TL;DR

Coinbase is launching a new price oracle for DeFi with signed price feeds from Coinbase Pro.

Compound governance is live: Community governance has now replaced the administrator of the Compound protocol. From this point forward, all changes (from supported assets, to system parameters) will originate from COMP token-holders.

dYdX unveils perpetual contract markets with Bitcoin swaps first: the swap, which will give traders up to 10x leverage on the BTC-USDC market, has started in a private Alpha before eventually being opened up to non-U.S. locales. Also, dYdX crosses 1billion USD in originated loans.

Zerion unveils DeFi SDK, an open-source system of smart contracts that makes integrating protocols easier.

Dharma introduced Social Payments — a Twitter-native financial ecosystem. You can send USD to any Twitter handle, regardless of where that person lives — even if they don’t have a Dharma account.

PoolTogether Introduces Pods, which allows PoolTogether players to link their tickets together. If any ticket in the pod wins, the prize is split proportionally.

Gnosis officially launched its protocol which is the result of two years of research and development. Moreover, Gnosis is funding and supporting the public non-profit initiative Corona Information Markets, a decentralized prediction markets platform, with the aim of uncovering key information about the novel coronavirus. They’ve provided $50k in subsidy to create 50 information markets covering different aspects of the pandemic.

Maker stability fees changed, now 6% for USDC, 0% for ETH/BAT, (DSR obviously still 0). ‘Black Thursday’ losses spur $28 million class-action lawsuit against Maker Foundation.

0x announced Matcha, a new trading platform that aggregates all DEX liquidity to give users the best price. Launching Q2 2020.

Aave is back with another development update including Token burn PageFire, new menu and HomepageGlowing star, user-friendly liquidations PageDroplet and Risk framework.

Uniswap V2 Bug Bounty Program announced.

imBTC Uniswap Pool Drained for ~$300k in ETH.

Synthetix integrates the new Curve pool.

1inch integrates Curve’s sUSD pool with Synthetix staking.

UMA announced initial Uniswap listing: the permissionless derivatives protocol is listing its native token on Uniswap on Wednesday, April 29th, at a valuation of ~$26M.

Coinbase Wallet has integrated with Frontier’s Mobile interface, enabling users to access Native DeFi dApps on mobile without having to import seed phrases or private keys.

Automation v2 on DeFi Saver introduced. The latest automation system can now react to the next price in the MakerDAO protocol and utilizes flash loans for better optimized ratio and leverage adjustments.

SheFi, a DeFi educational program that is also a vehicle to donate funds to nonprofits that educate women in STEM programs, announced.

dForce attacker returns all $25M back to project

A writeup of PieDAO’s managed Balancer pools.

The Rise of MakerDAO: A Personal Journey on Unchained: Mariano Conti head of smart contracts at MakerDAO, reads from his essay about his personal experience with cryptocurrency, particularly as an Argentine whose family has experienced periods of hyperinflation, and as a freelancer accepting payment from foreign countries.

Dissolving the Foundation and the Future of MakerDAO with Rune Christensen on POV Crypto.

CoinGecko Meetup #1 — Panel: DeFi Today & the Plan for the Future. Check out the video in our report below!

Don’t miss the DeFi Discussions virtual conference: May 1st — May 4th.

And much more!

Debt

Development Update: What’s Up With Aave? Aave reached $50M market size for the first time.

Liquidations Page

On a normal basis, liquidations occur automatically according to the smart contract. However, in response to the Crypto Black Thursday events, the team decided to include a user-friendly liquidation page that allows users to manually execute liquidations. This page will not normally be available, but if another Black Swan event like this happens, the liquidation page will be available so that users can come buy the collateral for a discounted price.

New Menu

The Aave UI gets sexier every day. Aave Design team has incorporated a brand new menu into the design updates, giving the user interface a much sleeker look.

New Homepage

The Design team also created a new homepage for the DApp to give users an overview of the available assets and total market size of the protocol.

Token Burn Page

It’s heating up outside and LEND is burning! All fees for borrowing and executing Flash Loans are redirected to burn the LEND token and decrease the monetary supply of LEND. The Aave Dev team has built a fun and imaginative interface so users can burn the LEND themselves!

