1 / For anyone stumbling upon DeFi wanting to know WTF happened this summer - here’s a high-level summary
2 / liquidity mining 👩🌾👩🌾👩🌾
A short-term growth strategy, where users provide liquidity in exchange for rewards, with the goal for incentivizing long term stickiness
Designs vary by timing, $ amount & recipient
COMP was the OG -- but liquidity mining is now table stakes
3 / CeFi 💕 DeFi
Binance and FTX leaned in with Binance Smart Chain and Serum
Jump Capital is market making for DeFi
Coinbase is listing tokens faster than ever (aka $UNI) and has a rumored upcoming token listing product.
More to come
4 / Composability!!!
Audited protocols are being used as open standards (e.g., Uniswap, Compound, Balancer), stitched together, forked & iterated upon
the beauty of open source innovation is *here*
[insert lego meme]
5/ Forking goes mainstream
Fast forks, pump & dump forks, sustainable forks. There’s a new fork daily
@ianjohnlee did a great analysis on fork defense strategies bit.ly/35Rzmmm
6 / BTC comes to Ethereum
BTC on Ethereum is accelerating. appears that BTC wants in on DeFi yields
Likely to see lots more in the pegged assets category
7 / DEXes are winning
AMMs provide early liquidity for projects and became the playground of DeFi
chart from @MessariCrypto @jpurd17
8 / Risky business
The compounding risk is understated and not yet well understood [unaudited code, regulatory overhang, bugs, hacks, oracles]
The need for products like @nexusmutual @cozyfinance @blocknative has never been stronger
9 / ELI5 via aggregation
YFI filled a market need - aggregation & optimization
Many others are in the game @parawap @1inch @raricapital @instadapp @totle
We’ll see bifurcation by market segment + strategy for retail + institutional investors
10 / Fair Launch movement
Making it easier to:
(1) bootstrap liquidity
(2) distribute tokens without a presale
(2) generate revenue quickly
treats all users equally
11 / Gas fees edge out the retail trader
Defi was much smaller 12 months ago - the market is now flooded with DeFi whales & institutional investors
Fees make it a game of scale & serious trading optimization
12 / Ok that was a lot - there is a ton to unpack for each point
but hopefully, this serves as a good recap & starting point!
What did I miss?
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