Hello Defiers! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
Summing up this past week: Yield farming continues to be the biggest trend in DeFi, and while gaining interest from lending tokens isn’t new in the space, additional token incentives is supercharging the practice. Last week the trend blew up with the listing of COMP, this week DeFi teams launched more strategies for farmers, including with Balancer’s BAL, mStable, Ampleforth and ERC20 Bitcoin tokens. We spoke with some of the most active DeFi investors to get their tips for a profitable harvest.
Yield farming can be risky as some traders are taking on leverage to increase their token rewards. To reduce some of that risk, Opyn released put options to protect against a decline in the price of COMP, while UMA launched a token for traders to short it. In non-yield farming news, Lending platform DMM raised $6.5M in less than two days —the lending platform lists Coinbase as a partner in its website, but the exchange told The Defiant it’s not aware of any partnership. This week’s interview is with Ampleforth CTO Brandon Iles on how the project is rethinking money, and Adam Blumberg from Iteraxis wrote an op-ed on the new kind of advisor that is being bred in DeFi; the financial architect.
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Op-ed
DeFi is Breeding Financial Architects Who Can Hack Yield to Rival Any Hedge Fund
Adam Blumberg has been a financial planner for a decade, advising on how to best allocate investments for the relatively risk-averse crowd of Houston, Texas, where he is based. His firm Interaxis has been producing educational videos on the space for the past 10 months. In today’s column, Blumberg discusses how decentralized finance affects his own profession, investment management. He describes how DeFi’s transparency, composability and trustlessness radically impacts asset management, and predicts a new kind of advisor is being bred; the financial architect. They are based anywhere and don’t require special degrees or experience other than the ability to piece money legos together and extract the most profit for their clients.
Interview
"All the Dizzying Ways People are Farming Yield is Proof of DeFi Composability's Success:" Ampleforth CTO
Brandon Iles, the CTO of Ampleforth. Brandon is a former Google and Uber software engineer, and built his first crypto app together with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Today, he’s trying to rebuild the way money works. For its huge ambitions, Ampleforth is a relatively little-known project. It wants to create an entirely new category of monetary assets. The end result is a token that trades at close to $1, the 2019 US dollar, to be precise, but Ampleforth doesn’t like to be called a stablecoin —read on to find out why. We also talked about the project’s recent liquidity mining program called Geyser, where traders can earn AMPL by supplying liquidity on Uniswap, and how for Brandon, the dizzying activity around these schemes is proof of DeFi’s success.
🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:
Friday
Bytes
You Can Now Short $COMP: UMA released synthetic COMP token yCOMP on mainnet today, which enables traders to permissionlessly short Compound’s token.
Opyn Releases Put Options to Hedge Against COMP Volatility: Decentralized options platform Opyn created put options for Compound’s governance token. Traders can now buy oTokens, which provide the option to sell COMP at $150 on July 3, no matter what the market price is.
mStable is Latest to Join DeFi’s Liquidity Wars: Stablecoin aggregator mStable is the latest DeFi project to use its native governance token to incentivize liquidity.
Thursday
Dives
Coinbase "Not Aware" of Partnership With Tim Draper-Backed Project DMM: “The company is not aware of any partnership with DMM,” a Coinbase spokesperson said in an email. The DeFi project lists Coinbase as a partner on its website.
Art Can Save Crypto From Itself: What if blockchain development has come to a stage where it can attract a whole new slice of society? This new group is creators. Signe Pierce, the artist behind Foundation’s latest drop, explains why she’s tokenizing her work.
High Block Gas Limits Doesn’t Mean Lower Transaction Prices: As yield farming takes DeFi by storm, Ethereum miners are testing a new way to increase transaction throughput, but that won’t necessarily mean transacting on Ethereum is getting any cheaper.
Wednesday
Dives
Yield Farmers Have Found Their Next Crop —BAL: Three weeks ago, Balancer started its liquidity mining program, allocating 145k BAL governance tokens to LPs each week. Yesterday, those first three weeks of crops were harvested as 435k BAL was distributed to over 1k honest workers.
Ampleforth Launches Geyser Liquidity Mining Program: Ampleforth yesterday started distributing its token AMPL to users who provide liquidity to the ETH/AMPL pool on Uniswap V2, and then stake their Uniswap LP tokens in Ampleforth’s interface for the program, called Geyser.
BTC Joins Yield-Farming Frenzy: DeFi Yield Farming is pushing composability to its limits. Synthetix, Curve and Ren have teamed up to launch BTC liquidity incentives using Curve’s low-slippage pools.
Tim Draper-Backed DMM Sale Spurs Disgruntled Buyers: Lending platform DeFi Money Market, or DMM, raised $6.5 million in less than two days by listing its DMG token on decentralized exchanges. But now alleged buyers are complaining online about glitches with the sale.
Bytes
Status App Integrates With Keycard Hardware Wallet: Blockchain infrastructure builder Status Network updated its Status App, a mobile messaging app, crypto wallet, and Web3 browser to integrate the application with Keycard, an open-source hardware wallet.
Opyn Raises $2.16M in Round Led by Dragonfly: Decentralized options platform Opyn raised $2.16M in financing round led by Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt at Dragonfly Capital.
Tuesday
Dives
Top DeFi Yield Farmers Share Secrets to a Profitable Harvest: Yield farmers are earning as much as 100% APR on popular stablecoins on a good day in the field. We asked top Yield Farmers about their strategies and key takeaways.
How to Protect Against $COMP Mining Risks: DeFi Dad produces a video tutorial to help ensure the average DeFi newbie doesn't get liquidated using leverage in this experiment.
Bytes
PayPal, Venmo Said to Roll Out Crypto Buying and Selling: CoinDesk
💜Community Love💜
Thanking all the amazing Defiers for the support and love this week (and always)!
Jason Williams 🔴 @JWilliamsFstmed
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ΞWoki, Quadratic Funding's Hype Man 🦄🌈📣 @owocki
Grants Conga Line 💃🕺💃🕺💃🕺💃 RT or @ reply this tweet with a grant cart you recently checked out. I just funded @RadxChange @DemocracyEarth & other digital democracy projects! Lets see how long this *public goods* conga line can get! 💃🕺💃🕺💃🕺💃 https://t.co/kssRLj78bFThe Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.
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About the founder: I’m Camila Russo, a financial journalist writing a book on Ethereum with Harper Collins. (Pre-order The Infinite Machine here). I was previously at Bloomberg News in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires covering markets. I’ve extensively covered crypto and finance, and now I’m diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.
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It is always a pleasure to read your newsletters. Keep up the great work. Thank you!