The king comeback, Polygon explosion, Yearn report

Welcome to This Week in DeFi!

DeFi is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. It’s nearly impossible to stay up to date with everything. Therefore, Coin98 Insights has decided to bring you this series. This Week in DeFi will help everyone stay up to date with the market and provide helpful insights to figure out investment opportunities. 

Highlights this week:

• The market is up again.
• Polygon is exploding when the number of dApps move to this chain is increasing fast.
• Yearn published its Q1 report, and the result was outstanding.
• And more essential updates in DeFi space.

Overview

1. The market has a significant pullback this week. The king of Crypto is now being traded at $57,400/BTC, and follow are altcoins.

It looks like the season won’t stop here.

2. Tesla sold off $272M worth of Bitcoin this week

However this does not affect too much to the price and market in general. Bitcoin is started to becoming a highly liquid asset.

3. DeFi

Everything is up again, DeFi TVL went back to $129.6 B.

Source: defillama.com

Layer 2

DeFi Pooling 

DeFi Pooling is coming to CelerNetwork, this will help users to join L2 more affordably. It is powered by StarkEx.

StarkEx is a STARK-powered scalability engine for crypto exchanges, right now projects using StarkEx are increasing fast like Celer, Immutable, dydx, deversifi. 

Dex

Bancor xBNT

Bancor introduced xBNT, which is a staking solution for automated yield optimization on Bancor liquidity pools. Users can deposit BNT and xBNT will automatically transfer to maximized profits and re-stake with NO extra gas fee.

Bancor continues to show their ambition far more than just an ordinary AMM. The protocol is becoming a one-stop Dex for DeFi.

Right now this project has:

• Cross-chain swap.
• One-side liquidity providing.
• Unlocked-liquidity for BNT staking.
• Automate farming.

What else can you need for an AMM?

CowSwap 

Balancer x Gnosis to launch Cowswap - a Dex with features like:

• Balancer v2’s flexible liquidity pools for gas-efficient trades.
• Gnosis v2’s batch auctions & price finding mechanism to settle trades at best prices.
• Gas fees are currently 90% subsidized.

This demonstrates the power of composability in DeFi when projects don’t compete with each other, instead, they combine their strength to make a better product and give users a better experience.

WildCredit launched and issues

WildCredit launched alpha of its AMM + lending protocol. However soon after launching, the project found a bug, and the team has to take down the link to the website.

Besides AMM, Wild Credit offers one-side liquidity providing and lending. The project promise to fix the bug and will redeploy soon.  

Lending/ Borrowing

Aave v2 Liquidity Mining Live

Aave v2 liquidity incentives are now live. Users, integrators, builders,… will now be able to receive $stkAAVE and participate in protocol governance.

Aave offers 2200 stkAAVE/day for this liquidity mining program from now to July 15.

Source: DeFiLlama

This program immediately shows a positive effect, and TVL of Aave has reached the top 1.

More specific? Aave is paying you >30% yields to BORROW.

If you look from a different angle, both Maker DAO and Compound don’t have incentive programs, but their TVL is still close to Aave TVL. Aave will need to differentiate itself more if it still wants to attract liquidity in the future. 

Asset management

dHedge Trend Following Bot

dHedge launched a new Trend Following strategy. This strategy will follow top active 7-day tokens which outperformed BTC performance over the last year.

Derivative

Opium live on Polygon

Opium, an options protocol, has launched Turbo and ETH staking on Polygon.

Aggregator

Yearn quarterly report Q1

Yearn has released its quarterly report.

TL, DR:

• Exploding in Revenue.
• TVL skyrocket.

Revenue grows exponentially.

Yearn TVL surpass $3.2 B

mStable Live on Polygon

mStable has launched on Polygon, users can now earn yield from their stablecoins in a fast and cheaper way. 

1Inch DeFi Wallet

1Inch released 1Inch Wallet for IOS, users can swap on Ethereum & BSC with the best price provided by 1Inch.

NFT

Binance NFT Marketplace

Binance introduced their NFT marketplace. 

One fact that, when others ecosystem still started to build their DeFi ecosystem, Binance has nearly completed all blocks in their eco and move to the next trend - NFT. 

Highly recommend everyone to research NFT and investing opportunities in this category. 

Others

Badger Bitcoin Bridge 

Badger introduced its Bitcoin Bridge powered by Ren Protocol. Now Bitcoin holders can earn yield from their assets. 

In retrospect, the Bitcoin bridge brings significant value to DeFi. The King of Crypto now has a market cap of over 1 trillion dollars, and if only 10% of that value flows to DeFi, it will be a massive way for DeFi in general. 

Element Finance mainnet soon

Element Finance, an unlocked & fixed yield protocol has completed audits and they will release mainnet on May 21st according to plan.

Conclusion

We hope that this series has given you an overview and valuable insights into DeFi this week. See you in the next This week in DeFi publish, here.