Last Week in DeFi: Alpha Finance Supports New Assets, Venus Risk Enhancements

This week saw several projects add support for new assets to their platforms, especially Alpha Homora V2, which now supports the lending of a number of new assets. BadgerDAO has also reached the end of the guarded launch of its ibBTC this week. The falling prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which began this month, has also affected all DeFi projects on the market, with the majority of them loosing around 50% of their Total Value Locked (TVL) by Sunday.

Alpha Homora has been busy adding new leveraged yield farming pools, as well as support for new lending assets, to its V2 platform the entire week. Monday began with adding support for sUSD and SNX lending and borrowing, and new sUSD and SNX pools. The following day the platform also added support for DPI, UNI, and SUSHI lending, and a new pool for DPI, which was followed with support and a pool for LINK on Thursday. Finally, the platform added support for WBTC on Friday.

PancakeSwap began the week with a burn of 5,206,192 CAKE tokens — equivalent to almost $144 million at the time — which included $6.2 million of CAKE tokens which were bought back by the project. Hot Cross also completed its initial farm offering (IFO) on PancakeSwap this week, with it turning out to be a big hit. Over $370 million were committed to the project, with the Basic Sale overselling by 1528.49%, and the Unlimited Sale by 33416.32%. PancakeSwap has also started looking to hire new engineers. More specifically, the project is looking for a Senior Backend, Solidity, and Blockchain AQ engineers.

The Venus protocol has now reduced its daily emissions of the XVS token by 50%, after VIP-24 proposal passed. On Wednesday, the XVS token experienced a price spike which triggered the liquidation of over $200 million. In order to avoid this situation in the future, Venus has put a new proposal to the vote, which if passed will implement new risk enhancements to the protocol.

On Tuesday, BadgerDAO joined the Armor Alliance Big Bug Bounty Challenge with Immunefi. The rewards for finding bugs on BadgerDAO will be calculated using the Immunefi Vulnerability Severity Classification System, with the rewards for critical payouts being capped at 10% of the funds at risk. On Sunday, the mintable cap of 525 ibBTC was finally reached during Badger’s guarded launch. Next week we will see the full launch of ibBTC, with no cap limits for minting the token, and it being enabled for all wallets.

On Wednesday Vesper Finance saw its VSP and VVSP tokens go live of Cream Finance. Two days later, the platform announced the launch of an incentivized beta for its new multi-strategy USDC Vesper Grow Pool, which enables pools to allocate percentages of total deposits to different strategies, and also supports dynamic updates to these allocations.

PowerPool, one of Balancer B2 launch partners, has built a new gas-efficient implementation that enables all users of the Balancer ecosystem to use new strategies for pool operation and asset management.

On Wednesday, Barn Bridge’s SMART Yield product enabled support for Aave’s stablecoin markets, allowing users to better manage risk. On Sunday, proposal AIP-21 passed with an overwhelming majority. Aave’s FeeCollector smart contract will now receive a share of all CRV and GUSD interests, like all other assets.

On Thursday, the Kraken exchange announced it has opened deposits for the SUSHI token, with its trading going live on 24 May. SushiSwap also whitelisted the partial-collateralized stablecoin IRON, as well as the TITAN token, on Polygon.

Proposal 046 on Compound, which whitelisted Chainlink’s LINK token on the platform, passed on Sunday.

Curve Finance initiated a vote to connect the alUSD and rETH pools to its DAO. While the vote is set to finish on 26 May, the community has already shown its support of these two assets.