At an integration level, almost all Kyber integrations saw increases in their USD and ETH volumes over January with most doubling their volumes:

As usual, the fastest growing dapps as measured by percent increase in USD volume included a mix of wallets, DeFi dapps, and KyberSwap products:

Kyber Katalyst

With the Katalyst launch fast approaching, the Kyber team met up in Ho Chi Minh City to finalize key aspects of the protocol upgrade. We discussed staking smart contract features, audit strategy, UI/UX considerations and dozens of other topics. The more we work on this, the more we are convinced we are building towards the next significant level of decentralization in this space, one that combines a successful platform/product/ecosystem with an ambitious self-governing autonomous organization.

Katalyst is our opportunity to make Kyber better and it’s not limited to a new staking model and DAO, we are bringing important new functionality to the swap execution side. Here’s a previously unannounced teaser for you: the protocol will be able to split single orders across multiple reserves to achieve optimal prices (at the moment, swap execution is routed only to the single best priced reserve), for example, if a user wants to swap 100 ETH to DAI, this large order can be broken into smaller pieces that are split amongst Oasis, Uniswap and Kyber reserves to achieve the most optimal rate for the user.

Integrations will also have the flexibility to source their liquidity from the specific reserves they want or even get their liquidity from certain reserve types. Our integration partners had previously requested this feature and we are happy to be able to bring it with Katalyst.

Coinbase KNC Listing

Yes it really happened! KNC is now listed on both Coinbase and Coinbase Pro. This listing is exciting in that it increases both the liquidity for KNC, and it significantly expands on the user base who can buy KNC to participate in governing the KyberDAO.

We’re already seeing an increase in accumulation of KNC across Ethereum wallets since we announced the Katalyst upgrade and we believe an on-ramp into Kyber world from a giant like Coinbase is a huge win for both the community and Kyber Network itself.

KNC was also listed on a number of different exchanges throughout February and it’s worth mentioning Delta Exchange became the first exchange to offer KNC Quarterly Futures Contracts with the option to leverage.

To top off the good KNC news, February was also the month Kyber burnt its 4 millionth KNC 🥳

KyberSwap

The team that brought you Limit Orders, Android & iOS apps, Fiat On-Ramp, Alerts, Charts, ENS support and many other features are back again with a brand new feature. The KyberSwap team unveiled the Portfolio Dashboard, a simple yet elegant UI to track wallet balance changes, visualize portfolio allocation, and keep an eye out on live market movements.

You can read KyberSwap’s full blog post on the new features here and they would love to hear your feedback through the Official KyberSwap Telegram

Kyber DeFi Updates

Unsurprisingly, DeFi dapps had their best month yet in February, almost doubling their volumes from $15M in January to $29M. This reflects an overall growth of the DeFi space as new projects come in and build new products and existing ones expand and grow their current offerings. Bullish market conditions have also helped volumes and attracted new users to the crypto space and to these products.

bZx

You may have heard of the recent heated debates around bZx (the team behind Fulcrum and Torque, two Kyber integrations) and the two exploits that impacted their contracts resulting in enterprising arbitrageurs making off with 3,571 ETH in profit (detailed postmortem by the team here).

There isn’t a single major project in the Ethereum space that hasn’t had some sort of vulnerability in its smart contracts (just samsuncz himself has found vulnerabilities in Maker, 0x, ENS, Kyber and half a dozen other prominent Ethereum projects), we are still in the experimentation and learning phase so we feel such vulnerabilities creeping into code, regardless of best audit practices, is inevitable, but must be used as very valuable lessons.

Special care also needs to be taken around price oracles, and both us at Kyber and other teams like Uniswap have time and again highlighted the pitfalls of relying on the existing on-chain price oracles. With the introduction of new tools like flash loans DeFi is getting even more complex so please be cautious and understand there are risks to consider when using Ethereum dapps.

We believe the bZx team and the DeFi space in general will learn a lot from this and will carry on building great dapps.

Discussing what on earth just happened the day after the exploit with the bZx team and @ChrisBlec at EthDenver

New DeFi Kyber Integrations

Gelato 🍦

Gelato is a super-useful tool that gives users access to their own personal Ethereum bots. These bots can execute transactions on their behalf based on predetermined automated routines. As a result, ordinary users can create ‘DeFi macros’ without requiring any coding knowledge.

Some use cases the team have highlighted for their alpha release include:

Time-based market orders on Kyber. Rather than selling or buying large amounts at once on Kyber, split your order over several days and automatically sell/buy smaller chunks each time Automatic token accumulation. Every time you receive any amount of DAI, exchange it for some other token on Kyber for automatic accumulation. Automatic account top-ups. If your hot wallet’s DAI balance gets close to zero, automatically top it up with your monthly allowance. Limit & stop orders on Fulcrum & Kyber. Buy leverage positions on ETH on Fulcrum or ERC20 tokens based on prices on Kyber

You can read more on Gelato including a wider set of interesting use cases here.

Idle Finance

Idle Finance is a lending dapp that allocates funds automatically across multiple lending protocols to get the best available returns from the market and users end up maximizing their lending return by investing in a single token. Gelato’s v2 update includes new contract architecture, Dynamic Fund Allocation, and a new UI/UX. The Kyber integration allows users to use the platform with any token in their wallet as this is automatically converted to the token to be lent out.

Reserve Manager and Token Metrics

Before we jump into Reserve and Token metrics we wanted to highlight a blog we recently published that dives deep into how Automated Price Reserves work and what makes them so well suited for token teams. You can read our full blog here but here’s a tl/dr of it:

tl/dr

For the same price range and inventory, Kyber’s APR can provide a lot more liquidity, better slippage, and has the ability to serve more volume than other platforms.

APR allows Reserve managers to: a) Provide liquidity for close to 100 integrated platforms b) Market make for profit on each trade c) Save funds and resources by efficiently utilizing token inventory

Many of the top token teams have already set up APRs, including Synthetix, Melon, DAOstack, and Gnosis.

Reserve Metrics

Reserves had their busiest months on record trading 576,943 ETH over 85,024 transactions. The Kyber reserve that provides liquidity to 44 different tokens continues to be the largest reserve with 38% of the reserve volumes. Oasis is second making up a quarter of all volumes and Uniswap is third with a tenth of all volumes.

Token Volumes

This month’s biggest movers were KNC and WBTC with 307% and 204% increases in volume respectively. Other strong performers include stablecoins which have been seeing strong growth for more than a year now.

New Token Listings

February we welcomed 5 new tokens to the Kyber Network ecosystem:

Flexacoin [FXC] — Flexacoin is a payments network with FXC used as collateral that enables instant point-of-sales payments Announcement

Metronome [MET] — Metronome bills itself as the ‘first autonomous cryptocurrency, built on the principles of self-governance, reliability, and portability’. Announcement

SyncFab [MFG] — SyncFab is parts procurement & supply chain blockchain Platform. MFG is used to pay for products and services. Announcement

Tokenize [TKX] — Tokenize is a digital currency exchange with TKX providing discounts and other benefits. Announcement

Unibright [UBT] — Unibright is a blockchain solutions provider enabling enterprise blockchain integration and tokenization while UBT serves as a voucher for products and services. Announcement

All the above teams have deployed Automated Price Reserves allowing them to easily provide liquidity for their tokens.