Recap: DeFi Week of July 20 🦄

Hello Defiers! hope you’re having a great weekend!

Summing up this past week: yEarn’s YFI governance token has dominated DeFi, soaring from just over $30 to more than $4,000, driving more than $300 million to the platform and spurring seven on-chain votes, in just one week. Value locked in DeFi pierced through $3 billion, two weeks after crossing $2 billion, but not happy with that, it made the $4 billion milestone a couple of days later, thanks to the addition of yEarn to DeFi Pulse’s leaderboard and the surge in the price of ETH. mStable added some drama by backtracking on its MTA token drop to early investors. UMA launched a fixed-rate stablecoin and Gemini will custody of .crypto domains. And speaking of custody, US regulators said banks can now custody digital assets. MakerDao raised the Dai debt ceiling as demand for the stablecoin continued to climb.

📺 Also, The Defiant’s YouTube Channel Launched! Subscribe!

Here’s our first video, in partnership with Robin Schmidt of Harmony Protocol:

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Interview

Developers Will Wake Up to the Fact That There's a Toolkit to Build Full-Fledged Customized Chains: Bette Chen

In this week’s interview, I speak with Bette Chen and Ruitao Su, who are building DeFi on Polkadot. While most of DeFi is being built on Etheruem, here is the team creating an entirely new financial infrastructure on the decentralized network built by the Web3 Foundations and Parity Technologies —which was founded by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood. Their project called Acala has been mostly known for its stablecoin, but they’re also building staking derivatives —a token that’s a derivative of staked DOT tokens and can be used in DeFi— and a DEX. Each one of these pieces is a huge undertaking on their own, but this ambitious team is making all of them at the same time.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

Friday

Dives

• YFI Surges +70x Pushing Governance Limits: In one week since it launched, yEarn Finance’s YFI has gone through a parabolic price increase, eye-popping returns for yield farmers, hundreds of millions deposited into the platform’s liquidity pools and —this is likely the most unique aspect—seven on-chain votes.

Bytes

• UMA Launches Fixed Rate Stablecoin: UMA is starting to ramp up its permissionless synthetic asset platform with the release of its third token yUSD.
• Winklevoss’s Gemini Will Now Keep Your ‘Unstoppable’ Web Domains Safe: Decrypt
• KR1 sells tokens from blockchain insurance firm Nexus Mutual: Proactive Investors

Thursday

Dives

• mStable Backtracks in Early Investors’ Token Drop: mStable MTA token distribution has raised the question of whether DeFi token listings are actually an improvement on VC rounds and ICOs.
• US Banks Can Now Hold Crypto –– How Un-DeFi-Like: So banks can now hold your keys. That’s pretty much the opposite of what decentralized finance is trying to accomplish. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t good news —it’s great news for crypto.

Bytes

• MakerDAO Voters Raise Dai Debt Ceiling: MakerDAO’s MKR holders have voted to raise Dai’s debt ceiling to 345M from 235M, which the stablecoin had already reached.
• Balancer Thesis: Placeholder
• Advancing Our Approach to Digital Currency: Visa

Tuesday

Dives

• Farmers Scramble to Get Latest DeFi Token’s 1,000% Yield: This is the state of DeFi: a token called “valueless” by its issuers drove $150M of deposits, while the token itself soared by more than 80x to as high as $2,500 practically overnight, as “farming it” has yielded annual returns of 1,000% for some traders.

Bytes

• There is Now $3 Billion Held in DeFi: Value held in DeFi reached a record $3 billion today, highlighting decentralized finance is growing at breakneck speed.
• DeFiDollar Stablecoin Adds Token Rewards: The team behind DeFiDollar will now use Curve Finance pools to collateralize its stablecoin, enabling liquidity providers to earn token rewards.
• Recapping mStable’s MTA Distribution: mStable launched its MTA governance token using a batched auction on the Gnosis Protocol-based DEX, Mesa on Saturday, after delaying the listing by 4 days.
• Balancer Launches First Governance Polls: Balancer’s BAL token holders were able to participate in the platform’s governance for the first time.
• Mastercard Announces Expansion of Cryptocurrency Efforts, Inks Card Deal With Wirex: The Block

💜Community Love💜

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

SuperMassive.eth @DirSchmidtThis is a fun way to make the week even busier but chuffed we could make it actually happen, @CamiRusso deserves a great video proposition

The Defiant @DefiantNews📺 The Defiant's YouTube channel launches today! Subscribe!! ✊ And check out our video on $YFI, the people's token in partnership with rockstar producer @DirSchmidt of @harmonyprotocol https://t.co/vN2nHgoN348:53 PM ∙ Jul 24, 202013Likes4Retweets

Sebastian Aldasoro @SaldasoroHow cool can this be? The Defiant's youtube channel!🔥🔥🔥

The Defiant @DefiantNews📺 The Defiant's YouTube channel launches today! Subscribe!! ✊ And check out our video on $YFI, the people's token in partnership with rockstar producer @DirSchmidt of @harmonyprotocol https://t.co/vN2nHgoN347:47 PM ∙ Jul 24, 20205Likes1Retweet

Dave Craige ⚡️ @davecraigeWell done video on $YFI. Worth the watch 👇 / @CamiRusso

The Defiant @DefiantNews📺 The Defiant's YouTube channel launches today! Subscribe!! ✊ And check out our video on $YFI, the people's token in partnership with rockstar producer @DirSchmidt of @harmonyprotocol https://t.co/vN2nHgoN347:36 PM ∙ Jul 24, 202010Likes2Retweets

David Iach | davidiach.eth 👨‍🌾 @davidiachCool episode and congrats on the launch @CamiRusso! Subscribed!

The Defiant @DefiantNews📺 The Defiant's YouTube channel launches today! Subscribe!! ✊ And check out our video on $YFI, the people's token in partnership with rockstar producer @DirSchmidt of @harmonyprotocol https://t.co/vN2nHgoN348:16 PM ∙ Jul 24, 20201Like1Retweet

Lasse Clausen @lalleclausenIt's been an honour to chat with the great @CamiRusso for @DefiantNews about our background and the 1kx thesis

thedefiant.substack.com“Things Tend to Get Better. For Anyone Involved in Crypto, It’s Obvious That This is 1,000x Better,” 1kx’s Lasse ClausenHello Defiers! In this week’s interview, I speak with Lasse Clausen, founding partner of 1kx, one of the most active venture funds in DeFi. A typical VC question in the traditional tech space is it a 10x? Is it 10 times faster, better, cheaper? This concept has been dressed up very nicely as like, o…3:15 PM ∙ Jul 20, 202028Likes4Retweets

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About the founder: I’m Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine here), the first book on the history of Ethereum. 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.