Last Week in DeFi: Uniswap V3, SushiSwap Lending Dapp, Vesper Fund Collaboration

This week saw the launch of Uniswap V3, the long anticipated upgrade to the protocol that brought with it the “concentrated liquidity” feature. Also this week, the majority of DeFi project either put to vote, or passed, several propositions that further adds value to their platforms.

On Wednesday, Uniswap launched the third iteration of its protocol, bringing users its long-awaited “concentrated liquidity” feature. Uniswap V3 gives liquidity providers a “granular control” over what price ranges their capital is allocated to, and also aggregates individual positions into a single pool, forming one combined curve for users to trade against. The third iteration of the protocol was so popular that only two days after it was released it was integrated with the 1inch Network.

Monday saw DeFi project SushiSwap release its newest product, the BentoBox dapp token vault, which can support a collection of decentralized applications, provide lower network wallet fees, and automatically generate yields for depositors. The popular Ethereum DEX also advanced its multi-chain vision on Thursday, and went live on the Polygon network (previously known as Matic) with a $30 million liquidity mining program.

Also on Monday, the largest DeFi project on Ethereum, MakerDAO, returned 84,000 MKR tokens from the Development Fund to the DAO, with the tokens now being under the control of the Maker Governance. The move was another step towards achieving the goal of decentralization. The project also put forward an executive vote on Friday, which, if passed, will further add different vault types to the Liquidations 2.0 framework, and allocate additional budget to fun operations in the month of May.

On Saturday, BadgerDAO began phase one of its Interest Bearing Bitcoin (ibBTC) — a tokenized Bitcoin that earns interest for holders. The 35 ibBTC mining cap was reached shortly after the product was launched, with the project saying it will increase the cap to 175 ibBTC in phase two next week

On Monday, Vesper announced that its Blockforce grant vote had passed with an overwhelming majority (99.28%), awarding Blockforce with $100,000 to begin the “first-ever” collaboration between a hedge fund and a DAO. Another vote was passed on Monday, whitelisting UNI and USDT as deposit assets for the Vesper pools.

Aave’s community also passed several votes through the week. AIP-17 passed on Saturday with an overwhelming majority, introducing a community-led grants DAO — with a budget of $1 million per quarter — to fund ideas submitted by the Aave community. AIP-19, which also passed on Saturday, will enable Curve users to deposit into Aave, and collect both CRV and stkAAVE rewards.

Curve.Finance, on the other hand, initiated a vote on Friday to make its stETH pool five times more efficient, and while the community still has four days to vote, the proposal has so far gathered the minimum votes required for approval, with 100% supporting the proposal.

On Tuesday, PancakeSwap proposed to reduce its CAKE token emissions. The vote was passed on Friday, reducing the emissions by 20 CAKE per block on farms. Previously, the project minted 40 CAKE tokens per block — though only 25 of those entered circulation — but will now mint only 20.

The Binance Smart Chain-based Venus protocol deployed its VIP-23 proposal on Friday, which if passed will allow the project to use Chainlink’s oracles to scale its “fast growing ecosystem”. The project chose Chainlink as its data aggregation model generates accurate global market prices that are resistant to numerous types of attacks, like API downtime, flash crash outliers, and data manipulation attacks.

On Monday, Balancer launched an incentives program for Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBP), a “leading token distribution platform in DeFi”. Through the program, users can earn up to 100 BAL tokens for referring a project that will execute an initial token distribution through Balancer’s LBP.

Wednesday saw Bancor launch a new trader rewards program, that will award Bancor traders with limited edition NFTs through May. Traders will have the opportunity to earn a limited edition NFT trophy in 5 categories each week. The categories include “High Volume Bancor Bull”, “Bancorian BNT Trader”, “Vortex Maximalist”, “Link Marine”, and “Lucky Golden Bancie”. In order to ensure fairness, the project will use a script utilizing Chainlink VRF to randomly select one winning wallet address in each category.

Asset Prices & TVL

While all project tokens are significantly up in price for the past 14 days, this week saw a mixture of gains and losses. MakerDAO has continued to slowly increase its Total Value Locked through the week, jumping from $10.7 billion on Monday to almost $14 billion at the time of writing. The project’s MKR token also saw an incredible jump in price between Monday and Tuesday — increasing from $5,000 to more than $6,000 — but since then has declined and is currently trading with an 8% gain from the start of the week.

Vesper’s VSP saw the largest increase this week, slowly climbing from $30 to now more than $40. Second place was taken by Bancor’s BNT, which cored an 11% increase.

Three DeFi projects — Compound, Curve, and Uniswap — saw their TVL rise through the week by $2 billion, $1.7 billion, and $1.3 billion respectively, but all saw their tokens drop in price. COMP experienced a drop of 7%, UNI a 2.7%, and CRV a 2.3%.

The biggest losers this week were BadgerDAO, Alpha Finance, and Aave, which all had their tokens drop by around 10% in price. While ALPHA and AAVE saw a steady decline, BADGER experienced a significant boost between Friday and Saturday — jumping from $31 to almost $42 — but is currently trading 9% down from the start of the week.