors using aggregation or new lower fee networks to differentiate and draw users in. We’re going to explore some of the more popular instances of these DEXs, and look into some of the more compelling measures of each to compare them.

What is driving this change in the Decentralized Exchange space?

DEX Aggregators – DEX aggregators search liquidity from different DEXs and offer users better token swap rates than they could get on any single DEX. They are able to optimize slippage, swap fees and token prices – often delivering a better rate for users.

👉 THE FULL RESEARCH PIECE IN THE DEFIANT.IO 👈

🔗 Labs raises $314 million in new funding led by A16z and Polychain Capital: The Block

Solana Labs, the developer of the Solana blockchain, has raised $314.15 million in a private token sale round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Polychain Capital.

🔗 Curve releases algorithm for exchanging volatile assets is up: Tweet

The pool is already integrated with @1inchNetwork and arbitraged by few traders.

🧑‍💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Dan Kahan, Owen Fernau and Masha Prusso, and edited by Edward Robinson and Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.

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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, while free signups get only part of the content.Click here to pay with DAI (for $100/yr) or sub with fiat by clicking on the button above ($15/mo, $150/yr).