Week in DeFi: SEC Clamps Down on Crypto, Zero-Knowledge Players in Motion and a Revived Umami

Defensibility in the Time of DeFi

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Hedging Against Impermanent Loss: A Deep Dive With FinNexus Options

What Is Yield Farming?

Binance

Balancer

Ledger

Coinbase

HyperPay

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

iExec RLC

Delysium

Numeraire

Baby Doge Coin

Banana Gun

Propy

Venus

Paycoin

Non-Playable Coin

API3

Auction Light

WadzPay Token

Froge (ETH)

Sommelier

TRUMP MAGA (trumpmaga.me)

Compound is a DeFi lending protocol that allows users to earn interest on their cryptocurrencies by depositing them into one of several pools supported by the platform.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Compound.

When a user deposits tokens to a Compound pool, they receive cTokens in return. These cTokens represent the individual’s stake in the pool and can be used to redeem the underlying cryptocurrency initially deposited into the pool at any time. For example, by depositing ETH into a pool, you will receive cETH in return. Over time, the exchange rate of these cTokens to the underlying asset increases, which means you can redeem them for more of the underlying asset than you initially put in — this is how the interest is distributed.

On the flip side, borrowers can take a secured loan from any Compound pool by depositing collateral. The maximum loan-to-value (LTV) ratio varies based on the collateral asset, but currently ranges from 50 to 75%. The interest rate paid varies by borrowed asset and borrowers can face automatic liquidation if their collateral falls below a specific maintenance threshold.

Since the launch of the Compound mainnet in September 2018, the platform has skyrocketed in popularity, and recently passed more than $800 million in total locked value.

Compound

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that is able to take real-world data and supply it to on-chain applications, while also connecting APIs to smart-contracts to facilitate the exchange of information between on-chain and off-chain data sources.

By supplying reputable, verifiable real-world data to blockchains, Band Protocol unlocks a range of new use cases for developers to explore — since they can now use any type of real-world data as part of their decentralized application (DApp) logic, including sports, weather, random numbers, price feed data and more.

Band Protocol initially launched as an ERC-20 project on the Ethereum blockchain in September 2019, but transitioned to the Cosmos network in June 2020 with the release of Band Protocol 2.0. The new protocol is built on BandChain using the Cosmos SDK. Oracle nodes on BandChain not only relay data but are also involved in block production/validation, giving them a dual role.

BAND is the native token of the Band Protocol ecosystem and is used as collateral by validators involved in fulfilling data requests, as well as the main medium of exchange on BandChain — being used to paying for private data.

Band Protocol

Bancor is an ecosystem of decentralized, open-source protocols that promote on-chain trading and liquidity.

Its main protocol, Carbon, is a decentralized trading protocol allowing users to perform automated trading strategies using custom on-chain limit orders and range orders, with the option of combining orders together to create automated buy low, sell high strategies.

By design, Carbon orders are irreversible on execution, easily adjustable directly on-chain, and resistant to MEV sandwich attacks. These capabilities give users an unprecedented level of control and automation to perform novel trading strategies on-chain.

Fast Lane, a separate open-source arbitrage protocol, allows any user to perform arbitrage between Bancor ecosystem protocols and external on-chain exchanges and redirect arbitrage profits back to the Bancor ecosystem.

All Bancor ecosystem protocols are governed by the BancorDAO via staked BNT.

Bancor

Yearn.finance is an aggregator service for decentralized finance (DeFi) investors, using automation to allow them to maximize profits from yield farming.

Its goal is to simplify the ever-expanding DeFi space for investors who are not technically minded or who wish to interact in a less committal manner than serious traders.

Launched in February 2020, the service, formerly known as iEarn, has seen huge growth in recent months as new products debuted and developers released in-house token YFI.

yearn.finance

UMA was founded in 2018 by Allison Lu and Hart Lambur, two ex Goldman Sachs traders, with the goal of making global markets universally fair, accessible, secure and decentralized.

The team drew inspiration from traditional finance derivatives to define an open-source protocol to allow anyone, anywhere, to design and build trustless financial contracts.

0x is an infrastructure protocol that allows users to easily trade ERC20 tokens and other assets on the many different blockchains (including Ethereum) without relying on centralized intermediaries. It is a protocol for decentralized exchange.

0x achieves this decentralized exchange functionality using a collection of open-source, publicly auditable smart contracts that work together to produce a flexible, low-friction trading protocol that developers can easily weave into their products.

The protocol is used by companies building web3 apps such as wallets, DEXes, portfolio trackes, and others. It is a used by hundreds of developers for their projects. The protocol has facilitates over $200B in trading volume since its inception. One can track its usage in its dedicated https://explorer.0x.org/.

The protocol is powered by an ERC20 governance token known as ZRX. ZRX holders can participate in protocol governance, having direct power over protocol changes and its community treasury.

0x Protocol

Curve is a decentralized exchange for stablecoins that uses an automated market maker (AMM) to manage liquidity.

Launched in January 2020, Curve is now synonymous with the decentralized finance (DeFi) phenomenon, and has seen significant growth in the second half of 2020.

In August, Curve launched a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), with CRV as its in-house token. The DAO uses Ethereum-based creation tool Aragon to connect multiple smart contracts used for users’ deposited liquidity. Issues such as governance, however, differ from Aragon in their weighting and other respects.

Curve DAO Token

Synthetix is building a decentralized liquidity provisioning protocol that any protocol can tap into for various purposes. Its deep liquidity and low fees serve as a backend for many exciting protocols on both Optimism and Ethereum. Many user-facing protocols in the Synthetix ecosystem, such as Kwenta (Spot and Futures), Lyra (Options), Polynomial (Automated Options), and 1inch & Curve (Atomic Swaps), tap into Synthetix liquidity to power their protocols. Synthetix is built on Optimism and Ethereum mainnet. The Synthetix Network is collateralized by SNX, ETH, and LUSD, enabling the issuance of synthetic assets (Synths). Synths track and provide returns on the underlying asset without requiring one to directly hold the asset. This pooled collateral enables an array of on-chain, composable financial instruments backed by liquidity from Synthetix. Some of the most exciting upcoming releases from SNX are Perps V2, which hopes to enable low-fee on-chain futures trading through the usage of off-chain oracles, and Synthetix V3, which aims to rebuild the protocol to achieve its earliest goal, being a fully permissionless derivatives protocol. Learn more about Synthetix on their blog or by joining the SNX Discord.

The platform aims to broaden the cryptocurrency space by introducing non-blockchain assets, providing access to a more robust financial market.

Synthetix

Ren (REN) is an open protocol built to provide interoperability and liquidity between different blockchain platforms.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Ren.

Formerly known as Republic Protocol, Ren launched RenVM, its virtual machine mainnet, in May 2020, having completed a $34 million initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018.

The protocol’s native token, REN, functions as a bond for those running nodes which power RenVM, known as Darknodes.

Ren aims to expand the interoperability, and hence accessibility, of decentralized finance (DeFi) by removing hurdles involved in liquidity between blockchains.

Kyber Network is a multi-chain hub of liquidity protocols that aggregates liquidity from various sources to provide secure and instant transactions on any decentralized application (DApp). The main goal of Kyber Network is to enable DeFi DApps, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other users easy access to deep liquidity pools that provide the best rates.

KyberSwap.com, its main DEX aggregator and liquidity platform, provides the best swap rates for traders in DeFi compared to individual exchanges. It also enables liquidity providers to maximize earnings via high capital efficiency. KyberSwap sources liquidity from multiple DEXes such as Uniswap, Sushi, Curve, QuickSwap, Pancakeswap, Traderjoe, Pangolin, SpookySwap, SpiritSwap, VVS Finance, Velodrome, GMX, and many others to achieve the best rates for traders on different chains. KyberSwap supports over 13 chains including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Cronos, Arbitrum, Optimism, Velas, Aurora, Oasis, BitTorrent, Ethereum PoW, and soon Solana.

KyberSwap is decentralized and permissionless, not requiring account sign-up or personal information. All transactions on KyberSwap are on-chain, which means transactions do not need a centralized third-party, like a centralized exchange, and they can be easily verified using the Ethereum or other chains’ block explorer.

