Recap of DeFi Space, August 2021
Defiprime Monthly #36
New DeFi Products
Swing Protocol
Swing is a new protocol designed to allow users to buy and sell votes. The Swing team is also developing fluid voting markets on top of already existing coin voting systems, where users can sell their votes for DAI in order to extract value from their governance tokens.Ribbon V2
Ribbon V2 is a new release of the Ribbon protocol. V2 mainly focusing on decentralization of the vaults, a rebuild of the vault accounting system, and governable vault parameters.$DYDX
dYdX’s protocol token, $DYDX, was recently released at the start of August, with the main benefits of the token being, of course, governance of dYdX and monthly rewards by trading on the dYdX exchange.
Finance.vote is a sponsor of our monthly newsletter 🙏
Finance.vote is a protocol for decentralised governance. At its heart is a DAO that governs a dApp suite, which provides all the tools that decentralised organisations will need to build a sustainable token economy. Finance.vote champions collaboration and digital democracy through decentralised technology and welcomes new and established protocols to upgrade their markets and governance.
What’s new at Defiprime
Defiprime listed a handful of new products this month. They include:
Step Finance, a dashboard for the Solana blockchain that lets you visualize, analyze, aggregate, and execute transactions.✅
Cryptex Finance, a tokenized total cryptocurrency market cap into TCAP token, that gives holders real-time price exposure to this key metric.✅
Serum, a DEX which is permissionless, trustless, and orderbook-based exchange on Solana. ✅
Raydium, an AMM built on the Solana blockchain, that leverages the central order book of the Serum DEX to enable lightning-fast trades, shared liquidity, and new features for earning yield.✅
Saber, a cross-chains stablecoin exchange based on Solana, which provides a liquidity foundation for many stablecoins.✅
Alpaca Finance, a lending protocol for leveraging yield farming, by multiplying farming principles.✅
Interviews with DeFi projects
Interested in TCAP? We recently talked with Joe Sticco of Cryptex about their development, and specifically how they are developing TCAP, a fully decentralized trustless total crypto market cap asset. Find it here.
This month we also talked with the APWine team, to find out how they are making their protocol of the same name. Find it here.
Looking at Solana? We talked with George of Step Finance, about how they are building a DeFi portfolio manager and aggregator, and how they are creating a UI for people to manage and transact across all protocols on Solana. Find it here.
Looking for projects on Ethereum? We recently talked with 0xNovachrono, the project lead and founder of Projectuanthe, which sets out to develop a set of Decentralized Invisible Transaction Scheme, and additionally wants to empower anonymous P2P transactions through ringCT and non-custodial NFT & DeFi interactions through zkSNARKS on ETH. Find it here.
We recently talked with 0xJohnny of Punk Protocol, and how they are building the first DeFi 401(k) pension service on ETH. Find it here.
We talked with Charles Smith of Shield protocol recently, from his journey from the Fintech industry to DeFi, to how Shield is building a one-of-a-kind decentralized protocol for future derivatives infrastructure. Find it here.
Noteworthy Links
Circle’s journey in becoming a national digital currency bank
Dune Analytics opposed a $25M Uniswap grant to its competitor, stating that it makes no sense for it all to be piped to one company when there are so many.
💸 Venture Financing
Sense Finance raised $5.2M, in an attempt to “add a new dimension to DeFi.”
The DeFi platform Krystal raised $6.6M in seed funding at the start of August, with participation from investors Hashed, DeFi Alliance, and others.
a16z, BlockTower, and Alameda Research-backed a $12.5M funding round for lending protocol TrustToken.
The indexing protocol Nakji Network raised $8.8M in SAFT funding at the start of August.
Perpetual Protocol launched a $47M fund in an attempt to boost DeFi derivatives in the middle of August.
LyraDAO received a $1M contribution in funding from the synthetixDAO on the 10th of August.
Tally, a governance startup, raised $6M from DAOs and VCs.
Polygon merged with Hermez Network on the 13th of August, in a $250M deal.
Dune Analytics raised $8M in a Series A funding round, led by USV.
Exactly raised $3M in seed funding, in an attempt to bring fixed-income to DeFi.
Scallop, a DeFi neo-banking app, closed a $2.5M seed funding round, with Blackedge Capital being the lead investor.
The Avalanche Foundation announced a $180M DeFi incentive program, to bring blue-chip DeFi apps to Avalanche.
The Cross-chain Protocol, Chainflip, raised $6M to fund their growth and security audits.
FinTech collective raised $250M, and also ended up launching its own dedicated digital assets strategy.
The AI Firm, Alethea AI, recently raised $16M to create an NFT metaverse, populated by “NFT bots.”
OpenSwap raised $1.5M in funding on the 25th of August, with the lead investors being NGC Ventures and Coin8 Ventures.
Euler closed an $8M Series A funding round, led by Paradigm.
Apricot Finance announced its $4M fundraising campaign on the 25th of August.
MatrixETF closed a seed & private funding round for an undisclosed amount.
a16z introduced a new seed fund of $400M, with the main aim being at tech and DeFi.
Syndicate recently raised $20M in a Series A funding round, in an attempt to scale community-driven investing.
Upcoming DeFi Events
Blockchain, Crypto-Arts & Future of Money 2021 - 11 Sep 2021 - Lagos, Nigeria
MCON Denver 2021 - 15 Sep 2021 - Denver, US
ETHOnline - 17 Sep 2021 - Online
NFT Con - 12 Oct 2021 - Online
LA Blockchain Summit - 02 Nov 2021 - LA, US and Online
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