MakerDAO Dominance Approaching 50%, 0x's Asset Swapper, Guesser's DeFi Prediction Market

Good morning defiers! This is what’s going on in decentralized finance,

• MakerDAO dominance continues to slide
• 0x releases Asset Swapper to automate finance
• You can now bet on total value locked trends on Guesser

MakerDAO DeFi Dominance is Approaching 50%

MakerDAO’s dominance among decentralized finance protocols is about to drop below 50 percent for the first time ever.

Total ether deposited in MakerDAO is at 56 percent of total value locked in DeFi, according to DeFi Pulse, down from about 90 percent of the space at the start of the year. Reasons to explain this:

• MakerDAO interest rates for ether-backed Dai loans rose to 20.5 percent from 9.2 percent at the start of the year. The system is trying to incentivize users to close out loans and diminish Dai supply to keep the 1-to-1 peg with the dollar, which has been working
• Rising competition from other lending platforms, especially Compound, which has been beating Maker in loan origination since July. Of note: Maker is slipping to third place in loan origination so far in August, after Compound and dYdX

It will be interesting to see the impact of multi-collateral Dai. Maybe once MakerDAO adds the ability to use multiple tokens as collateral (not just ETH), its dominance will start to pick up again.

0x Releases Asset Swapper to Further Automate DeFi

Decentralized exchange protocol 0x launched Asset Swapper, a tool that aims to provide an easy way for smart contracts to swap Ethereum-based tokens at the best prices, leveraging 0x liquidity. This sounds complicated, but the basic goal is reducing the number of steps users have to take within different dapps, and leave those actions to a computer program.

This is the type of thing that allows DeFi platforms to do what traditional financial apps can’t, and also that makes the overall DeFi experience “magical” for users. These are examples of how this tool is already working:

• dYdX integrated with 0x so its users can trade on margin with a single transaction, as 0x smart contracts build that leveraged position in the background. For the user it’s just “push button, get leverage.”
• Humingbot’s trading bots use 0x liquidity to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities across centralized and decentralized exchanges and atomically swap tokens
• DeFi Saver uses 0x to reduce the number of steps involved in closing a MakerDAO CDP, and abstracts away the use of MKR by deploying contracts that swap ETH or DAI for MKR when topping up positions.

It’s likely that we’ll start to see more uses pop up as teams in different dapps start to experiment, which brings us to the “money legos” meme becoming increasingly popular. Open source software and an active developer community like Ethereum’s have resulted in a network of applications building on top of each other, using the pieces they’re finding useful, and growing together.

Guesser Creates DeFi-Based Prediction Market

Guesser, an interface for prediction market protocol Augur, is launching a weekly market on the amount of ETH locked in DeFi, as shown on DeFiPulse. That means haters will now be able to short DeFi growth –but they’ll have to use DeFi to do it.

The current market is “Will the Total Value Locked (ETH) in DeFi be between 2.4M and 2.7M on September 1st?” 60 percent is voting yes, with a liquidity of about $1,800, as of last night.

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