This Week in DeFi – October 8

October 8, 2021 CoinCapCentral DeFi 0

To the DeFi community,

This week, Fei announced V2 of the hybrid stalecoin design, bringing improved incentive alignment and other improvements learned through the initial months of the platform operating in the wild. Fei will be redeemable 1:1 for PCV (protocol controlled value), and will employ Balancer pools to help mitigate volatility risk to the platform. Hybrid stablecoins are growing up quickly. 

 

Dominant Finance has come to Polygon, allowing users to trade dominance pairs with faster transactions and far lower costs. Similar to perpetual contracts, dominance pairs allow users to trade based on the relative market cap of two different assets like ETH and BTC, increasing or decreasing their return based on the change in market caps after the trade has been initiated. 

 

Visor Finance, a liquidity manager for Uniswap V3 pools, is pitching in on the Perpetual Protocol liquidity program, earning transaction fees and PERP rewards by depositing USDC in PERP pools on Visor. Managed liquidity can help reduce exposure to impermanent loss, and increase transaction fee earnings over time.

 

And Stripes Finance closed on $8.5 million in funding led by Multicoin Ventures, Defiance Capital, Fabric Ventures, and Morningstar Capital. The interest rate swap perpetuals protocol will spend the funds developing on-chain derivatives for interest rate swaps facilitated by AMM technology, with plans to add yield hedging and other advanced financial instruments in the future.

 

For such a new industry, it’s amazing how much can be going on at once in DeFi. While recent Compound bugs have shaken some community members and raised tough questions about the cadence of decentralized governance decision making, other Ethereum-based DeFi projects like Stripes continue to raise millions of dollars for markedly more complex financial concoctions.

But for those who have been around for more than the current cycle, it’s not hard to remember a time when Ethereum, in the wake of the original DAO hack, seemed like little more than a pipe dream, with major doubts about the overall viability of the project and specific concerns around the true immutability of the Ethereum blockchain (ETC stans still haven’t forgotten).

And while we’ve made incredible progress in just two years, moments like these stand out as reminders of how far we still have to go to create robust, reliable systems that can truly stand the test of time (and misaligned actors) and the rigors of real world uses. It’s easy to get in the mindset that the legal and financial infrastructure we enjoy in the modern world were built in a systematic way, tested and free from errors when they launch. 

The truth is, all of these systems have been through generation after generation of trial, error, and improvement, and in many cases still grapple with structural issues that may never truly be addressed. That’s the promise and power of DeFi and crypto more broadly – mistakes are bound to happen, but for the first time our infrastructure and incentives are designed to address even structural issues, along with the myriad of bugs and errors that crop up along the way.

Just remember, this isn’t about living in the decentralized future. We’re building the decentralized future. Try to enjoy the ride ?

 

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