Aave’s Risk Framework

Aave Risk team put together a comprehensive Risk Framework that describes their methodology for measuring risks, adding a new currency in Aave Protocol, and setting the risk parameters. It also includes a detailed risk assessment for each currency.

Aave x Metacartel Dragon Quest Talk:

Compound Digest — Governance is Live on Mainnet, ETHGlobal DeFi Hackathon, MYKEY Q&A

Compound Governance is now live. The Compound team is no longer the administrator of the protocol; instead, all future modifications to the protocol will be proposed and voted on by the community. This is a milestone on the path to fulfilling our vision of an open protocol that can evolve in entirely new ways.

The community has put together a forum for open discussion on protocol changes. See compound.comradery.io to collaborate on proposals before you vote. In order to get started voting on proposals, see the Governance Guide — How To Vote on a Proposal.

Developers are highly encouraged to start building their own tools and interfaces to participate in governance of the protocol. For example, anyone can now build their own interface similar to the governance explorer on the Compound website.

To get started building, see the Compound Governance Quick Start Guide on Compound blog. It includes links to a GitHub repository that has some open source examples.

The First Compound Governance Proposal: A proposal to add USDT to Compound will be the first one to go through Compound’s new governance process.

Compound Voice AMA:

In other Compound news, the team held their first, experimental live-voice AMA. Robert Leshner, co-founder and CEO of Compound, answered community questions in the Discord. There were lots of great questions about what the future holds now that the protocol is governed by the community. The team also got a sneak peek of the first upcoming governance proposal, which they’ll likely see in the next week. Here is an MP3 download link of the AMA recording, in case you missed it.

Compound is Sponsoring ETHGlobal’s Hack Money Virtual DeFi Hackathon:

ETHGlobal, which hosts some of the most popular in-person Ethereum hackathons, is hosting its first virtual event, Hack Money. Starting in May, Hack Money is a DeFi-themed Ethereum hackathon, with more than $25k worth of prizes.

There will be 2 Compound bounties up for grabs, each worth $1000 of cUSDC:

Bounty #1 will go to the team that creates the best project that implements borrowing through Compound. This project can be an SDK, API, or application. See the Borrowing Quick Start Guide for an introduction to developing borrowing integrations.

Bounty #2 will go to the team that creates the best project that implements Compound governance. See the Governance Quick Start Guide for an introduction to developing governance integrations.

Hackathon participants can ask technical questions in the Compound Discord #development channel.

Robert Leshner and Calvin Liu will be hackathon judges and you’ll also see them on speaker panels. Registration for the event is now closed, but stay tuned for more announcements.

MyKey Q&A:

MYKEY provides a handy and secure smart contract wallet on multiple blockchains, to lower barriers and enable mass adoption.

In the interest of making access to blockchains easier, MYKEY provides key management and handling of gas fees, so developers can concentrate on the core of the application.

What don’t people know about MYKEY? Their smart contract logic is upgradable, transparent, and secure. The team published the contract upgrade reason and open source code along with 3rd-party security audits. These are published to the community in advance. When a contract is deployed features need to wait 4 days before activation. Here’s a link to the MYKEY Ethereum documentation.

MYKEY grew from 0 to 13000 signups on Ethereum in 3 months.

What do developers love about MYKEY? MYKEY offers free network fees and free transaction quota for every user. They also have documentation to help developers get started using MYKEY in their app.

What’s different about your Compound implementation? Multi-Operation Transactions. Usually, when a new user deposits an ERC-20 asset into the Compound protocol, two signatures are needed for two transactions — approve and deposit. MYKEY wraps the two operations into one single, atomic transaction. This way, the user only needs to sign one transaction to deposit an asset, bringing a smoother experience.

More Links & Discussions

Dharma introduced Social Payments — a Twitter-native financial ecosystem. You can send USD to any Twitter handle, regardless of where that person lives — even if they don’t have a Dharma account:

Executive Vote: Lower USDC SF, Lower USDC LR, Whitelist Oracles, Raise Dai DC, Raise GSM Delay, Deactivate MKR Oracle in SCD: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

Note: As discussed on the forum this spell will be implementing a grace period until 16:00 UTC on May the 12th, upon at which time SCD will undergo actual shutdown. The action of caging the system at this point in time is implemented through this executive spell which includes a mini contract controlling the time of shutdown. It is also worth noting that collateral prices at the time of caging will be determined by the Oracle.

