Recap: DeFi Week of April 6 🦄

Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend. Jag sameaj and happy easter if you celebrate!

This past week has been especially great for The Defiant: We launched The Defiant podcast to host the audios of our weekly exclusive interviews. The Gitcoin Grants round concluded and it was incredibly rewarding to see over 100 contributors to keep growing and improving this content platform. It’s with the same goal of continuing to build up The Defiant, that we started taking sponsors. All sponsors included will keep adding value to readers, highlighting projects that users and builders of open finance can benefit from.

On the news side: These past seven days yielded many examples of how open finance is already revolutionizing money; PieDAO’s issued BTC++, its first ETF-like fund, The LAO, which wants to build a permissionless VC, announced its launch date, an Etherean announced the sale of its own personal token, and dPiggy released a no-loss investment platform. MakerDAO’s MKR holders voted to compensate borrowers who holders who lost all their collateral in the March 12 market crash. Rune Christensen spoke about the crisis in an interview, which was published as The Defiant’s first podcast episode. Ganesh Swami of Covalent crunched numbers for The Flippening That Matters series, to find that smart wallets are still a tiny fraction o total Ethereum accounts, despite double digit monthly growth.

That was just one week. Subscribe to get the latest DeFi news and analysis straight to your inbox and you don’t miss a thing. Free-signups get partial content, paid subscribers (only $10/month, $100/year) get everything. Click here to pay with DAI ($70/year).

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🙌 Together with Ampleforth, a digital asset protocol for a base money which doesn’t require collateral and is uncorrelated with the rest of crypto.

Interview

The March Market Crash "Was a Test for Maker and DeFi; It's Fair to Say The Test Was Passed:" Rune Christensen

This week’s interview is with Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, the largest lending platform by assets in decentralized finance and the issuer of the Dai stablecoin. Rune has been in crypto since 2011 and is no stranger to volatility and crazy market conditions. Still, last month was the most shocking for him yet. On March 12th, MakerDAO’s mechanism to heal loans that become under-collateralized broke down amid the market crash, allowing one trader to run off with more than $4 million in free ether. He calls it Maker’s toughest test yet, and he believes the protocol passed it.

Podcast

The Defiant has just launched a podcast to host all the exclusive interviews published on the newsletter weekly. Now you’ll be able to hear these conversations with the builders and users of this new, open and radically transparent financial system directly. This week, you can hear what Rune Christensen had to say in our interview, from his own words.

Op-ed

Ethereum’s Road to Mass Adoption With Smart Contract Wallets Has a Long Way to Go

Smart contract wallets are crucial for the mass adoption and acceptance of Ethereum by main-stream users, Ganesh Swami, cofounder of data firm Covalent, writes in the fourth installment of our series The Flippening That Matters. Only 30,000 smart contract wallet addresses have been created so far, compared with 90,000 new Ethereum addresses added everyday.

Thursday

Dives

• Wall Street is Paying a +500% Premium for Ether: Shares in Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust, ticker ETHE, are trading at a 515% premium to the fund’s net asset value, near the widest since ETHE first started trading in OTC markets at a crazy 1,150% premium in June.

Sums

• There’s Now a “No Loss Investment” Platform on DeFi: dPiggy, a platform which enables no-loss crypto investing. As with PoolTogether, rTrees and other similar projects, dPiggy is based on redirecting interest gained on crypto deposits.
• Bitcoin-Backed tzBTC Launches on Tezos: The Bitcoin Association Switzerland together with a group of crypto firms launched a token that’s backed 1-to-1 with Bitcoin to be traded on the Tezos blockchain.

Bytes

• Programmable Fintech Payments Startup Sila Raises $7.7M Seed to Wipe Out ACH: TechCrunch
• Codefi Launches Inspect to Boost DeFi Transparency
• Risk/Reward of liquidity provision in AMMs: AlfaBlok

Friday

Dives

• Let’s Stop Using Our Dad’s Financial System: Money has not kept up with the times. In the few decades since the 1980s the internet has wiped out communications barriers and the world has become instantly connected. But in the US, it takes three days to pay rent if you want the lowest fee. That’s because we’re still using the same financial infrastructures as our grandparents.

