I’ve shared my perspective on many DeFi protocols on this blog, but recently I realized I’ve never gone back to the basics: the DEXs. That’s precisely what we will do today, tackling the topic mostly by looking at value capture mechanisms.
AMM-based DEXs like Uniswap, Curve or SushiSwap all grew tremendously both in available liquidity and volume this year, and so did the fees they collected.
A few weeks ago, I shared my first post on algorithmic stablecoins highlighting the key characteristics that made such projects interesting in my eyes. In this piece, we’ll go deeper into the topics, with a comparative analysis of the two main models: the Basis model and the ESD model.
DeFi has grown tremendously over the past year, partly thanks to the appearance of more streamlined investment products such as Yearn’s or Harvest’s vaults. Thanks to their architecture, they facilitate the mutualization of capital which enables smaller yet profitable investments on money markets and other DeFi services like Curve or SushiSwap.
Remember when we used to talk of a “post-covid world”? It’s funny to see how the expression quickly stopped being used as people realized the social order of the “new” world would be as nonsensical and wasteful as the previous.
Yet, the phrase had the merit to stress the role of the pandemic which brought so much stress on our social structures that it resulted in twenty years of “progress” packed into one.
Since the beginning of December, a new trend has been shaping up in DeFi: algorithmic stablecoins. Several projects launched and saw significant growth, attracting even more interest for this subset of the space.
Before we dive into what they are and what they entail, let’s first discuss the addressable markets.
Yearn Finance has been making headlines lately with the announcement of several acquisitions like Pickle Finance or SushiSwap. The Yearn team has joined its development forces with five other DeFi projects already.
To grasp what’s happening, we’ll look back at the main events since September and how each of the different sub-projects is now working to achieve a shared goal.
Ethereum’s decentralized finance is ready to grow beyond its sandbox: with a dense network of financial primitives, it’s now easier than ever to harness DeFi for other ends, such as to replace a predatory relic of our past like the lottery, still insanely popular and detrimental.