Projects can build with KyberSwap to access its different features, such as the instant settlement of token swaps, liquidity aggregation for the best rates, liquidity pools, and a customizable business model. Kyber looks to solve the liquidity issue in the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry by allowing developers to build products and services without having to worry about liquidity for different needs.

The Kyber Network Crystal (KNC) token is a utility and governance token that is the "glue that connects different stakeholders in Kyber's ecosystem." KNC holders can stake their tokens in the KyberDAO to help govern the platform and vote on important proposals - and earn staking rewards in KNC that come from trading fees. Investors in KNC include #Hashed, Signum Capital, ParaFi Capital, HyperChain Capital.

Kyber Network Crystal v2

Convex Finance is a DeFi protocol that allows Curve liquidity providersto earn a share of trading fees on Curve without staking liquidity there. Instead, LPs can stake with Convex and receive boosted CRV and liquidity mining rewards. This provides CRV stakers with better capital efficiency and positions Convex Finance as an important player in the Curve wars.

Convex has entered a competitive race to obtain as much control as possible of the Curve Finance stablecoin exchange. The more CRV tokens a protocol has, the more influence it has over interest rates on Curve, which is the largest DEX in the world by TVL. Consequently, the “Curve wars” are an ongoing race for influence over what is probably the most important protocol in DeFi.

Convex Finance

SushiSwap (SUSHI) is an example of an automated market maker (AMM). An increasingly popular tool among cryptocurrency users, AMMs are decentralized exchanges which use smart contracts to create markets for any given pair of tokens.

SushiSwap launched in September 2020 as a fork of Uniswap, the AMM which has become synonymous with the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement and associated trading boom in DeFi tokens.

SushiSwap aims to diversify the AMM market and also add additional features not previously present on Uniswap, such as increased rewards for network participants via its in-house token, SUSHI.

SushiSwap

Aragon

LRC is the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency token of Loopring, an open protocol designed for the building of decentralized crypto exchanges.

In 2020, the average daily trading volume of the entire cryptocurrency market fluctuated in the approximate range of $50-$200 million. Most of that trading is conducted on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges — online platforms operated by private companies that store users’ funds and facilitate the matching of buy and sell orders.

Such platforms have a number of downsides common to all of them, so a new type of exchange — decentralized— has emerged to try to alleviate these disadvantages. However, fully decentralized exchanges are not without their own flaws.

Loopring’s purported goal is to combine centralized order matching with decentralized on-blockchain order settlement into a hybridized product that will take the best aspects of both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

LRC tokens became available to the public during an initial coin offering (ICO) in August 2017, while the Loopring protocol was first deployed on Ethereum mainnet in December 2019.

Loopring

Storj, pronounced as “stor-jay,” is an open-source cloud storage platform. Basically, it uses a decentralized network of nodes to host user data. The platform also secures hosted data using advanced encryption.

In a white paper published in December,2014, Storj was first introduced to the world as a concept. It was to be a decentralized peer-to-peer encrypted cloud storage platform.

Two years later, an updated white paper was published. Here, a decentralized network  — connecting users who need cloud storage space with those who have hard drive space to sell — was described. The platform was launched in late 2018.

People with hard drive space and good internet connectivity can participate in the network. They become a unit in the network, called a node. Space providers are rewarded by Storj tokens.

Storj

Basic Attention Token, or BAT, is the token that powers a new blockchain-based digital advertising platform designed to fairly reward users for their attention, while providing advertisers with a better return on their ad spend.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Basic Attention Token.

This experience is delivered through the Brave Browser, where users can watch privacy-preserving adverts and receive BAT rewards for doing so. On the other hand, advertisers can deliver targeted ads to maximize engagement and cut down losses due to ad fraud and abuse.

The Basic Attention Token itself is the unit of reward in this advertising ecosystem, and is exchanged between advertisers, publishers and users. Advertisers pay for their advertising campaigns in BAT tokens. Out of this budget, a small portion is distributed to advertisers, while 70% is distributed to users — whereas the intermediaries that typically drive up advertising costs are cut out of the equation to improve cost-efficiency.

