Recap: DeFi Week of Aug. 19 🦄

Hi defiers, hope you’re all having a great weekend!

Summing last week up: Prompted by intense debate over whether Ethereans should do a mea culpa over scammy initial coin offerings, I looked into how much decentralized finance has to thank this funding mechanism and it turns out, it’s quite a bit. The SEC approved the first ERC20 IPO, giving new life to funding via Ethereum tokens. MakerDAO dominance continued to slide, which might change as token holders voted to cut borrowing rates. Coinbase, 0x and Compound created new tools to improve dapps’ user experience, while Opyn and Synthetix launched new products for traders. Finally, if you think all this will blow up into pieces, you can short it on Guesser’s new DeFi-focused market, but you’ll have to use DeFi :)

1. Apple for Shiny New Card, DeFi For Shiny New Banking

Scrape the matte white, multi-layer coating off Apple’s titanium card and you find that this time, this aging tech giant isn’t changing everything this time. Decentralized finance is. (Read more)

2. 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. This is good news for DeFi. (Read more)

3. Almost a Third of Top DeFi Projects Did ICOs

With so much gone wrong during the initial coin offering craze, decentralized finance offers a glimpse of what went right. The crowdfunding mechanism helped bootstrap a chunk of the most active and innovative corner of the blockchain space. (Read more)

4. Lightning Gets You $20, DeFi Gets You $50,000

A person or group with $5 million locked in the Lightning Network, a payments channel-based system for Bitcoin, is making $20 on transaction fees, according to TrustNodes. DeFi Prime thought of taking the amount staked and plugging it into decentralized finance platforms and the difference is staggering. (Read more)

Interview

How to Bring a Billion People to Crypto: Argent's Itamar Lesuisse

Itamar Lesuisse, co-founder of smart-contract based crypto wallet Argent, talks about what he and his team have done to make the wallet act more like a traditional bank account, and about the recent integrations with MakerDAO and Compound. He also talks about what’s next: A fiat on-ramp (likely with Wyre in the U.S.) to be announced in the next couple of months, account insurance next year, and crypto wallets to manage identity. The end goal is bringing a billion people to crypto. (Read more)

Daily News

Friday

• New Coinbase Product Links Mobile Wallet With Dapps: Coinbase created WalletLink to connect its mobile wallet with dapps on desktop browsers. This will put decentralized applications at the fingertips of Coinbase’s 30 million users.
• Opyn Makes it Super Easy to Go 6x Long ETH: Opyn, a decentralized exchange, is offering 6x leveraged trading for ETH, the highest available in DeFi.
• MakerDAO Holders Vote to Cut Interest Rate: MakerDAO’s stability fee was cut by 2 percentage points to 18.5 percent. It was the first cut since June. The current rate is now a lot more competitive. It compares with Compound’s 16.4 percent and dYdX’s 17.9 percent, according to LoanScan. (read post)

Thursday

• 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.
• 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. (read post)

Wednesday

• First ERC20 Token Set to be Sold in an IPO: Crypto trading platform INX Limited plans to raise up to $129.5 million selling Ethereum-based tokens in an IPO. This would be the first time ERC20 tokens are sold in an offering registered with the SEC.(read post)

Tuesday

• Compound Releases Open Oracle System: Compound Finance launched the Open Oracle System with the goal of creating a decentralized price feed, which won’t rely on a single project and therefore diminishes the risk that it can be shut down.
• Synthetix Launches Index Tokens: Synthetix, a platform for trading synthetic digital assets, launched a new category of index tokens tracking an index of centralized exchanges tokens. (read post)

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