This Week in DeFi – October 15

To the DeFi community,

This week, Sushiswap and Celo announced a partnership to bring $12.6 million in liquidity mining rewards to Celos mobile-first user base, with rewards going live at 4pm ET on October 14. The partnership also launches with support from Optics, an L2 token bridge that will now allow users to bridge from Polygon to Celo without needing to route through Ethereum (while offering withdrawal capabilities to Ethereum as well).

 

Dubai-based Morningstar Ventures announced a $15 million investment in Elrond, to provide support to founders and builders working within the Elrond ecosystem. Funds will also be used to set up an Elrond Incubator based in Dubai, with an eye towards growing Elrond use in the UAE and the rest of the Middle East.

 

pNetwork presented plans for V2, enabling enhanced cross-chain and cross-L2 transfers of both assets and data messages, employing a unified infrastructure layer to route between chains as opposed to the current one-lane pToken bridges between individual chains. Postman will do the same but with smart contract data, allowing assets like NFTs and oracle data to more easily be transferred throughout the crypto ecosystem.

 

 

And LP-collateral loan primitive Alchemix released a roadmap for the future, including the announcement that V2 code is nearly complete and will go for audits on November 1. Plans also include increased decentralization and launching a DAO, a grant program, multichain support, and a slew of other improvements to bring the protocol into the DeFi 2.0 epoch.

 

 

With institutional interest firmly entrenched, DeFi has become an industry in its own right in a remarkably short time. Now some of you may have heard the rumblings about DeFi 2.0, distinct and different from the Compounds and Curves of the world, but still a piece of the broader project to democratize financial access and improve financial wellbeing around the world.

Opinions on DeFi 2.0 are still being formulated and consolidated, but here are a few initial thoughts. DeFi 2.0 protocols are largely reliant on the building blocks laid down during the initial DeFi wave – decentralized exchanges, overcollateralized lending protocols, and the wrapped tokens and bridges that allow value to more or less freely float through the ecosystem.

DeFi 2.0 increasingly seems to be capturing those protocols that use these foundational components in ways not seen before in the traditional financial system, or anywhere else. Increasingly robust algorithmic and incentives-based stablecoins are beginning to find real uptake and traction while avoiding implosion, while time-based lending protocol lockups and staking schemes try to find the balance between too difficult to understand and too good to pass up.

Finally DeFi 2.0 represents a truly multichain experience, where demand (even in this nascent industry) can only realistically be met by offering services on multiple blockchains or L2 solutions. As with many things in crypto, theres more to believe in and a more sturdy foundation, but the number of potential winning projects to keep track of has grown exponentially – in this world the factors to consider change, but picking good investments rarely gets easier.

Nobody can keep track of it all, and Ive missed more winners than I care to admit. But keep your head in the game and do your research, and it will be hard not to come out at least a bit better off.

 

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Base Fee: 0.00%

ETH Stability Fee: 2.00%

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WBTC Stability Fee: 2.00%

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Total Value Locked:$96.3B (up 3.63% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap:$135.76B (up 3.18%)

DEX Weekly Volume:$15.62B (down -3.99%)

DAISupply: 7.02B (up 7.83%)

Total DeFi Users:3,543,720 (up 1.58%)

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Alex is a Content Writer at Circle, with previous experience at tech startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and as a freelance writer and analyst. Interests include cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and he has been in the crypto community since 2014.