Last Week in DeFi: Balancer V2, Alpha Finance Oracle Aggregator, SushiSwap Token Launchpad

On Tuesday, Balancer Labs officially released the second iteration of its automated market maker after more than a year of development. The team behind the upgrade said they expect V1 to continue to provide better prices until a “substantial amount” of liquidity has been migrated to V2, at which point Balancer believes the gas prices for simple swaps will be reduced by up to 53%. V2 will also move all of the platform’s assets into one big vault, meaning users will only need to pay for gas when going into or out of Balancer.

Monday saw Alpha Finance launch its new Oracle Aggregator, which uses data from two of the largest oracle providers — Band Protocol and Chainlink — to ensure scalability, flexibility, and security, as well as prepare the Alpha ecosystem for its upcoming growth stage. The tool will enable Alpha products to access verified data aggregated from up to three data oracles for a single asset in one location. Shortly after the re-launch of Alpha Homora V2, the development team was forced to increase its credit limit, which is now $600 million, due to the high demand.

SushiSwap has continued spreading its influence across a number of chains, and on Thursday it finally went live on OKExChain. On Friday, the project also revealed some details around its new token launchpad, named MISO, which will have its smart contracts split into two separate groups, tokens and markets. The token contract will be able to mint three different type of tokens; a standard ERC-20 token without a fixed supply; a token with a fixed supply; and the so called SushiTokens, which will have additional functions for governance, farming, and administration. The Markets contract enables projects to create different incentives and utilize different price discovery methods before launching their liquidity onto SushiSwap.

After returning 84,000 MKR tokens from the Development Fund to the DAO last week, MakerDAO revealed on Thursday it will take at least until 31 December for it to dissolution the Maker Foundation. Once achieved, this will move MakerDAO closer to its goal of decentralization, which has “always been paramount to Maker’s mission”.

On Wednesday, Compound revealed it will be splitting close to $200,000 in grants to seven projects. This will be the third batch of grants to be funded by Compound, and while fewer in number than the last batch, all seven projects “pack a punch”. The project has also put to vote two proposals, 045 and 046, which if approved by the community will add the TUSD and LINK tokens to the protocol with 0% collateral factor.

Another project to release a new wave of grants was Uniswap, which on Thursday awarded close to $500,000 to ten projects, all of which promise to “make v3 even more accessible” and find new ways to “engage the ever-growing Uniswap community”. Uniswap further said it had seen a 50% rise in the grants applications it has received ever since it launched its third iteration of the protocol.

The Aave Grants proposal received unanimous support from the community, and the grants program was officially launched on Monday. The AAVE token has also continued its steady growth, and while likely not connected to the Aave Grants program launch, the token has experienced a 20% growth over the last week, and is currently trading for $537.

On Wednessday, Curve Finance began a community discussion on how to make the platform multi-chain. While it has already expanded to Fantom and Polygon, one of the issues the platform is facing is finding deep enough liquidity without a new token or rewards. The vote to increase the efficiency of stETH liquidity pools by a factor of 5, which was initiated last week, has passed with overwhelming support, with the proposal getting enacted on Thirsday.

BadgerDAO announced on Wednesday that its Badger BTC Bridge — which was launched at the end of April in partnership with RenVM — will soon be coming to the Solana, Fantom, and Polygon blockchains. The project also began the guarded launch of its Interest Bearing Bitcoin (ibBTC) phase 2 on Thursday, which raised the mintable cap for ibBTC to 200 BTC.

Following the rising popularity of the DOGE token, PancakeSwap decided to initiate a community vote to enable users to stake DOGE and earn CAKE tokens on Wednesday. The proposal was approved the next day, with almost 82% of the community supporting the decision. On Friday, the project also announced the next Initial Farm Offering (IFO) to be hosted on the PancakeSwap IFO platform. Called Hot Cross, the project is a tooling company that is ETH and EVM Network focused.

On Wednesday, Venus announced it had fully upgraded to Chainlink as its oracle solution. In order to ensure that Venus is always fully collateralized and referencing fair market prices, its lending markets will now leverage Chainlink during both the loan issuance and liquidation processes.