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Uniswap Trading Volume Goes Wild As Numbers Hit New Peak

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2020 saw a huge shift in focus from the grips of centralized financial sector to decentralized finance [DeFi]. Among the DEXs, which started dominating on-chain flows, Uniswap in particular, stood out.

Unsiwap Protocol went on to become one of the most prominent platforms witnessing significant traction in a very short period of time. In the latest development, the daily trading volume [7d moving average] across all asset pairs on the decentralized exchange reached an all-time high.

This was revealed by the blockchain intelligence platform, Glassnode which further noted that on an average, $780 million were traded per day in the past week. With this, the figures surpassed the previous peak that hit back in early September 2020.

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DeFi went on to become one of the biggest trends last year with Unsiwap leading the DEXs. With just 10 days to this year, the DEX witnessed an astounding growth.

Uniswap Gives Stiff Competetion to Centralized Counterparts

Owing to the prolonged rally of Bitcoin and the crypto market, the net inflow of ERC-20 stablecoins to exchanges have been breaking records almost every single day.

With $2.3 billion, Binance noted most inflows of stablecoins amidst the bull run. But the decentralized exchanges were not far behind either, and have acquired a large portion of the on-chain volume along with the stablecoin inflow in this bull market.

It was none other than Uniswap that was ranked in the second with $708.6 million in the middle of the other centralized exchanges.

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Other CEXs such as Huobi, OKEx, Coinbase, and others were observed to be trailing behind Uniswap with stablecoin balanced below $600 million. As COVID-19 fears gripped the world, the industry caught the bug of DeFi with crypto enthusiasts feverishly “FOMOing” on lending protocols, borrowing stablecoins and mining liquidity.

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Thanks to this trend, over the past several months, Uniswap has grown to become the world’s largest decentralized exchange by volume. According to Dune Analytics, it even had more than 44% of the DEX market share, at the time of writing.

Hence, it was not just market participants that appeared to be flocking Uniswap. Stanford Blockchain Club became the latest group to verify itself as a Uniswap delegate. With this, the group surpassed a student group at rival California university UC Berkeley to become one of the largest delegates and position itself in the ninth rank.

DeFi Market Sees Healthy Progression As TVL Crosses $21 Billion

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Bitcoin is unstoppable, and so is DeFi. 

As the cryptocurrency industry slowly broke records, the decentralized finance [DeFi] realm also hit new milestones.

On the 7th of October, the total value locked in the deFi industry hit $21.86 billion, according to DeFi Pulse stats. After growing at a formidable pace all throughout last year, the industry has seen strong interest in 2021 as well. The latest figure hinted that its adoption and utility could be permeating as the main trends in the months to come.

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Maker at $4.1 billion, Aave at $2.83 billion, and Uniswap at $2.68 respectively continued to be the top three protocols in the leaderboard. Maker has more than 19% market dominance while the price of its token, MKR has surged to the highest levels in more than two years. At the time of writing, it was valued at $1,078 after an appreciation of 36.83% over the last 24-hours.

What’s in Store?

Decentralized Finance realm saw billions of dollars being poured into its projects. Just recently, ShapeShift, the Colorado-based non-custodial exchange revealed its plans of directing orders through deFi applications to dismiss know-your-customer [KYC] regulations.

The cryptocurrency platform intends to steadily get rid of its own centralized trading activity [which includes its KYC policy] in favor of a decentralized alternative as it plans to become fully DEX-based for customers.

This was a positive development for the ecosystem which has been branded as a bubble by many. As institutions continue to enter the Bitcoin ecosystem, the industry could gain more up steam and see institutional money and professional traders wanting exposure to the space.

The one thing that could still hurt the decentralized finance sector was the regulation part. The financial utopia that the industry aims to offer has met with several setbacks. Billions of funds have been lost in 2020 alone as the space saw multiple breaches and security hacks. The damage to its reputation can only be solved by comprehensive and effective security auditing.

Will DeFi Replace CeFi?

The industry is still quite nascent and while it has become increasingly relevant to people, there is still ample room for change and improvement. Several models and practices of its centralized counterpart can be deployed to the decentralized structure to increase efficiency while shielding it from malicious entities.

