Dencun On The Horizon: DeFi Week of April 30

Happy weekend Defiers! Here’s what we covered this week.

New technology captured headlines throughout the week, with Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko revealing core devs are already entering the “final stages of planning” the network’s next major upgrades, called Dencun.

Dencun will include proto-danksharding, which is tipped to dramatically reduce Layer 2 transactions fees by reducing the costs associated with storing transactions on-chain.

The week hosted the mainnet launch of the Sui blockchain, a heavily hyped Layer 1 network from former Meta employees. Curve deployed its native crvUSD stablecoin deployment on Ethereum, prompting degens to ape $2M into the project before a user interface was even live.

Degens also wreaked havoc on Aave and Compound, sending lending rates for TUSD into triple-digits after racing to capitalize on the stablecoin briefly tagging heights of $1.20 on Binance.

New platforms continue to proliferate for NFT traders, with Blur, OpenSea’s upstart competitor, launching an NFT lending protocol that allows users to ape into non-fungibles on lay-by. Sotheby’s, the 279-year-old auction house, also launched Sotheby’s Metaverse, a new peer-to-peer NFT marketplace. The news indicates influential players in the art world are betting the prolonged NFT downtrend will eventually subside and pave the way for a resurgence in non-fungibles.

Bitcoin is enjoying a surge in activity after continuing to embrace Ethereum-inspired tech, with the network’s new BRC-20 token standard driving Bitcoin’s daily transaction count into new all-time highs. The move follows the launch of Ordinals, a protocol allowing users to mint NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, which has garnered significant adoption since launching in January.

And in this week’s podcast, Nader Dabit of Aave and Lens — Aave’s decentralized social media protocol. Nader gave us a sneak peek at what Lens is currently working on, including gasless transactions.

Enjoy!