What happened to the DeFi trendsetters and blue chips two years ago?

It has been 2 years since Defi Summer~

Defi has experienced more than two years of development and has produced countless innovative projects. Last year’s bull market set off a feast of Defi2.0 represented by OHM . We saw him build a high building, saw him entertain guests , and then saw his building collapse...

When the tide recedes, we will know who is swimming naked. The so-called Defi2.0 will be worthless when the bear market comes. So we have dramatically returned to the Defi1.0 era, and several major Defi1.0 projects that have become infrastructure have returned to people's attention.

Do they have any new developments recently?

Look at them one by one!

Uniswap

Uniswap is not the earliest Defi project, but it is definitely the most successful Defi project at present . If you want to take only one project to represent Defi, it is undoubtedly Uniswap.

Uniswap has not made any major moves since the introduction of the innovative V3 last year. However, in terms of trading volume, it has indeed always firmly occupied half of the entire Dex market. Although the price of the currency has also plummeted after the bear market, the data alone has not changed much, whether it is trading volume or market share.

Of course, you can also say from another perspective that Uniswap's tokens are worthless, because they can neither pay dividends nor be destroyed, and are still being unlocked... Because a big tree attracts the wind and has been watched by Sec, Uniswap dares not make any big moves in the token mechanism. Except for an illusory governance function, the price of Uni tokens can be said to be completely supported by Uni's absolute dominance and an expectation for the future that no one can predict for sure.

However, a few days ago, Uniswap's acquisition of NFT aggregator Genie deserves everyone's attention. Uniswap finally couldn't help but reach out to the NFT field. From then on, Erc20 and Erc721 were both strong. Genie aggregates commodities from other NFT markets, Uniswap provides transaction depth, and Erc20 tokens can directly purchase NFTs on any market, without having to use ETH to transfer them again as before, so the industry is generally optimistic about this merger and acquisition.

MakerDao

MakerDAO has always been a mediocre Defi 1.0. Even during the Defi Summer two years ago, its performance was almost the worst among the leading companies.

The first reason is that although DAI is the most famous Crypto Native stablecoin in the industry, its adoption rate is far lower than that of USDC and USDT. Secondly, its collateral component is "contaminated" by USDC, and its market value has been easily surpassed by UST. MKR's token empowerment has always been a "chicken rib" style that is biased towards governance, and its strengths over Uniswap are limited.

The collapse of Luna in May may be the biggest positive for MakerDAO. People have completely lost confidence in algorithmic stablecoins and have once again turned their attention back to over-collateralized stablecoins.

In the past two years, MKR has made two major moves worthy of attention:

First, last year, we issued the first batch of real-world DeFi assets with Centrifuge, allowing financial institution New Silver to take the lead in establishing a real estate restoration and resale loan pool in its Tinlake contract, and completed the first loan financing with MakerDAO as a credit facility. Although there have been no major moves since then, it is still the first attempt in the industry to connect with the outside world through stablecoins and borrowing. I hope that we can see more similar cases in the next bull market.

Secondly, a proposal was made in the past few days to help survive the bear market and utilize untapped reserves by investing 500 million DAI stablecoins in US Treasury bonds and bonds. The final vote was 80% to buy Treasury bonds and 20% to buy corporate bonds. How should I put it? In a sense, it can be regarded as a form of going out of the circle...

AAVE + Compound

These two are discussed together because, firstly, they are both representing double leaders, and secondly, their recent actions are similar.

AAVE released version V3 a few months ago. The biggest change in V3 is the introduction of Portal, which supports seamless movement of user assets between Aave V3 markets through different networks - in other words, cross-chain. Users can pledge on eth, borrow on Polygon, and finally repay on Arbitrum...

Another function is the loan isolation pool , which is used to isolate the risks of non-mainstream mortgage assets. It is basically a standard feature of loan projects in 2021-2022.

In addition, Aave released a request for comments (ARC) proposal to the community a few days ago to introduce the stablecoin GHO. After the proposal was passed, the first promoter was the Aave protocol. Like other assets on Aave, Aave will also deploy GHO aToken and GHO debt tokens after integrating with GHO. This means that they will pay a lower interest rate for borrowing GHO, which will also incentivize more Aave to pledge and protect the Aave protocol.

Compound released the multi-chain lending protocol code of Compound III a few days ago. Some experts who can read the code said that they have only seen one obvious difference from the V2 version , that is, V3 only allows borrowing of one basic asset (blindly guessed it might be USDC). By simplifying the borrowable assets and aggregating the supply of USDC on different chains, the upper limit efficiency is improved (a bit like the Stargate technology implementation based on LayerZero), but doing so will undoubtedly make a great sacrifice in collateral efficiency.

We will have to wait a few months until it goes online to see the details.

Curve + SNX

Curve was very popular at the end of last year, and Curve War became a popular term that many people in the DeFi circle talked about. However, with the collapse of Luna, Curve War has almost become a pseudo-noun.

When the biggest calculation and stability fell, people lost all confidence in the calculation and stability track. Without calculation and stability, theoretically there would be no curve war to fight.

Could it be that Curve can only earn some transaction fees by relying on the traditional three pools (USDT, USDC, DAI) and homogeneous tokens like stETH-ETH?

Fortunately, Curve’s “good brother” - SNX recently made a big move:

Last year, SNX teamed up with Curve to conduct an atomic swap, using its own synthetic assets to provide smaller slippage than other DEXs such as Uniswap when trading large amounts of BTC and ETH. This is a very good technical implementation.

However, the extremely long transaction time and strict requirements on asset formats make the experience very poor, and it is difficult to form a "building block combination" with other projects.

In the most recent proposal, after modifying the requirements for oracles and asset formats, the atomic swap experience of SNX was greatly improved and was directly integrated into 1inch. Therefore, for some large-scale BTC and ETH transactions, 1inch can directly go the SNX+Curve route, forming direct competition with Uniswap V3 for mainstream assets.

From the consumer's perspective, competition is certainly a good thing, especially "healthy competition" that involves technological innovation.

From the perspective of the industry, it can only be said that the Defi industry has become more competitive, especially for Uniswap LPs. The bear market is already difficult to endure, and everyone is counting on collecting some transaction fees. Now the transaction fees have been taken away by Curve + SNX. It's difficult...

summary

The "Summer of DeFi" in 2020 is a year of rapid development of DeFi. Today, the ebb and flow of DeFi has made us lose our short-term overestimation of it, but these leaders and blue chips still show their long-term value. The future of encryption technology is long, and we will wait and see.