Hence, it would be too early to say whether the space can replace CeFI, However, 2021 could definitely see several DeFi-CeFi synergies.

Bitcoin Advocate Andreas Antonopoulos Blasts At DeFi Platform Over Trademark Issues

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The craze surrounding decentralized finance [DeFi] has cooled down but space is still very popular and has seen many new features over the past several months. Despite the fact that DeFi has taken the world by storm, even this sector is not spared from some difficulties in registering a trademark.

The word ‘coin’ is difficult to trademark as it is a generic term that is not in itself distinct. Clear reasoning and evidence need to be there to back up its claim as to why it is distinct from the rest. In the latest news, prominent Bitcoin advocate and tech entrepreneur Andreas Antonopoulos slammed a DeFi platform and who goes by the name ‘COIN’ for sending a legal notice to a Twitter user with the name ‘coin_artist’.

The project claimed to have trademarked its name thus prohibiting other platforms/handles to use the same name. This did not go well with the community members especially after finding out that the USPTO had already rejected the project’s application for the name“COIN”. Currently, it just has a “$COIN” trademark for the purpose of “financial service software”.

Antonopolous called COIN a “scrummy company” and went on  to say that

“This company didn’t invent the name “COIN” (obviously) or its use as a token name. AFAIK they didn’t invent the term DeFi. They’re happy to appropriate both to use in their name, taking from the creative commons. Then they turn around and try to claim their utterly generic name, trademarked in obvious bad faith and they send threatening letters to an artist.”

Despite COIN’s official blog post stating that its legal team did not ask anyone to change their name, branding, or use of the word Coin across the industry, the project was at the receiving end of a lot of backlash following the event.

Antonopoulos went on to say that COIN’s ticker symbol is indistinguishable from others because they” picked an incredibly generic name”. He further added,

“What this should tell you is that they are scammers. They are soulless exploiters without any ethics. They are happy to appropriate public goods and then use their money and their lawyers to threaten so they can solidify their dodgy claim.”

0x DeFi Protocol Crosses Sushiswap To Grab 2nd Position

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The hype around decentralized finance [DeFi] has faded but the development and activity surrounding the industry have once again gained prominence. In the background, amidst the noise of food-themed, meme, clone DeFi protocols, there is one decentralized exchange or DEX has started picking up pace. Yes, we are talking about the open protocol 0x which has noted significant appreciation as the market continued its uptrend.

Specifically, 0x climbed to the second spot with respect to the market share of decentralized exchange [DEX] by volume over the past week. Currently, the platform represented 22% of the total market share and was trailing behind, Uniswap which recorded a 7-day trading volume of a whopping $2.42 billion with a market share of 52.7%

This was noted by Senior Research Analyst, Ryan Watkins who’s tweet read,

“Surprised no one has talked about 0x cracking the top 2 DEXs by volume this week.”

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Over the past 7 days, 0x registered a trading volume of 1.22 billion. With this, the Ethereum-based protocol surpassed the contentious Sushiswap whose volume for the same time period was found to be at $544 million followed by Curve and Balancer at $428 million and $119 million respectively.

The latest spike in the volume figures can be attributed to the new relayer Tokenlon which was currently running a trade mining program. Affirming the latest news, Tokenlon stated,

“True. We had a trade mining and referral program for Tokenlon users. This way we can get a broad distribution of our $LON token, which is then released very soon.”

As deFi boomed throughout the year, 0x’s usage, also climbed record highs. To top that, the protocol reportedly facilitated nearly $4 billion in trades across various DEXs as well as aggregators such as Tokenlon and 1inch. In fact, it also generated approximately $400,000 in protocol fees.

0x’s native token, ZRX also witnessed a surge of nearly 300% during the same time, from trading below $0.26 to climbing all the way close to $0.75. However, the token took a massive plunge soon after as selling pressure intensified and has so far failed to recover. At the time of writing, it changed hands at $0.41.