How and Why to Self-Integrate Dai into Decentralized Apps: As the DeFi movement continues to gain traction, more and more people will integrate Dai into their decentralized apps, many without Maker’s help.

Composable Infrastructure as Code: An Introduction to the Maker DeFi Ecosystem: Beautiful examples of composable infrastructure as code in software design are seen in Dai-integrated Decentralized Financeblockchain applications.

Governance Polls: Adjustments to Dai Stability Fee, Governance Security Module, and more: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents a Dai Stability Fee adjustment, GSM Module adjustment, MKR Oracle Deactivation in SCD, Sai Stability Fee adjustment, and a USDC Stability Fee adjustment.

Executive Vote: Adjust the USDC, Sai, and Dai Stability Fees: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

A Guide to Single-Collateral Dai (Sai) Shutdown.

‘Black Thursday’ losses spur $28 million class-action lawsuit against Maker Foundation: A proposed class-action lawsuit seeking more than $28 million from the Maker Foundation and several of its affiliates is set to be filed in U.S. federal court, according to documents obtained by The Block.

In a draft complaint, the Maker Foundation — a non-profit organization supporting the development of the MakerDAO decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol — was accused of misrepresenting the protocol’s risks to investors and failing to protect investor interest.

Specifically, the complaint alleges negligence, intentional misrepresentation and negligent misrepresentation in connection with the claimed losses. The lawsuit does not seem to have been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“While misrepresenting to CDP Holders the actual risks they faced, The Maker Foundation neglected its responsibilities to its investors by either fostering or, at the very least, allowing the conditions that led to Black Thursday, all after actively soliciting millions of dollars of investment into its ecosystem,” the complaint states.

xDai:

In light of the recent announcement made by MakerDAO to shutdown their Single-Collateral Dai(SAI) system, Nuo Network has suspended new reserve, loan and margin trade orders involving SAI effective immediately.

Derivatives, Swaps and Prediction Markets

4 Political Trading Podcasts to Follow this Election Season: Augur Weekly — A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.

2020 Political Prediction Conference:

Augur v2 is planning to use GSN, however, there are currently only a few mainnet relayers running, charging ~70% (default) fees. The team would like to encourage the broader Ethereum community to begin run GSN relayers with a more reasonable fee for Augur v2.

More on Augur:

dYdX Launches BTC Perpetual Contract Market: dYdX is launching Perpetual Contract Markets that enable trading of any non-Ethereum based asset. The first market went live is entering private Alpha with up to 10x leverage. Sign up to apply for early access.

Perpetuals have been popularized by a number of centralized exchanges over the last few years — allowing users to get synthetic exposure to BTC and other crypto assets without an expiration date. Perpetuals are the most widely traded product in all of crypto with daily trade volume in the billions of dollars, eclipsing spot trading volume in 2019 as the most popular way to gain crypto price exposure.

dYdX launchES the first ever decentralized Perpetual Contract Market. The team believes decentralized perpetuals are a big step forward for the industry, and are a natural fit for DeFi:

Decentralized Perpetuals augment the value proposition of existing perpetual products. Smart contracts exist to solve problems around trustworthiness and lack of transparency. These are two of the biggest problems with current implementations of perpetual contracts where users have no visibility into liquidation mechanisms, insurance funds and socialized losses. Perpetuals open up a world of trading possibilities that are currently not available in DeFi. Now any asset, not just those based on Ethereum, can be traded on DeFi. For the first time DeFi users will have access to liquid trading of BTC, by far the most widely traded crypto asset. Perpetuals are the most popular trading product in crypto. Trading volume of crypto perpetuals is double the volume of the spot market, and still growing fast. Perpetuals give users an easy and capital efficient way to get leveraged long or short exposure. We expect this trend to apply to DeFi as well, and for the trading volume of decentralized perpetuals to quickly surpass all spot DeFi trading volume.

