Intro

As soon as I finished writing the article about my Defi investment strategy, I discovered some new products that I hadn't heard about. Its really hard to keep up with everything that is goiing on in the Defi space, and each couple of days I hear about something new, amazing and game changing. These particular projects are quite new, all related, and havn't had much publicity yet, but they are all up and running live on Eth/mainnet. They all performed pretty well according to my initial testing and evaluation. So I decided to do a quick and dirty, triple review.

hydro/ddex

Hydro protocol SDK

These are the financial primitives that Ddex is built on. "Lending protocols, predictions markets, and countless other DeFi projects can use Hydro to easily build both single-sided and multi-sided marketplaces" It supports multichain development, is secure and audited, and has other features mostly of interest to developers. (Not to be confused with some other, unrelated project also called hydro)

Ddex

Compares favourably with the other defi lending products. Supports spot, margin trading, lending and borrowing. It currently has the best rates for lending dai on any defi platform, according to Loanlist Also, there are 0% trading fees for now.

The legacy (older interface) version also supports the Usdx project (see below) and its governance token DF. I imagine all the trading pairs will be moved over to the new version. And there will be more components to come, as the new version matures, and they add more features. Aside from the fact that they have the highest rates now, I like what they are doing, and the team behind it seems to be very knowlegeable, and have a lot of experience (with the previous version).

imtoken wallet

This is a great mobile wallet which supports the project below with its USDx stable coin, and DF governance. But it has a lot of other really good features. For example, it supports multiple chains, and dapps on each one, including Ethereum, Eos voting and Rex staking, and Cosmos staking. They are adding support for Polkadot in future versions. They also have a built in token exchange (Tokenlon) which is very useful, and I like the transaction audit trail that it keeps for all on-chain transactions. I don't hear much about it, but I find it invaluable.

dforce/usdx/lendf

This is an interesting group of projects that work together, as well as partner with the projects above. I was introduced to it by Chi Chang Chang on Defi nation. I think that it has a lot of good potential, so I tested it out. I also spoke to the founder Mindau Yang on Telegram, and he impressed me.

dForce

These are the financial primitives that all these components are based on, and more to come (kind of like Bzx for Fulcrum/Torque, or Hydro for Ddex). Links on their web site to the code on github, and upcoming whitepaper. In the mean time, they have some products which are running live on mainnet.

USDx

This is a meta stablecoin based on 4 constituent stable coins described in the medium article linked in the title above. This reduces your stablecoin risk. It includes Dai, which is algorithmicly pegged to USD (as you know) and also other fiat backed stablecoins which are audited and transparently monitored.The minting process is really just about aggregating and disaggregating the component stablecoins into USDx, but you don't have to worry about how it works, since you can just get it directly. The USDx coin can be purchased or exchanged from Ether or ERC20 coins on Ddex (legacy), or Imtoken, so you can easily get in and out.

Lendf.me

This service allows you to lend or borrow USDx. Yesterday the rates were higher than Dai, but today they are down. However, the borrowing rates are really low. (Today, it is high again). So I think that we need the rates to stabilise a little more for this to be reliable. I expect the USDx borrowing/lending rates to become less volatile as it becomes more liquid. When this project matures it will probably be a profitable, and low risk solution to add to the Defi toolkit. And I expect more innovation in the future.

Conclusion

This article could actually serve as an addendum to my previous article, which explains my investment strategy. Its hard to know who the Defi winners will be, since there are so many contenders, and the space is changing so fast. So, I am keeping an open mind, and a diversified Defi based portfolio (as explained in my previous article). Success in this space will also depend on other factors like marketing. So, its not always the best technology that wins out in the end.

As usual, comments are welcomed and let me know what you think.

"We live in interesting times". Sir Austen Chamberlain