0x Vision of Bringing Interoperability Cross-chain

More recently, the execs of the platform had revealed an ambitious plan to drive the expansion of 0x protocol beyond Ethereum. In a blog post, Theo Gonolla, 0x Labs product manager stated that the team believes in heading towards a multi-blockchain world with a vast web of interconnected networks forming the backbone of web3.

 

SushiSwap and Uniswap Drama: Is SUSHI Handling More Value Than UNI?

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Blockchain activity has been exhibiting that SushiSwap’s native SUSHI token was handling a significantly higher value than Uniswap’s UNI token. As of December 16th, SUSHI tokens were responsible for 74.35% in terms of the combined value transferred by the two tokens. UNI’s share on the other hand was found to be at a meager 25.65%.

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As depicted by the above chart, Pink represents SUSHI’s share while Green represented UNI’s share.

The reason as to why the vampire protocol’s token, SUSHI has been moving more value can be attributed to the fact that SushiSwap provides greater support for liquidity mining. This is a critical process by which the token holders in the market can earn each platform’s native token.

Why is Uniswap lagging?

This has been a setback for Uniswap which ran liquidity mining starting from the period of18th of September to the 17th of November. During the two months, Uniswap distributed 20 million UNI. However, the decentralized exchange has not notified if it plans to continue this feature. Moreover, a vote to continue running liquidity mining with lower rewards has so far failed to meet quorum.

Despite this, Unsiwap’s overall trading volume far exceeds that of its clone which handles quite less volume than the former. While acknowledging that UNI held an undeniable moat in the market, DeFiance Capital’s Eugin Lee noted that new products and innovations could still disrupt it, something that the community is seeing in SUSHI currently.

The two rival protocols have every ardent follower, but according to Lee, “both can do well”. Justifying the argument, Lee went on to provide a “moat” that is possessed by both UNI and SUSHI and stated that can essentially both list tokens that centralized exchanges cannot.

In addition, the liquidity provisions in UNI and SUSHI returns an LP token collateral that can be re-staked or restructured into other farm or collaterals protocol. This is something that their centralized counterparts or even aggregators do not offer.

Furthermore, Low transaction fees and slippage among other decentralized exchanges is another plus point according to the analyst who asserted that low trans fees and slippages mean that aggregators will prioritize UNI and SUSHI since the transaction fees and slippages for both DEXs were currently the same.

In short, though market participants may prefer Uniswap as an exchange, it cannot be ignored that the market was found to be moving a larger amount of SushiSwap’s native token. And considering the nascency of the space, there is enough space in the industry to accommodate both and let time decide what drives up the appeal of both the tokens in the coming days.

 

Binance-Backed Injective Protocol Announces Partnership With Binance Smart Chain

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Binance-backed Injective Protocol announced a partnership with Binance Smart Chain [BSC] on the 14th of December. According to the official blog post, the integration aims to further expedite derivatives adoption on the BSC ecosystem.

Injective Protocol’s popularity can be stemmed from a massive $2.6 million fundraise led by Pantera Capital. Its association with Binance has further advanced its traction. The protocol became the first-ever incubated project to host a successful IEO on Binance Launchpad. The cryptocurrency exchange’s native token, BNB is also available on Injective’s testnet.

To top that, Injective was the first protocol for cross-chain derivatives trading and its main competitors include some big names of the industry including centralized platforms such as CME Group, BitMEX, LedgerX, and OKEx, among others.

A quick primer: Injective is essentially a decentralized second layer DeFi protocol that supports trading of all markets, such as spots, futures, derivatives, CFDs, and perpetual swaps.

While noting that Binance has played an integral role in the growth of Injective  Protocol, its CEO and Co-founder Eric Chen stated,

“We are thrilled to be working with BSC. One of the core missions we have here at Injective is to truly pioneer decentralized derivatives adoption worldwide. Integrating with the burgeoning BSC DeFi ecosystem certainly puts us one step closer to achieving that goal.”

The latest development comes a week after Injective Protocol launched its ‘Solstice’ testnet for its deFi trading platform. Furthermore, Injective has been working toward a mainnet launch in the coming days. It had previously announced partnerships with popular blockchain firms such as Elrond, Ramp DeFi, among others.