For dYdX to be a meaningful cryptocurrency exchange, users must be able to trade the most popular crypto asset: BTC.

The market has shown that perpetuals are the best and most liquid way to trade BTC with leverage. Usage and volume of perpetuals far surpasses that of margin trading. For these reasons the team choses to build a novel protocol for perpetuals rather than add any ERC20 BTC to dYdX margin trading product.

dYdX crosses 1billion USD in originated loans.

Announcing Gnosis Protocol: Gnosis officially launched its protocol which is the result of two years of research and development. Gnosis Protocol is a fully permissionless DEX (decentralized trading protocol) that enables a new mechanism called ring trades to maximize liquidity. Ring trades especially improve liquidity for illiquid or “long tail” tokens such as prediction market outcome tokens, by facilitating trades not normally possible on traditional trading protocols.

You can try it out and trade today on Mesa, the first dapp built on Gnosis Protocol, or directly on smart contract level using this tutorial.

Great initiative by Gnosis: they fund and support the public non-profit initiative Corona Information Markets, a decentralized prediction markets platform, with the aim of uncovering key information about COVID-19.

Build with UMA at HackMoney: the team is sponsoring ETHGlobal’s HackMoney and offering 2 bounties:

- $1,000 to the most interesting interface for priceless synthetic tokens

- $1,000 to the best way of incentivizing or providing liquidity for priceless synthetic tokens

The UMA project token ($UMA) will be listed on Uniswap at ~15:00 UTC on Wednesday, April 29th.

Fund Management

Melon Easter Quiz:

Sanz Prophet — Set Social Trader AMA Series: This is a transcript of a recent AMA that was held between Sanz Prophet and the Set community in our Discord channel. The AMA was held on the 1st of April at 10:00AM PDT, 2020.

You can check out Sanz Prophet’s Sets here.

Why ChainLinkGod is the Ultimate ChainLink and DeFi Bull — Set Social Trader Spotlight: In these posts, the team gives you insight into exciting new traders that will be trading on the Set Social Trading platform. If you want to learn more about Set Social Trading, you can click here.

This post contains an interview with ChainLinkGod, a new trader on the TokenSets platform who’s offering his LINK Profit Taker Set.

ChainLinkGod’s Set is currently live on TokenSets — you can check it out here.

How ByteTree Uses Bitcoin Network Demand Metrics to Generate Alpha in the Markets — Set Social Trader Spotlight.

ByteTree’s Set is currently live on TokenSets — you can check it out here.

How to TokenSets: Learn about the key parameters, tips and features to keep in mind when selecting your next Set.

Securities, Insurance and NFTs

NexusMutual: how Solidity cover will evolve to be able to cover the demand for large policies.

Liquidity Relays

0x Announces Matcha, a new trading platform that aggregates all DEX liquidity to give users the best price. Launching Q2 2020.

Managed Liquidity with 0x API:

Get Started with 0x API Today

As the decentralized finance space matures, developers are beginning to coalesce around standard pieces of infrastructure to power their products and services. Examples include node management tools like Infura and Alchemy or onboarding standards like Wallet Connect. For many teams trying to bring their product to market, liquidity sourcing — or where and how your product exchanges asset X for asset Y — is becoming an increasingly important infrastructure level decision for builders early in the product development cycle.

Much like onboarding or node management, liquidity sourcing will determine how accessible and how scalable your product can be as it gains popularity. Unlike traditional consumer applications, however, “scale” or “product-market fit” is not some far-flung end-state in DeFi. In fact, they’ve seen it achieved in a relatively short timeframe for many products, where just 100 MAUs can bring a product into the top tier of performance in terms of volume or total value locked.

Why does this matter in the context of liquidity sourcing? As it turns out, early decision paths that may seem easy at the moment can often lead to issues with scalability and performance shortly thereafter. These issues manifest themselves in the form of slippage, or the ability to swap asset X or Y for a reasonable price at scale. When developers choose a single liquidity source (e.g., Kyber or Uniswap), they are effectively handicapping their product’s ability to scale efficiently, and, more importantly, they are choosing to manage their product’s liquidity sourcing in-house in perpetuity.