Sums

• PieDAO — The First Fund for DeFi’s ETF Issuer is Live: PieDAO, a project enabling a more decentralized way of creating ETF-like fund, issued BTC++, it’s firs so-called pie, which holds four different versions of Bitcoin for Ethereum tokens.
• The LAO — Ethereum-Based Venture Fund Launches April 28: The LAO, a venture fund which wants to take the first step in “building a permissionless Silicon Valley,” announced it’s launching on April 28.
• Initial Alex Offering — Developer Launches Self-IPO: Developer Alex Masmejean is raising $20,000 with his personal token $ALEX, which is traded over decentralized exchange Uniswap. He wants to use the money raised to move to San Francisco and found a crypto startup.

Bytes

• MakerDAO Token Holders Vote to Compensate Vault Owners
• Gemini to Enable Chainlink, Dai, and Orchid Trading

💜Community Love💜

Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!

Ash Egan @AshAEganReally enjoyed @CamiRusso's interview with @RuneKek on adding USDC as collateral, the MKR auction, and looking ahead in DeFi

The Defiant @DefiantNews💖Full interview for paid subscribers here: https://t.co/tehkT6Q5Ao9:54 PM ∙ Apr 7, 202014Likes3Retweets

Ben DiFrancesco @BenDiFrancescoThere are SO many awesome content creators and aggregators out there, it's hard to pick just a few to support, but this time around I gave to: @CamiRusso @ethhub_io @TrustlessState @evan_van_ness @defipulse6:36 PM ∙ Apr 7, 20209Likes2Retweets

Meeseeking @meeseekingJust gave $250 USDC to @CamiRusso's @DefiantNews @gitcoin grant. I subscribe & love her coverage. Also pre-ordered 5 copies of her book, The Infinite Machine, re: history of #Ethereum,arrives in July. Looks badass. gitcoin.co/grants/567/the… amazon.com/Infinite-Machi… #publicgoods

amazon.comAmazon.com: The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum (9780062886149): Russo, Camila:…Amazon.com: The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum (9780062886149): Russo, Camila: Books4:02 PM ∙ Apr 6, 20205Likes3Retweets

Camila Russo @CamiRussoThanks @WPeaster for including me among all those badasses and for the very kind words! ☺️ blockonomi.com/the-minds-of-c…

12:32 AM ∙ Apr 7, 20207Likes1Retweet

DeFi.cx @CxDefiCongrats @CamiRusso !! Another Great experiment on @DefiantNews

Aave @AaveAave🌟3 months ago @CamiRusso started the DeFi10 Portfolio experiment by putting 100 Dai into 10 different DeFi apps 🚀The results so far are in, and Aave is the best return lending platform and 2nd best overall (hats off to @tokensets) $aDai $LEND https://t.co/KGDNIysSkO12:53 PM ∙ Apr 8, 20208Likes3Retweets

juanescallon.eth @jcescallonSupporting in @gitcoin grants my favorite #Defi content creators @RyanSAdams @TrustlessState @ChrisBlec @CamiRusso . keep it up! let's bring the revolution of open finance to the masses1:27 PM ∙ Apr 10, 202011Likes1Retweet

Aave @AaveAave🌟3 months ago @CamiRusso started the DeFi10 Portfolio experiment by putting 100 Dai into 10 different DeFi apps 🚀The results so far are in, and Aave is the best return lending platform and 2nd best overall (hats off to @tokensets) $aDai $LENkO

12:06 PM ∙ Apr 8, 202059Likes20Retweets

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 at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.

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About the author: I’m Camila Russo, a financial journalist writing a book on Ethereum with Harper Collins. (Pre-order The Infinite Machine here). I was previously at Bloomberg News in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires covering markets. I’ve extensively covered crypto and finance, and now I’m diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.