Injective Protocol [INJ] Surges

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Shortly after the collaboration announcement, Injective Protocol’s native utility token, INJ has rallied almost 17%. This comes after the price of the token had an unimpressive run despite the launch of the testnet in the first week of December.

However, the latest development has catapulted the price to flip bullish even as Bitcoin and the rest of the altcoins noted a dip. At the time of writing, INJ’s value rose to $2.50 as it held a market cap of $37 million and a 24-hour trading volume of $22.7 million.

Ethereum Has Been Flowing From CeFi to DeFi

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The conversations surrounding the decentralized finance [DeFi] realm might have taken a backseat with the rise in prominence of Bitcoin, but when it comes to the second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, deFi continued to hold a special place.

Despite a significant price appreciation, Ethereum investors were found to be with withdrawing their assets from centralized exchanges. Data from the crypto analytic platform, Glassnode revealed that the amount of fees on #thereum spent on ETH deposits to centralized exchanges took a plunge from approximately 25% in 2017 to less than 1% according to the current.

Interestingly, almost all fees spent on transactions involving centralized exchanges in the past several months were used for ETH withdrawals. In short, there has been an overall decline with respect to Ethereum user activity on centralized exchanges.

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Gauging from the receding activity of Ethereum users on CEX over the last couple of months, it can be noted that the trend could have been bolstered due to rising gas fees on Ethereum.

Additionally, Ethereum locked in deFi protocols had hit a major slump when the figure took a dive from 8.867 million ETH to 6.692 million in the last week of November. The TVL began trending upwards as deFi has once again managed to gained momentum.

DEXs have produced a compelling case for the users and developers alike. However, repeated cases of security breaches and loopholes, the community has, time and again, questioned the protocols seeking to take advantage of the growing hype by advertising impressive returns while blatantly neglecting to perform security audits. Due to its contentious nature, decentralized finance space has been touted as either a bubble or the greatest wave of innovation the the world ever seen in finance.

DeFi Grabs Headline

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The number of individual addresses involved with deFi is now greater than 1.046 million, according to data compiled on Dune Analytics. While the rise in addresses does not correspond to rise in the number of individuals or firms, since a person may have more than one address, it, however, depicted a monumental rise as deFi’s popularity rose.

Will ‘Project Catalyst’ Be Cardano Blockchain’s First-Ever DeFi Protocol?

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IOHK, the company behind the Cardano blockchain announced experimenting with a decentralized finance [DeFi] lending protocol dubbed ‘Project Catalyst’. In a long Twitter thread, IOHK urged the Cardano community to pitch and, get community feedback. The community would then vote on the favorite ideas the best of which would get the funds to build the project.

IOHK tweeted,

“We’ll soon be inviting the community to register to vote, kicking off the first-ever public Catalyst funding round. An initial $250k-worth of #ADA will be available for building the best idea[s] at Cardano. And that’s just the beginning…”

Throughout 2021, IOHK revealed several rounds would, in turn, unlock millions-worth of ADA to fund development ranging from content to community resources, decentralized apps[ DApps] to decentralized finance [Defi]. With its latest initiative ‘#festivalofidead’, the team intends to accelerate the development of the Cardano ecosystem by pooling in the community by “empowering” and funding them.

The best ideas which will be selected by Cardano community members will essentially receive up to $250,000 worth of ADA to advance the development of their projects.

The first candidate to be announced for IOHK’s latest project is dubbed ‘Liqwid’ which claims to be an open-source lending protocol on a distributed decentralized cloud. According to Dewayne Cameron, Management Consultant at Liqwid, the platform enables participants to earn interest on deposits and borrow assets directly on the Cardano blockchain.

Furthermore, Liqwid is essentially governed by its members who are the only individuals that introduce proposals or vote on updates. All member decisions will be recorded and enforced by smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain.

According to Liqwid’s official release, the development phase for the protocol will begin in December third week while testing is scheduled for the end of the first quarter of 2021.

Besides, IOHK further revealed a second collaborative idea by Workshop Maybe, a community focussed organization, and Gimba Labs. According to the pitch, the idea aims to drive up adoption for Cardano.

