Welcome to the first Kyber Ecosystem Report. At the last count, Kyber’s smart contracts were providing services to more than 50 different applications ranging from dapps to wallets, exchanges to funds, and merchants to conferences. This report looks at the data behind these applications and highlights the prevailing trends in the Kyber ecosystem.

What kind of products and services use Kyber?

With its open and permissionless architecture, a diverse range of projects, products, and teams plug into Kyber’s liquidity protocol. Wallets integrate Kyber to allow end users to exchange one token for another, merchants, event organizers and real estate platforms use it to receive stablecoins regardless of the token users have paid in, and dapps use it for their own specific use case based needs.

Kyber can be found across the following categories:

Kyber Usage by Category

Wallets

With wallets serving as crypto-users’ primary tool for digital asset control, in-app conversion from one asset to another is a natural extension of these wallets’ capabilities. It is therefore not surprising to see so many wallets use Kyber to provide this functionality. These wallets, either through direct Kyber smart contract integration, or by providing a web3 environment to access KyberSwap, make up a significant portion of the volume passing through Kyber, as can be seen in the table below:

Wallets are in competition with each other to innovate and capture as much of the wallet market as possible and throughout the last quarter have added significant new features. Some highlights from larger partners are as follows:

Enjin wallet will be integrated into the newest Samsung Galaxy phone range, potentially opening it up to very large consumer market.

imToken released a hardware wallet, introduced biometric verification and added ERC721 support for its wallet.

MyEtherWallet introduced KYC-less crypto-to-fiat conversion for transfers up to $5,000.

Trust Wallet added credit card crypto purchases and released a cross-platform cross-blockchain wallet library to serve the crypto community.

DeFi products

As the DeFi movement grows, we see Kyber playing a key role allowing any token to be used anywhere within these new financial products. At a practical level, Kyber helps both build positions (convert to the asset required, i.e. ERC20 to ETH), and liquidate them (exit to the asset required, i.e. convert collateral to stablecoin during liquidation). This availability of multi-asset liquidity at both entry and exit points allows for these increasingly complex portfolio positions (short, margin long, over/under collateralized) to be tailored for each user’s individual requirements.

Here are some of the DeFi apps utilizing Kyber:

Nuo is a non-custodial on-chain margin trading dapp that has had huge growth since its launch mid-February. In 6 weeks, $1.6mm in reserves have been locked up and $500k in almost two thousand loans have been given out. With Kyber fulfilling margin trade orders within the dapp, Kyber’s volume has benefited from this growth and Nuo is now the 9th highest trading entity on Kyber Network:

Easwap — the Easwap team have been at the forefront of DeFi applications for a while now with Instadapp, MakerScan and Easwap. Since launching in December, $1m worth of ETH has been locked up and 280k DAI debt issued on Instadapp. Both Easwap and Instadapp use Kyber for their InstaSwap service and volumes through Kyber have been on the rise:

Uniswap — Uniswap’s addition to Kyber’s liquidity protocol is a good example of how different DeFi projects can make use of each other’s strengths to improve the overall user experience. In this case, any dapp, merchant, fund or product integrated into Kyber get’s access to a much larger pool of liquidity coming from Uniswap ($8.5m locked up in Uniswap and increasing rapidly), and by extension, to tighter spreads and more competitive pricing. Uniswap in return, sees its liquidity used wherever Kyber’s protocol is used, bringing it extra volume. In the first three months of the year, Uniswap has fulfilled 11,868 swaps worth $9,466,233 for Kyber.

Caleb’s graph show’s Uiswap’s high growth

Apart from larger dapps, we’d also like to highlight the efforts of the independent developers that hack with Kyber at hackathons, build inspiring dapps, and drive the growth in this space. This week we’d like to highlight Hilmar X and Scott.

Hilmar X built IPFSwap, an exchange that brings Kyber and IPFS together to create a fully decentralized exchange stack.

Hilmar is also working on a soon-to-be-released service built on top of DeFi protocols.

Scott built the Lothlor Token Fund, a dapp that allows users to hold a basket of tokens and create short and leveraged positions. It uses Kyber to rebalance positions, Compound to borrow WETH to enter short positions,and MakerDAO to create DAI to enter leveraged positions. Lothlor is a great example of different DeFi tools being combined to build new dapps that can rival conventional financial products.

Merchants and Event Payments

Making it easier to use crypto as a form of payment for conventional products and services will be an important driver for overall crypto adoption. To this end, Ethereum already serves as a viable v1.0 payment platform, and Kyber provides the liquidity, through its payment widget, to match what the users wants to pay in, with what the merchants want to receive. Many products and services, including ugly sweaters, can already be bought for 70 different ERC20 tokens.

Buy with ERC20: chique

Recently, 82 Paris ETHCC tickets were sold using this payment widget allowing buyers to pay in the ERC20 token of their choice(with ETH, DAI, RCN & SNT the most popular choices), while the organizers received the payment in DAI, within one transaction. Together with other recent integrations, we are seeing a gradually increasing acceptance of crypto as a viable payment form (shoutout to Austin and Igor’s contributions to this space👌).

Upcoming Edcon 2019 will also be payable in ERC20 tokens (with a 10% discount over regular old fiat money😎)

Other select dapps

Decentraland — Kyber was integrated into the second Decentraland LAND auction back in December. Throughout the auction, DAI, MKR, BNB, SNT and RCN were used to swap 275,480 MANA in total.

Etheremon — Since launch, Kyber has been used to buy mons worth $5,429 with the majority of users paying in KNC (84%), followed by W-ETH(5.6%), DAI (3%) and BAT (2.6%)

New Integrations to look out for in future ecosystem reports:

Set Protocol — Set Protocol will be launching its Strategy Enabled Tokens in April with Kyber integrated to issue and redeem these SET tokens. Set Protocol is also a merchant and DAO member for WBTC which it makes use of to build these Stategy Enabled Tokens.

Blockimmo — Blockimmo is a decentralized real estate investment platform with Kyber integrated to allow property buyers to pay for tokenized real estate in the ERC20 currency of their choice while sellers receive stablecoins. We look forward to platforms like Blockimmo providing an avenue for more conventional assets to come on-chain.

Reserves Managers

Reserve Managers are at the heart of Kyber’s liquidity protocol. Consisting of market makers, token teams, dapps and individuals, this group supplies the instant liquidity required to feed the ecosystem. As demand for swaps from different dapps and services has increased over time, both the number of reserve managers, and the volume they have handled has also increased: