DeFi
In Aave Founder Stani Kulechov’s ‘Grand Plan’, $11 Billion DeFi Lender Overtakes MakerDAO – DL News
- Aave’s founder explained to DL News how decentralization opens the doors to competition.
- Aave has transformed into a DeFi supermarket with a wallet, social media channel, and stablecoin.
- Managing the complexity of a new business structure poses challenges.
Aave Labs has built its brand over the past seven years by creating a no-frills lending platform.
It avoided complexity and weathered the 2022 bear market as a stable DeFi banking business.
Today, Stani Kulechov, the company’s Finnish co-founder, is transforming Aave into a DeFi supermarket.
It includes a stablecoin, called GHO; a crypto wallet called Family; and Lens Protocol, as well as a social media network that is in the process of raise $50 million investors.
Alongside Aave’s lending operations, these units are now housed under a new parent company called Avara, based in London.
These moves strengthen Aave’s rivalry with several DeFi companies.
“Obviously, the advantage of a decentralized system is that there are always open doors for competitors,” Kulechov said. DL News.
No other player looms larger than MakerDAO, the seven-year-old stablecoin issuer that has long been in lockstep with Aave. As Aave has added new companies, so has Maker.
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“Every person on the planet has social capital.”
— Stani Kulechov, Aave
In his attempt to grow, Kulechov trades a simple model for a more complex ecosystem.
Kulechov said DL News This won’t be a problem. By building a single purchasing platform, Avara will cater to the needs of both DeFi newcomers and seasoned cryptocurrency users.
“Every person on the planet, regardless of language, nation, geographical location, has social capital,” Kulechov said.
“If we can solve the problem of who owns what we own online, that will fundamentally unlock more value.”
So far, Kulechov and the Aave team have proven their ability to create value.
By charging fees to users to borrow, lend, liquidate loans and make deposits, Aave has recorded approximately $100 million in income over the past 30 days, according to data from Logical token.
Aave’s total locked value, or deposits, has more than doubled in the past 12 months, to $11 billionData from DefiLlama shows this. Aave, active on a dozen different blockchains, surpassed MakerDAO this year to become the third most valuable DeFi project.
Aave’s TVL over the past three years. Source: DeFi Llama.
Building a walled garden for Aave users may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense, said Drew Osumi, co-founder of venture capital studio Number Group.
“If Avara has a social network, a wallet, lending, and a stablecoin, I feel like there’s a world out there where if someone is completely new to crypto, they could see this as an easy onboarding experience,” Osumi said. DL News.
“I feel like the big plan is to be a decentralized, permissionless Meta, where users are actually valued at market value.”
But why would the world need another social media platform?
“The main idea will probably not be to replace Twitter,” Kulechov said. “What will be interesting is to have an open shared network, which anyone can create, and which already has users.”
Lens Protocol allows developers to build Instagram-like apps and add cryptographic features to them.
It caters to NFT collectors by turning profile pictures and user IDs into non-fungible tokens. It also allows decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, to propose and vote on key issues for their community directly on Lens.
DeFi Rivals
Aave and Maker have been the foundation of decentralized finance since the ICO era in 2017. Both have benefited from meteoric crypto rallies and both have suffered market crashes.
The two often collaborated even though they were in competition.
This duel reached its peak with competing stablecoins.
Maker issues DAI, DeFi’s oldest decentralized stablecoin. Aave has started issuing its own stablecoin, GHOin July 2023.
Stablecoins used throughout DeFi. Source: DeFi Llama.
Both stablecoins are pegged to the dollar and are over-collateralized by other cryptocurrencies. For example, to mint $1 of either stablecoin, you would need to invest more than $1 in another cryptocurrency such as Ethereum.
It’s a market expected According to Bernstein analysts, this figure is expected to reach $3 trillion over the next five years.
“Stablecoins represent the largest market opportunity in crypto,” said Lito Coen, head of growth at Socket Protocol, a cross-chain bridging protocol. “If you’re going to tackle another market after lending, stablecoins are the most logical expansion.”
Extreme volatility
With GHO, Aave is also showing competitiveness. Indeed, Maker launched its own lending protocol, Spark, in 2023.
“GHO makes a lot of sense, especially when one of the largest stablecoins is directly overcollateralized spear a competitor to Spark,” Coen said.
The battle lines became clearer in April when the Maker community offered to support $1 billion in DAI with a new untested stablecoin issued by Ethena, a platform on the Ethereum blockchain.
Called USDe, the asset supports its $1 ankle differently from GHO or DAI.
Rather than being over-collateralized, it is backed by staked Ethereum positions and short Ethereum positions on exchanges that make money if the price of Ethereum falls. This is an innovative system, but one that has not proven itself in conditions of extreme market volatility.
For Aave, the arrival of the Ethena market brought many risks. If USDe collapsed due to the market crash, there was concern that DAI would also lose its peg.
With over $130 million in direct investment (DAI) in Aave, this was a risk the Aave community could not bear.
1B $DAI
– made from scratch (20% of total supply)
-in a protocol not tested in combat
-with zero risk mitigation
-weak oracles in less than a month
-for assets that are hyper-sensitive to market conditionsis the definition of reckless
Will offer DAI LTV reduction in Aave today
— Marc “Chainsaw” Zeller 👻 🦇🔊 (@lemiscate) April 2, 2024
In April, Marc Zeller, founder of a DeFi governance project called Aave Chan Initiative, propose eradicate all DAI markets on Aave.
Kuleshov agreed.
“The departure process should begin immediately in case of a favorable outcome,” Kulechov said. wrote in the Aave forum.
Kuleshov attributed the episode to risk management rather than direct competition.
“There has been a significant increase in the perception of DAI risk,” he said. DL News“If that risk increases, the best thing to do is to be as conservative as possible.”
Meanwhile, Kulechov’s Lens protocol faces competition from another crypto-based social media protocol called Farcaster.
Both offer many similar features, but Lens stores more activity (likes, follows, and posts) on the blockchain than Farcaster. Farcaster opts for speed and user experience.
Farcaster has a big lead so far, with almost 600,000 users compared to Lens’ 430000. It also recently closed a $150 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Paradigm and joined by Andreessen Horowitz, USV and other leading venture capitalists.
“It’s a completely different sector within crypto, much less proven.”
— Lito Coen, Socket
It remains to be seen, however, whether these two social networks will last.
“The most uncertain sector for me is Lens,” Socket’s Coen said. “It’s a completely different sector within cryptocurrency, which, in general, is much less proven.”
New fundraising
Kulechov hopes so too.
In June, DL News announced that it was launching a new fundraising round that would value Lens at $500 million.
“I’m a big fan of what Stani is doing with Avara,” Coen said. “I don’t think enough teams are thinking big and trying to grow horizontally.”
Despite all the new technologies and business models in DeFi, Kulechov’s initiatives show how old-school product development and new markets are essential to growth.
“We like to move from building infrastructure to thinking about what these businesses are and also what interfaces we can build,” Kulechov said.
Liam Kelly is a DeFi correspondent at DL NewsContact us at liam@dlnews.com.
DeFi
Haust Network Partners with Gateway to Connect to AggLayer
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, August 1, 2024, Chainwire
Consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies is a snowball that is accelerating by the day. More and more people around the world are clamoring for access to DeFi. However, the user interface and user experience of cryptocurrencies still lag behind their fundamental utility, and users lack the simple and secure access they need to truly on-chain products.
Haust Network is a network and suite of products focused on changing this paradigm and bringing DeFi to the masses. To achieve this goal, Haust Network has announced its far-reaching partnership with bridgeseasoned veterans in rapidly delivering revolutionary blockchain utilities for projects. The Gateway team empowers blockchain developers to build DAOs, NFT platforms, payment services, and more. They drive adoption of crypto primitives for individuals and institutions around the world by helping everyone build their on-chain presence.
Gateway specializes in connecting sovereign blockchains to the Aggregation Layer (AggLayer). The AggLayer is a single unified contract that powers the Ethereum bridge of many disparate blockchains, allowing them all to connect to a single unified liquidity pool. The AggLayer abstracts away the complexities of cross-chain DeFi, making tedious multi-chain transactions as easy for the end user as a single click. It’s all about creating access to DeFi, and with Polygon’s technology and the help of Gateways, Haust is doing just that.
As part of their partnership, Gateway will build an advanced zkEVM blockchain for Haust Network, leveraging its extensive experience to deploy ultra-fast sovereign applications with unmatched security, and enabling Haust Network to deliver its products to its audience.
The recently announced launch of the Haust Wallet is a Telegram mini-app that provides users with access to DeFi directly through the Telegram interface. Users who deposit funds into the wallet will have access to all standard send/receive services and generate an automatic yield on their funds. The yield is generated by Haust Network’s interconnected network of smart contracts, Haustoria, which provides automated and passive DeFi yielding.
As part of this partnership, the Haust Network development team will work closely with Gateway developers to launch Haust Network. Gateway is an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and zkEVM technology, which the Haust wallet will leverage to deliver advanced DeFi tools directly to the wallet users’ fingertips. Haust’s partnership with Gateway comes shortly after the announcement of a high-profile alliance with the Polygon community. Together, the three will work to build Haust Network and connect its products to the AggLayer.
About Haust Network
Haust Network is an application-based absolute liquidity network and will be built to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Haust aims to provide native yield to all users’ assets. In Telegram’s Haust Wallet, users can spend and collect their cryptocurrencies in one easy place, at the same time. Haust operates its network of self-balancing smart contracts that interact across multiple blockchains and then efficiently funnel what has been generated to Haust users.
About Gateway
bridge is a leading white-label blockchain provider that offers no-code protocol deployment. Users can launch custom blockchains in just ten minutes. They are an implementation provider for Polygon CDK and have already helped projects like Wirex, Gnosis Pay, and PalmNFT bring new utility to the crypto landscape.
About Polygon Labs
Polygon Laboratories Polygon Labs is a software development company building and developing a network of aggregated blockchains via the AggLayer, secured by Ethereum. As a public infrastructure, the AggLayer will aggregate the user bases and liquidity of any connected chain, and leverage Ethereum as the settlement layer. Polygon Labs has also contributed to the core development of several widely adopted scaling protocols and tools for launching blockchains, including Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, and Polygon Miden, which is currently under development, as well as the Polygon CDK.
Contact
Lana Kovalski
haustnetwork@gmail.com
DeFi
Ethena downplays danger of letting traders use USDe to back risky bets – DL News
- Ethena and ByBit will allow derivatives traders to use USDe as collateral.
- There is a risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place more bets.
Ethena has downplayed the dangers of a new feature, which will allow traders to put up its synthetic dollar USDe as collateral when trading derivatives, which are risky bets on the prices of crypto assets.
While allowing users to underwrite their trades with yield-bearing USDe is an attractive prospect, Ethena said there is potential risk in letting traders use an asset partially backed by derivatives to place even more derivatives bets.
“We have taken this risk into account and that is why Ethena operates across more than five different sites,” said Conor Ryder, head of research at Ethena Labs. DL News.
The move comes as competition in the stablecoin sector intensifies.
In recent weeks, PayPal grown up the amount of its stablecoin PYUSD in circulation 96%, while the MakerDAO cooperative plans a rebrandingaiming to increase the supply of its DAI stablecoin to 100 billion.
US dollar growth stagnates
It comes as Ethena has lost momentum after its blockbuster launch in December.
In early July, USDe reached a record level of 3.6 billion in circulation.
That figure has now fallen by 11% to around 3.2 billion.
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New uses for USDe could boost demand for Ethena’s products.
This is where the new plan, announcement Tuesday with ByBit, one of its partner exchanges, is coming.
Ethena users create USDe by depositing Bitcoin or Ether into the protocol.
Ethena then covers these deposits with short positions – bearish bets – on the corresponding asset.
This creates a stable support for USDe, unaffected by price fluctuations in Bitcoin or Ether.