 

Tron-Powered Lending Platform Just Lend Goes Live

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The Tron ecosystem first set foot into the world of decentralized finance back in July 2020. The first was the lending and borrowing platform dubbed “Just Lend” to enable Tron users to receive interests and borrow against collateral.

More than five months later, the first Tron-powered money market protocol went live on the 7th of December, according to the latest blog post by the JUST Foundation.

At first, Just Lend is set to accept TRX, USDT, USDJ, SUN, WIN, BTC, JST, and WBTT tokens as collateral for loans. Besides, the protocol will also enable smart contracts for TRX, BTC, SUN, JST, WIN, WBTT, USDT, and USDJ to distribute jTokens that correspond to underlying assets to users’ accounts at the exchange rate.

First-Ever Tron-Powered Lending Platform Goes Live

Just Lend aims to establish fund pools whose interest rates are essentially determined by an algorithm based on the supply and demand of Tron assets. According to the official release, the protocol has two roles- the depositor and the borrower both of which can directly interact with Just Lend to earn as well as pay the floating interest rate. Elaborating further on the protocol, the JUST foundation further elaborated,

“An open and transparent lending environment, quick response and low fees all make it easier for users to use JustLend. Decentralized lending in the TRON ecosystem will also inject confidence to the TRON DeFi ecosystem, and this low-risk borrowing by staking TRON assets will introduce a new way of financial management to TRON users.”

Supplying & Borrowing On Just Lend

Unlike the existing P2P platforms, the Just Lend protocol seeks to pool the supply of each user in the platform. This, in turn, would stir up liquidity and strike a better monetary balance. The “suppliers” will also be able to withdraw their assets anytime without having to wait for a specific loan to expire, which enables the protocol higher liquidity than its fellow P2P platforms.

With regards to borrowing assets on Just Lend, the users need to acquire jTokens as collateral through depositing tokens, at first. Following which the users can then borrow any available asset on the platform. As opposed to its P2P counterparts, Just Lend just asks the borrowers to specify the borrowing asset. No other additional information such as the expiry date is needed by the platform.

Furthermore, borrowing is carried out real-time, and its interest rate will be automatically adjusted depending on the market’s supply and demand.

DeFi Platform Cream Finance Announces Integration of Chainlink Price Feeds

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Peer to peer lending and exchange platform, Cream Finance announced the integration of Chainlink Price Feeds on the Ethereum mainnet as its primary oracle solution throughout all Cream markets.

According to the official release, the Chainlink network will be providing pricing data on the Ethereum mainnet to C.R.E.A.M for the ETH-denominated markets such as LINK, COMP, YFI, BUSD, USDT, USDC, UNI, and AAVE.

Announcing the same, Cream Finance stated,

“We are pleased to now use Chainlink’s market-leading decentralized network of price oracles to leverage high-quality off-chain pricing data for calculating the current volume-adjusted market prices of assets.”

Utilizing Chainlink, Cream will be able to leverage Sybil which is a decentralized network of independent resistant oracle networks to derive market prices for many leading cryptos. The blog post further mentioned that each Chainlink oracle node sources price data for multiple premium off-chain data aggregators.

This is to verify that the data source itself indicates a volume adjusted average aggregated from across both CEXs and DEXs. Following which, the responses of the individual nodes’ are then aggregated to construct a weight-adjusted on-chain price that Cream Finance’s smart contracts can reference when making loans or receiving deposits.

In return, Chainlink will guarantee that Cream Finance has access to robust and accurate price data to support a safe and reliable liquidation process, even during irregularities and anomalies be it flash loans, high gas prices, periods of network congestion, and centralized infrastructure outages.

Furthermore, Cream Finance has also confirmed that LINK holders will be able to use their tokens as collateral on its platform following the integration.

TWJ had earlier reported crucial collaboration of Cream Finance according to which Yearn Founder Andre Cronje revealed that the developers of both Yearn and Cream have teamed up to launch Cream v2. The main objective of this merger was to focus on lending and leverage products. Additionally, Cream v2 would enable earning yield with leverage and was slated to be a launchpad for future collaborative lending products of the two DeFi platforms.