"DeFi" TAG

Insurance, one of the earliest envisioned use-cases in the DeFi sector, has yet to gain the same momentum as decentralized exchanges: $230 million to $2.7 billion is the difference in market cap, according to Delphi Digital. Concurring that the insurance sector is underdeveloped, the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance’s (CCAF’s) latest benchmark survey notes that...

On November 7th, the cryptoasset lending company, Cred Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the state of Delaware, having accumulated $136 million of liabilities while holding just $67.8 million in assets. While the exact reasons for the bankruptcy are still not fully known, we can surmise four main factors based on admissions from Cred,...

As the use of DeFi and decentralized exchanges (DEXs) in particular have grown, a new sector has emerged that seeks to improve on the user experience and overall service offered by DeFi protocols. Liquidity aggregators pull liquidity from multiple trading venues, with the intent of providing end-users optimal prices and low slippage. Aggregation can provide...

As discussed last week, the surge in DeFi usage throughout 2020 may prove one of the year’s defining narratives. Though not directly analogous, parallels can be drawn between the industry’s current interest in open finance and its embrace of initial coin offerings in mid to late 2017. And, as with the latter, the former brings with...

Surges in DeFi usage, particularly on Ethereum, have proven a defining narrative of the blockchain and cryptoasset industry thus far in 2020. In large part, such progress in adoption can be attributed to the DeFi governance tokens, the recent proliferation of which has brought renewed attention to the practice of so-called ‘liquidity mining.’ Liquidity mining...

Five years after its initial launch, Augur has released a second instantiation of its prediction market protocol. Long anticipated, Augur v2 contains several updates largely aimed at enhancing efficiency and usability. In light of these events, the following dispatch explores the obstacles that have long hindered Augur and the potential for recent updates to alleviate...

Though the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) sector has collectively experienced rapid increases in adoption in recent months, there is perhaps a no more dramatic example of supposed growth in the sector than that of Compound, including, among other metrics, the explosive market capitalization expansion of COMP, the money market protocol’s new native governance token. From a fundamental cryptoeconomic...

Despite stablecoins and decentralized finance (DeFi) continuing to drive demand for gas consumption on Ethereum, and the smart contract network seeing higher usage than ever before, the price of Ether has remained largely range-bound in recent months both versus USD and BTC, raising important questions concerning the relationship between the network and its native asset...

In an earlier dispatch, we referenced Chris Burniske and Placeholder’s work on quantifying smart contract demand via the aggregate amount of fees paid to validators or miners. While illuminating in its own right, it led our research team to consider the long-term resilience of such a fee market on Ethereum and how this relates to a...