Mitigate risks
While using USDe as collateral for derivatives trading is proving popular, it is unclear what the effects will be if the cryptocurrency market experiences major fluctuations.
Using derivatives as collateral to place more bets has already had disastrous effects.
In June 2022, Lido’s liquid staking token stETH broke its peg to Ether following the fallout from the Terra collapse.
Many traders who used looping leverage to increase their stETH staking yields were liquidated, creating a cascade that caused the price of Ether to drop by more than 43%.
Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said: DL News His office and his partners have taken many precautions.
Ethena spreads bearish bets supporting the USDe across the five exchanges it partners with.
According to Ethena, 48% of short positions supporting USDe are on Binance, 23% on ByBit, 20% on OKX, 5% on Deribit, and 1% on Bitget. website.
In doing so, Ethena aims to minimize the impact of an unforeseen event on a stock market.
The same theory applies to the distribution of risks across different supporting assets.
Fifty percent of USDe is backed by Bitcoin, 30% by Ether, 11% by Ether liquid staking tokens, and 8% by Tether’s USDT stablecoin.
Previous reviews
Ethena has already been criticised regarding the risks associated with USDe.
Some have compared USDe to TerraUSD, an undercollateralized stablecoin that collapsed in 2022.
“It’s not a good design for long-term stability,” said Austin Campbell, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School. said as the USDe launch approaches.
Young replied to critics, saying the industry needs to be more diligent and careful when “marketing products to users who might not understand them as well as we do.”
Ethena has since added a disclaimer on its website stating that USDe is not the same as a fiat stablecoin like USDC or USDT.
“This means that the risks involved are inherently different,” the project says on its website.
Tim Craig is DL News DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Feel free to share your tips with us at tim@dlnews.com.
DeFi
Cryptocurrency and defi firms lost $266 million to hackers in July
In July 2024, the cryptocurrency industry suffered a series of devastating attacks, resulting in losses amounting to approximately $266 million.
Blockchain Research Firm Peck Shield revealed in an X post On August 1, attacks on decentralized protocols in July reached $266 million, a 51% increase from $176 million reported in June.
The most significant breach last month involved WazirX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which lost $230 million in what appears to be a highly sophisticated attack by North Korean hackers. The attack was a major blow to the stock market, leading to a break in withdrawals. Subsequently, WazirX launched a program in order to recover the funds.
Another notable incident involved Compound Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, which suffered a governance attack by a group known as the “Golden Boys,” who passed a proposal who allocated 499,000 COMP tokens – valued at $24 million – to a vault under their control.
The cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI also fell victim On July 16, a hack resulted in losses of $9.73 million. Additionally, Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning network, was one of the first protocols to suffer an exploit last month, loming $8 million on July 3 due to an attack targeting its staking mechanism.
Meanwhile, Rho Markets, a lending protocol, suffered a $7.6 million breach. However, in an interesting twist, the exploiters research to return the stolen funds, claiming the incident was not a hack.
July 31, reports The Terra blockchain protocol was also hacked, resulting in a loss of $6.8 million across multiple cryptocurrencies. As crypto.news reported, the attack exploited a reentrancy vulnerability that had been identified a few months ago.
Dough Finance, a liquidity protocol, lost $1.8 million in Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) to a flash loan attack on July 12. Similarly, Minterest, a lending and borrowing protocol, saw a loss of $1.4 million due to exchange rate manipulation in one of its markets.
Decentralized staking platform MonoSwap also reported a loss of $1.3 million following an attack that allowed the perpetrators to withdraw the liquidity staked on the protocol. Finally, Delta Prime, another decentralized finance platform, suffered a $1 million breach, although $900,000 of the stolen funds was later recovered.
DeFi
The Rise of Bitcoin DeFi: Then and Now
The convergence of Bitcoin’s robust security and Layer 2 scaling solutions has catalyzed the emergence of a vibrant DeFi ecosystem.
By expanding Bitcoin’s utility beyond simple peer-to-peer payments, these advancements have opened up a new frontier of financial possibilities, allowing users to participate in decentralized lending, trading, and other complex smart contract operations on Bitcoin.
