🪄 How to Get Your Future Yield Now With Alchemix
Hello Defiers! Here’s what we’re covering today,
- New weekly series! Defiant Degens, by DeFiDad. This week we cover, how to yield farm on Alchemix
- PancakeSwap is now beating Uniswap on total value locked and trading volume
- DeFi is becoming a consumer product
- B20 NFT bundle buyout period is now live
and more :)
Also, ICYM: The Defiant announced its first funding round yesterday!
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🙌 Together with:
- Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance
- Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/!
- Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi
- Aave, an open source and non-custodial liquidity protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets.
📺 Quick Take: Cross Asset Swap
📺 Tutorial: How to Bridge Assets From Ethereum to Polygon
DEFIANT DEGENS BY DEFIDAD
🪄 How to Get Your Future Yield Now With Alchemix
We will be hosting a weekly tutorial on the most compelling opportunities to consider yield farming, written by our friend DeFi Dad, an advisor to the Defiant and the Chief DeFi Officer of Zapper. The goal is to expose more Defiant readers to new DeFi applications and their associated liquidity mining programs.
Background on Protocol: In TradFi, investors use interest and dividends as a source of income. However, these payments are usually quarterly at best. Alchemix is a newer DeFi protocol that flips this concept on its head by providing the ability to get your future yield now. Alchemix vaults act as the hub to generate yield advances in the form of a synthetic derivative called alUSD pegged to $1.
Having launched in February, Alchemix already boasts $1.17B in TVL. With Alchemix, you can deposit DAI and borrow up to 50% of the deposited amount of DAI at a 1:1 ratio, by minting alUSD. The deposited DAI is then deployed to Yearn vaults to earn yield and continuously pay back the vault owner’s debt while the vault owner can choose to use the alUSD for personal expenses, farming, or whatever they want!
TLDR
- Alchemix enables borrowing from future yield in the form of dollar-pegged alUSD.
- Alchemix automates paying back loans with the yield earned from deposited DAI. So as the protocol pays down your debt, you can withdraw more DAI collateral unless you choose to pay back the alUSD sooner.
- Vaults are not liquidatable by “keepers” based on a collateralization ratio like with Maker, Aave, Compound, or Reflexer. The owner of an Alchemix vault can choose to liquidate part of their collateral to repay the loan, allowing them to withdraw whatever is remaining, but there’s no liquidation to enforce maintaining a specific loan-to-collateral ratio.
- Alchemix is governed by the ALCX token.
👉 READ THE FULL TUTORIAL HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈
ALT-DEFI
🥞 PancakeSwap Total Value Locked Overtakes Uniswap’s
TLDR PancakeSwap, a Binance Smart Chain automated market maker, surpassed Uniswap’s total value locked for the first time yesterday hitting $7.87B, a mark $100M higher than the Ethereum AMM. That makes the BSC-based AMM the largest by assets locked and daily trading volume, which has been over $1B for seven days straight now.
GROWTH PancakeSwap’s TVL is more than 53 times larger than it was three months ago when the AMM had only $146M locked in its protocol.
CAVEAT PancakeSwap’s growth comes with caveats. Its native blockchain, BSC, uses a Proof-of-Staked-Authority (PoSA) model which limits its validator set to 21 block producers. Fewer nodes allow BSC to offer low gas fees, which have drawn many new users into the chain’s financial ecosystem, even though Binance sacrificed decentralization by making validator participation a permissioned process, while BSC governance depends on Binance itself.
TOKENS At $26, PancakeSwap’s token, CAKE, is nearly 49 times higher than it was three months ago. The pace of growth roughly matches the protocol’s TVL growth (53 times larger) over the last three months, while Uniswap’s UNI token price has grown by a magnitude of over six over the same period to $36, while its TVL has tripled.
👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈
MAINSTREAM WATCH
🤩 DeFi is Becoming a Consumer Product
TLDR DeFi is catching the attention of the mainstream consumer, with more apps than ever launching with the end consumer in mind.
BY THE NUMBERS In the last week alone, 21 DeFi projects w-re launched on Product Hunt, a site that attracts 5M enthusiasts to discover and test new product launches. Since 2017, the industry averages 58 DeFi companies launched a year, in the last 7 days, about 20% of a year’s worth of companies were launched. The NFT Hack hackathon had 178 NFT projects launched in 3 days.
👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈
NFT BOOM
✨ Buyout Period for Top-Notch NFT Bundle B20 is Live
TLDR The buyout contract for the B20 NFT bundle is live, meaning that 20 single-edition Beeple NFTs are back on the market in a winner-takes-all lot.
WHAT’S B20 B20 bundle is a collection of ultra-rare NFTs including 20 one-of-one Beeples, a 3LAU soundscape, and prime real estate in Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space. This bundle backs the B20 token, which was conceived by investor and B.20 project creator Metakovan of the Metapurse fund as a way for anyone to own a stake in the high-end NFT art world.
LOGISTICS The buyout clause is a smart contract feature that allows anyone who holds at least 5% of B20’s total 10M token supply to initiate an auction to buy the entire NFT bundle. The winning bidder would gain direct ownership of all the NFTs in the bundle, along with the ability to separate them.
👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈
FUNDING ROUND
💰 Step Finance Raises $2M in Round Led by Alameda
TLDR Step Finance, a Solana app which aggregates users’ DeFi activities across the blockchain’s open finance ecosystem has raised $2M in a round led by Alameda Research, Three Comma Capital and others.
BIGGER PICTURE Step’s funding shows that the Solana ecosystem is mature enough that users need their DeFi activities aggregated. Dashboards like Zapper and Zerion have been instrumental in making DeFi manageable to Ethereum users by shipping features which allow users to take liquidity provider positions and deposit into yield aggregator protocols with one-click. Step aims to do the same for Solana. Zapper and Zerion received 3.4M and 1.8M visits respectively in March.
👉 READ THE FULL STORY HERE, IN THEDEFIANT.IO 👈
🔗 ConsenSys Raises $65M From JPM, Mastercard, and Others: Decrypt
“ConsenSys, the Brooklyn-based Ethereum software developer and incubator, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $65 million in funding from investors including JP Morgan, UBS, Mastercard, and leading crypto companies. It is the first external funding round ConsenSys has ever done,” Decrypt reported.
🔗 DeFi mutual fund Sheesha Finance raises $9.4M: Cointelegraph
“Sheesha Finance, a decentralized finance mutual fund based in the United Arab Emirates, has raised $9.44 million over a two-week token sale — underscoring heightened investor demand for DeFi applications,” Cointelegraph reported.
🔗 Ether Freakers Decentralized Game
“We created the final auto-generative art algorithm for 8 distinct species of Freakers. The algorithm generates a unique avatar for every Freaker, which not only looks cool, but depicts its exact attributes and abilities within the game.
It’s a game that can and will only ever be played once. The game has already begun, and it will last as long as Ethereum mainnet exists. Some players are winning, and others are losing, but anyone can play, and it’s never too late to start.”
✊ Head to THEDEFIANT.IO for more DeFi news 📰
🧑💻 ✍️ Stories in this newsletter were written by Owen Fernau, Dan Kahan, DeFiDad and Sydney Lai, and edited by Camila Russo. Videos were produced by Robin Schmidt and Alp Gasimov. Podcast was led by Camila, edited by Alp.
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 ($10/mo, $100/yr).