As a result, small teams are massively increasing the scope of systems that are orthogonal to their core product experience, which often leads to wasted sprint cycles spent resolving the liquidity sourcing issues stemming from their original infrastructure design choice.

Connect to 0x API in minutes

0x witnessed this issue play out over and over for teams building products across DeFi, and that’s why they decided to create 0x API, a powerful tool that serves up aggregated decentralized exchange liquidity in a single endpoint. By having a professional team at 0x always thinking about liquidity sourcing, performance improvements, and developer experience, 0x API helps developers by moving from a state of managing liquidity to managed liquidity with 0x.

With managed liquidity, the team abstracts all the complexity associated with scaling your DeFi product from Day 1 by aggregating the best-in-class sources of liquidity and surfacing them through a straightforward yet robust set of API endpoints. Additionally, they’re always adding updates and features that not only improve the depth of liquidity you can offer users but also enable you to create enhanced user experiences as your product matures.

They believe liquidity sourcing in DeFi should be analogous to accepting online payments in eCommerce. In essence, developers should choose a simple API (like Stripe), integrate it into their product, and get back to doing what they do best: building beautiful, robust, and accessible financial products for the masses.

Get Started with 0x API Today

1inch integrates Curve’s sUSD pool with Synthetix staking:

Kleros (PNK) is now available on Kyber Network.

SelfKey (KEY) is now available on Kyber Network.

Loopring founder Daniel Wang recently spoke with Camila Russo of The Defiant. He shared his view on a philosophical point:

“I think decentralization is not the goal. It is one of the means with which we can achieve our real goal, which is security.”

Uniswap V2 Bug Bounty Program Announced: You can find all the information about the program here.

Payments Networks

Raiden Weekly:

Neutral debt pool incentive trial: A new trial to incentive people to balance the debt pool by holding iETH.

Bauxite Product Release: Everything the front-end team has been up to recently!

New Curve Pool Launch: The Curve team has deployed a new Curve pool after the vulnerability discovered earlier this week in the previous pool. The new Curve pool is now ready for stablecoin liquidity providers to add liquidity. As promised, the team has added a section to our docs site here with detailed information about Synthetix integrations, including the new Curve pool. The Curve contract deployed for this pool has been audited and the details of the audit can be found at the link above.

A new CurveRewards contract for liquidity providers has been deployed and you can now stake by going to Mintr and clicking on the LP Rewards tab.

This new Curve pool reward system will operate for about 3–4 weeks, after which they will migrate to an upgraded liquidity pool model that utilises Aave’s interest-bearing stablecoins, once the new contract has been audited.

sUSD Curve pool vulnerability & next steps: Details about the recent sUSD curve pool vulnerability.

Other

Introducing the Coinbase Price Oracle. The Coinbase Price Oracle provides a critically important service to the DeFi ecosystem: a signed price feed available via the Coinbase Pro API.

Access DeFi with Coinbase Wallet: Coinbase Wallet has integrated with Frontier’s Mobile interface, enabling users to access Native DeFi dApps on mobile without having to import seed phrases or private keys.

Futureswap Alpha Goes Live: Futureswap, an exchange to trade 20x perpetual ETH futures went live this week for a brief period of time. In its 3 day alpha period, it did over $7 million in volume with over $1 million of liquidity. Check out the full recap here.

The MetaClan DAO is now live on Ethereum mainnet: MetaClan is a crypto-native eSports clan built to inspire the future of gaming. This week, they launched their official DAO which will act as an onchain treasury fund to aggregate tribute, loot, and proposals alike.

PoolTogether Introduces Pods: Pods allow PoolTogether players to link their tickets together. If any ticket in the pod wins, the prize is split proportionally.

Zerion unveils DeFi SDK, an open-source system of smart contracts that makes integrating protocols easier. You can view it here.

Returns of DeFi vs HODLing: Q1 2020.

Introducing Automation v2 on DeFi Saver: The latest automation system can now react to the next price in the MakerDAO protocol and utilizes flash loans for better optimized ratio and leverage adjustments.

SheFi Announced: SheFi is a DeFi educational program that is also a vehicle to donate funds to nonprofits that educate women in STEM programs.