Read on to learn about the rise of Bitcoin-based decentralized finance and how the space has expanded to accommodate a new generation of native assets and features.
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What is DeFi?
Decentralized finance (DeFi) represents a paradigm shift in financial services, offering internet-based financial products such as trading, lending, and borrowing through the use of decentralized public blockchains.
By implementing blockchains, smart contracts, and digital assets, DeFi protocols provide financial services through a decentralized ecosystem, where participants do not have to deal with intermediaries when transacting.
What is Bitcoin DeFi?
The inherent limitations of the Bitcoin mainchain in supporting the intricacies of decentralized finance have created the need to develop smart contract-based Layer 2 solutions.
Additionally, the advent of the Ordinals protocol in 2023, which facilitated the emergence of fungible token standards such as BRC-20 and Runes, catalyzed the growth of DeFi on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This expansion in protocol diversity has broadened the applications of the world’s leading cryptocurrency network beyond the core base-layer use cases around value preservation and transactional capabilities.
Therefore, Bitcoin DeFi has become a nascent sector within the digital asset market, after previously being a missing essential part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin DeFi in its early days
Integrating decentralized finance (DeFi) concepts into the Bitcoin ecosystem has been a journey of innovation and perseverance. Early attempts to bridge the gap between Bitcoin’s fundamental simplicity and DeFi’s complexities have spawned pioneering projects that, while laying essential foundations, have also encountered significant obstacles.
Colored coins
Colored coins represented an early foray into tokenizing real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. By leveraging the existing network to track ownership of assets ranging from stocks to real estate, this approach highlighted Bitcoin’s potential as a platform beyond digital currency. However, scalability and practical implementation challenges have limited its widespread adoption.
Counterpart
Building on the colored coins, Counterparty has become a platform for creating and trading digital assets, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), on Bitcoin.
The introduction of popular projects like Rare Pepe NFTs has demonstrated the growing appeal of digital collectibles. However, constraints around user experience and network efficiency have hampered its full potential.
These early experiments, while not fully realizing their ambitions, served as valuable stepping stones, informing Bitcoin DeFi’s subsequent developments. Their challenges highlighted the need for more sophisticated infrastructure and protocols to harness the full potential of decentralized finance on the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin DeFi Today
Today, building DeFi applications on Bitcoin is primarily done in the realm of Layer 2 (L2) networks. This architectural choice is motivated by the limitations of Bitcoin’s base layer in supporting complex programmable smart contracts.
Bitcoin’s original design prioritized security and decentralization over programmability, making it difficult to develop sophisticated DeFi protocols directly on its blockchain. However, the recent emergence of protocols like Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes, while not DeFi in their own right, has sparked possibilities for future DeFi-like applications on the main chain.
In contrast, L2 solutions offer a scalable and programmable environment built on Bitcoin, enabling the creation of various DeFi products.
By expanding Bitcoin’s capabilities without compromising its core principles, L2s have become the preferred platform for developers looking to build DeFi applications that encompass trading, lending, staking, and more.
Leading L2 networks such as Lightning Network, Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin provide the infrastructure for these efforts. Some of these L2s have even introduced their own native tokens to the network, further expanding Bitcoin’s DeFi ecosystem.
Essentially, while Bitcoin’s core layer presents challenges for DeFi development, its security and decentralization have provided a foundational layer for the innovative L2 landscape to thrive.
Bitcoin Layer 2 offers a promising path to building a robust and thriving Bitcoin-based DeFi ecosystem that offers trading, staking, lending, and borrowing. All you need is a DeFi Wallet like Xverse to access the new world of decentralized financial services secured by Bitcoin.
Conclusion
The integration of DeFi principles into the Bitcoin ecosystem, primarily facilitated by Layer 2 solutions, marks a significant evolution in the digital asset landscape.
Building on the foundational work of pioneers like Colored Coins and Counterparty, the industry has evolved into more sophisticated platforms like Rootstock, Stacks, and Build on Bitcoin to create a thriving Bitcoin-powered DeFi ecosystem.
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