Basic Attention Token launched in 2017 following one of the fastest sell-out initial coin offerings (ICOs) of all time, with the platform raising a total of $35 million in under a minute. Since then, it has rolled out its attention-based advertising experience to users in most countries through its Brave Rewards program.

As of November 2020, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada had the most active advertising campaigns.

Basic Attention Token

Maker (MKR) is the governance token of the MakerDAO and Maker Protocol — respectively a decentralized organization and a software platform, both based on the Ethereum blockchain — that allows users to issue and manage the DAI stablecoin.

Initially conceived in 2015 and fully launched in December 2017, Maker is a project whose task is to operate DAI, a community-managed decentralized cryptocurrency with a stable value soft-pegged to the US dollar.

MKR tokens act as a kind of voting share for the organization that manages DAI; while they do not pay dividends to their holders, they do give the holders voting rights over the development of Maker Protocol and are expected to appreciate in value in accordance with the success of DAI itself.

The Maker ecosystem is one of the earliest projects on the decentralized finance (DeFi) scene: the industry that seeks to build decentralized financial products on top of smart-contract-enabled blockchains, such as Ethereum.

Maker

OMG Network, formerly known as OmiseGo, is a non-custodial, layer-2 scaling solution built for the Ethereum blockchain. As an Ethereum scaling solution, OMG Network is designed to allow users to transfer ETH and ERC20 tokens significantly faster and cheaper than when transacting directly on the Ethereum network.

The network is based on a novel scaling solution called MoreViable Plasma, which uses a sidechain architecture to group several transactions off-chain into a batch, which can then be verified as a single transaction on the Ethereum root chain. According to OMG Network, this technology has the potential to scale Ethereum to thousands of transactions per second (TPS) — instead of the 10 to 14 tps Ethereum 1.0 is currently capable of.

The network is powered by the OMG utility token, which can be used as one of the payment methods for fees on the OMG Network, and will eventually be stakable — helping to secure the network in return for rewards.

OMG Network

Ontology is a project designed to bring trust, privacy, and security to Web3 through decentralized identity and data solutions. It is building the infrastructure to provide trusted access to Web3, allowing individuals and enterprises to rest assured that through regulatory compliant digital identity solutions, users and their privacy come first.

The Ontology blockchain is a high speed, low cost public blockchain. It is designed to bring decentralized identity and data solutions to Web3, with the goal of increasing privacy, transparency, and trust. To achieve this, users and enterprises are provided with the flexibility to build blockchain-based solutions that suit their needs, while also ensuring regulatory compliance. Through Ontology’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Ontology ensures frictionless compatibility with Ethereum, the first step in the creation of the Ontology Multi-Virtual Machine and further interoperability for the chain.

At its launch, Ontology chose to forego the popular initial coin offering (ICO) model in favor of a series of community distributions and airdrops of its ONT cryptocurrency.

This helped to quickly establish both organic price discovery and a passionate community and helped the project to avoid subsequent regulatory scrutiny.

For example, for a brief period any person who signed up for the Ontology newsletter received an airdrop of free 1,000 ONT, which reached a value of $10 per token soon after the token became listed on major exchanges like Binance.

Ontology launched its own MainNet on June 30, 2018 and has been up and running smoothly since.

Ontology

Civic is a blockchain-based identity management solution that gives individuals and businesses the tools they need to control and protect personal identity information.

The platform is designed to change the way we think about identity verification by giving users more control over their personal data, while allowing them to access a wide range of services without needing to fork over excessive amounts of personal information.

Civic's identity verification solution uses distributed ledger technology to authorize identity usage in real time, and is used to sparingly share information with Civic partners after authorization by the user.

Unlike some other identity management services, Civic users store all their sensitive data on their mobile device. Users are able to authorize the sharing of specific personal data by providing a biometric signature through the Civic app.

The Civic ecosystem is enabled by a unique utility token known as the Civic token (CVC), which is used for the settlement of identity-related transactions between Civic participants — such as between a customer and service provider.

Users can earn CVC tokens for completing a variety of tasks, such as signing up for a service through the platform or introducing new users, while validators can earn CVCs for validating documents for service providers.

Civic was launched in 2018, following a sell-out initial coin offering (ICO) the year prior.