Last Week in DeFi: Badger Bridge, Bancor Auto-Compounding, Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol

This week saw several DeFi projects integrate Chainlink’s price feeds to their platforms. Price-wise, most DeFi tokens defied gravity, QUICK being a clear leader with a price hike of around 600%. ALPHA and CAKE also impressed with more than a 55% increase, while Vesper’s VSP was the only major asset to go down in price.

On Monday, BadgerDAO launched its new Bitcoin-to-Ethereum bridge (Badger Bridge), which enables users to convert their native Bitcoin to renBTC and wBTC with “one click” thanks to an integration with RenVM. As part of the integration, the Ren Project agreed to transition its bridge platform wBTC.cafe — which has made around $1.3 billion token conversions since June 2020 — into the new Badger Bridge. In the first 48 hours after the launch, the Badger Bridge was already used to transfer $68 million worth of Bitcoin. In order to secure the daily rebases of its elastic supply token DIGG, Badger integrated a new DIGG/BTC Chainlink price feed on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Balancer decided to move away from competition and embrace cooperation with a new partnership with Gnosis. The collaboration between the two will result in a brand new decentralised exchange (DEX), Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol (BGP), which will combine Balancer V2’s flexible liquidity pools and Gnosis V2’s price finding mechanism. BGP will be rolled out in three stages, with the firms targeting a mid-June launch. Balancer further said that, due to this announcement, it will be moving back its V2 iteration by a “week or two”. A day later, Balancer also announced it will be launching Balancer Simulations, in partnership with TokenEngineering Academy, which will gather DeFi researchers to work on challenges like Dynamically Adjusting Pools, Efficient Liquidity Mining, LP Risk Management, and AMM-based complex financial products.

A Chainlink BNB/USD price feed on Binance Smart Chain was also integrated with PancakeSwap on Wednesday, in order to secure the platform’s new Prediction product. Launched the same day, PancakeSwap Prediction allows users to bet on whether the price of BNB/USDT will go up or down in the next 5 minutes. On Friday, the DeFi platform also launched an auto-compounding pool, which no longer requires users to manually re-stake their CAKE tokens to get the best APY.

On Thursday, Vesper also integrated with Chainlink. The new integration will allow the decentralised fund to deliver the “most-accurate-possible” look at the fiat value of the digital assets within its pools. In its quest to support all major ERC-20 tokens, Vesper also started a vote to whitelist Uniswap and Tether as deposit assets. Even though the vote will end on 3 May, it has already gathered 98% support from the community. Another vote, with a 99% approval from the community, will allow Vesper to award $100,000 of VSP tokens to Blockforce Capital, enabling a new fund that leverages Vesper products to maximise returns through Vesper Grow pools.

On Tuesday, Alpha Homora announced a new liquidity mining period, from 28 April to 12 May, on both Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Two days later, the DeFi project also added support for BNB/XVS and BNB/FRONT leveraged yield farming pools on PancakeSwap vBSC. These pools allow users to farm CAKE with just one token.

Wednesday saw Venus announce an exclusive Binance Smart Chain airdrop of its Venus Reward Token (VRT) — a mechanism created to become an additional mining distribution to suppliers and borrowers of the Venus Protocol — which will be distributed on 15 May. The platform will also airdrop 1 VENUS NFT per 10 XVS owned to all non-exchange wallets, in commemoration of the Venus Protocol. A day later, Venus also announced that its XVS token could now be spent at over 60 million merchant locations, earning users up to 8% cash back in BNB through the Binance Visa Card.

On Monday, Bancor released xBNT — a “set-and-forget” staking solution that will provide automated yield optimisation for Bancor liquidity pools — which will address the issue of high gas fees for single-sided exposure and protection from impermanent loss. Built by the xToken project, xBNT bundles BNT deposits together in a single contract such that it minimises gas costs for liquidity providers, and also re-stakes BNT autonomously on behalf of investors.

On Tuesday, Uniswap decided to expand its V3 core contract bug bounty — which allows users to earn up to $500,000 for the discovery of high severity bugs — to include the V3 periphery contracts. This includes the previously mentioned reward from Uniswap Labs, and a new $500,000 reward from Uniswap Grants.

Also on Monday, Aave’s AIP-16 proposition passed with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote from the community, and introduced V2 liquidity mining incentives. Users, integrators, builders, and others can receive stkAAVE tokens, boosting their governance weight and and increasing the protocol’s security.

Friday saw MakerDAO put to vote a new Executive Proposal, which if passed will allow the project to integrate ETH and WBTC collateral types into its brand new Liquidations 2.0 system. If approved, the proposal will have around 70% of all Dai — including the vast majority of Dai generated against non-stablecoin collateral assets — covered by the updated Liquidations system.

Price & TVL Changes

The largest price increase we saw this week was that of QuickSwap’s QUICK, which pumped from $180 all the way up to $1600 a piece before stabilising around the $1200 mark. Alpha Homora’s ALPHA token, which began the week with a price of $1.15 per token, is now trading at $2.16. Venus’ XVS token saw a slight price growth from Monday ($60) to Wednesday ($77), but then exploded in price and is now trading around the $106 mark.

PancakeSwap’s CAKE, on the other hand, experienced steady price growth from Monday — when it started trading for $28 — to Saturday, and is now changing hands for $40 a piece. The last token with amazing growth this week was AAVE, which jumped by around 40% and is now trading for $483. The DeFi project also saw an incredible increase in its Total Value Locked, which jumped from less than $6 billion on Monday to upwards of $9.5 billion on Saturday.

Other tokens, such as COMP, CRV, SUSHI, and BAL all enjoyed a steady price increase through the week, with all of them currently trading for around 25% more than they did on Monday. BADGER is also up 25% — and trading for around $35 — though it reached this price on Wednesday, and has since traded in the ranges between $31 and $35. Maker’s MKR token reached an all time high of $4,762 today, though this is only a 16% increase in price from Monday to now.

Despite Vesper’s increase in TVL this week — from $1.2 billion on Monday to $1.5 billion on Saturday — its VSP token price went the other way. While the token saw a boost of 10% in its price on Monday ($44), it has gone significantly down since, and is now trading around the $33 mark.