Last Week in DeFi: BadgerDAO’s ibBTC, Balancer’s BAL Sale, Vesper Partners With Gauntlet

This week saw several platforms add new liquidity pools, while other projects conducted token offerings. Finally, BadgerDAO officially launched its interest bearing Bitcoin product without limits on its minting. Vesper Finance partnered with Gauntlet on a new on-chain risk management system, while PancakeSwap used its IFO participation fees to buy back $850, 000 CAKE tokens from the market.

After reaching the final phase of its guarded launch, BadgerDAO’s interest bearing Bitcoin (ibBTC) officially went live on Thursday, showcasing the capital efficiency and composability only achievable on Ethereum. Shortly after ibBTC’s launch, Cream Finance placed a proposal up for community vote to whitelist ibBTC as a collateral asset. Users will now be able to use the Badger Bridge to transfer their Bitcoins to the Fantom Network thanks to a new integration between Fantom and RenVM.

Kalmar became the third project to conduct its initial token offering (IFO) on PancakeSwap. The sale of the KALM token was fairly successful, with more than 160,000 unique wallets committing over $800,000 to the project. Also on Thursday, PancakeSwap used the proceeds from its IFO participation fee to buy back $850 million CAKE tokens worth from the market, which it intends to bur the coming Monday.

On Monday Vesper put to vote a proposal to work with DeFi modeling platform Gauntlet on a new on-chain risk management system, which was approved by the community on Thursday. The new system will consist of two components, a monitoring dashboard for strategies, and a “lending risk model” for dynamic collateral allocation. On Saturday, Vesper officially launched the incentivized beta for its USDCv3 pool with 50,000 VSP as reward for participants.

On Wednesday Venus introduced VIP-27, which would gradually reduce the collateral rations on the XCS and SXP tokens by 5%. The next day, the protocol partnered with PancakeSwap to enable VRT-BNB liquidity providers to earn CAKE tokens through a new PancakeSwaps VRT Syrup Pool. On Friday the project had its VRT token listed on the Gate.io cryptocurrency trading platform, which supported a VRT token airdrop to XVS holders.

On Tuesday, SushiSwap partnered with AMM-based decentralized margin trading protocol Lever, which then went live on Sushi’s Onsen program. Users can now farm SUSHI tokens using the LEV-WETH liquidity pool. On Thursday, SushiSwap held a dutch auction for the SAK3 token on its new token launchpad, MISO, which raised $3.21 in SUSHI tokens from 265 participants. The SAK3 token is the first of its kind tokenized sake, with 888 tokens representing 888 real world bottles of sake. While users can hold a fraction of a token, for them to redeem a bottle of sake they need to own at least 1 token.

On Tuesday the dYdX trading platform launched a new CRV-USD perpetual market on Layer 2, enabling holders of Curve Finance’s token to go long or short on STV with up to 10x leverage. On Wednesday, Curve Finance put forth a proposal for a new decentralized-only stablecoin pool due to a renewed demand from its community. Even though the vote will end on Monday, it has already received huge support from the community.

On Friday, MakerDAO put forth an Executive vote, which if passed will make changes to the protocol’s oracle whitelisting and Liquidation 2.0 activations. Most notably, the PSM-USDC-A Debt Ceiling will be increased from 2 billion to 3 billion DAI, a number of vault type will be added to the Liquidations 2.0 framework, and the Flat Kick Incentive (tip) will be increased from 0 to 300 DAI for all vault types.

On Thursday, Balancer Labs acquired $24.25 million through the sale of BAL tokens from its treasury to “some of the most respected investors in the cryptocurrency space”. The newly acquired funds will help Balancer grow the awareness and education of its protocol in the Asia-Pacific region, expand its community engagement, and support developers ready to build on top of the Balancer protocol.

On Thursday Alpha Homora announced a new mining period for its ALPHA token mining. The project will distribute 4,800,000 ALPHA tokens to stablecoin lenders, Ethereum lenders on Alpha V2, and V1 and V2 users with leveraged positions between 26 May and 9 June.

Bancor launched a new pool for Wootrade’s WOO token with BNT liquidity mining rewards. WOO holders will now be able to stake their holdings on Bancor and earn WOO tokens from the swap fees and BNT from rewards. The pool also offers impermanent loss protection.