A writeup of PieDAO’s managed Balancer pools.

AtomicLoans lets you lock up BTC for a Dai/USDC loan.

The Incognito Project Will Give Ethereum DeFi Monero-Like Privacy: The Incognito privacy project is an interoperable chain that will let you privately use DeFi platforms without ever touching Ethereum itself.

When DeFi meets Rollup.

CoinGecko Meetup #1 — Panel: DeFi Today & the Plan for the Future:

DeFi Discussions virtual conference: May 1st — May 4th. The goal of the summit is to help developers & traders bridge knowledge gaps so that they can build better DeFi products & put more skin into the game. It’s 100% free + virtual, so you can tune in from anywhere in the world to learn.

Speakers Include:

Sep Kamvar,Co-Inventor of EigenTrust & Co-Founder of cLabs

Austin Griffith, Ethereum; Burner Wallet & ETH.BUILD

Luke Youngblood, Exec at Coinbase Custody

Taylor Monahan, Founder & CEO of MyCrypto

Gavin McDermott, Engineering & Research at IDEO

Allison Lu, Co-Founder of UMA; Ex-VP at Goldman Sachs

Alex Wearn, Founder & CEO of IDEX

Peter Yuan Pan, Summoner & Operator of MetaCartel

Hugh Karp, Co-Founder & CEO of Nexus Mutual

Aparna Krishnan, Co-Founder & CTO of Opyn

Michael Feng, CEO & Co-Founder of Hummingbot

Noah Zinsmeister, Engineering Lead at Uniswap

Felix Feng, CEO & Co-Founder of Set Protocol

Benedict Chan, CTO of Bitgo

and more!

Check out the full speaker list & agenda here.

Got ideas for a cool DeFi app but not a developer? Add a comment to this Google doc with your idea and a hacker might just build it at ETHGlobal’s online Hack Money hackathon!

Total Value Locked in DeFi

Top 100 DeFi Tokens by Market Capitalization

Total Market Cap: $1,290,741,026

Ethereum Defi map

Source: A map of the DeFi ecosystem, broken down by category (source)

MISC

Post-Black Thursday, is Dai still safe to use?

Constant function market makers as a zero-to-one DeFi innovation.

DeFi Data and Visualization Resources.

Constant Function Market Makers: DeFi’s “Zero to One” Innovation.

Money-legos: tool to build DeFi apps.

dForce Attacker Returns All $25M Back to Project: According to data visible on the Ethereum blockchain, multiple transactions were initiated from 6:00 UTC on Tuesday from an address labelled “Lendf.Me Hack” to the admin address for the Lendf.Me project. The transactions included some extremely large amounts, such as one for 57,992 ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain — an amount worth around $10 million at press time. Additional transactions involved various U.S. dollar-linked stablecoins — such as USDT, BUSD, TUSD, DAI, USDC, HUSD and PAX — totaling nearly $10 million. Further, a total of 581 units of WBTC, HBTC and imBTC — ethereum tokens that peg to bitcoin as an underlying collateral — have also been returned. The sum of these is worth around $4 million at bitcoin’s current price. Curiously, the hacker did not return exactly the same balance of assets as were stolen, but returned some of the value in other types of tokens. All told, however, they handed back crypto assets worth roughly $24 million as of press time.

Dissolving the Foundation and the Future of MakerDAO with Rune Christensen on POV Crypto. Topics:

The next steps for the Foundation

DAI’s independence from the Dollar

The values instantiated in MakerDAO

Black Friday perspectives

The Rise of MakerDAO: A Personal Journey on Unchained: Mariano Conti of MakerDAO, head of smart contracts at MakerDAO, reads from his essay about his personal experience with cryptocurrency, particularly as an Argentine whose family has experienced periods of hyperinflation, and as a freelancer accepting payment from foreign countries. He describes the evolution of Maker from single-collateral Dai (now Sai) to multi-collateral Dai, and also gives his perspective on the events of Black Thursday and the subsequent debt auctions the protocol undertook to right itself.

The imBTC/Uniswap/dForce hack explained:

How truly decentralized exchange protocols differ:

This is not financial advice.

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