Volume 2

Each week, we’ll round up the hottest news across the DeFi ecosystem to help you keep up to speed as things continue to move fast.  This is the DeFi Drop, the best way to stay updated on DeFi.

The Maker Foundation Returns Dev Fund Holdings to the DAO

Depending on who you ask, Maker invented DeFi for crypto, let alone for Ethereum. For those that need a catch up, Maker and MakerDAO are OG projects in Ethereum, launched in 2017. The protocol is responsible for minting the popular stablecoin $DAI. $MKR is the native token of the Maker protocol. Last week, in a surprise announcement, the Maker Foundation gifted the MakerDAO 84,000 MKR tokens (worth ~$5,000 each as of writing this). The DAO is governed by MKR holders, and they were given no stipulation or strings attached for the gift. This move marks the beginning of the end for the centralized portion of the Maker team.

VanEck launches digital assets equity ETF

Europe has its first themed ETF, and it’s all about DeFi. Aptly named DAPP, Van Eck’s new ETF launched on the London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Boerse. DAPP follows “MVIS Global Digital Assets Equity index”, a recently launched index which currently includes 26 pure-play digital asset companies. This includes miners, trading platforms, hardware manufacturers, holding and trading specialists, payments, patents/ services solutions, and even bankers. While no obvious actual DeFi protocols are currently part of the ETF, the infrastructure and companies included pave the way for protocol tokens to be included. Further, Van Eck also filed for an Ethereum ETF this week.

Yearn’s earnings quarterly report 2021

It’s atypical for any crypto project to put together and release an earnings report reminiscent of traditional finance (or TradFi, to crypto folks). However, the yearn finance DAO ($YFI) did just that. With their report, the public can take a deep dive into important metrics and reporting from the team. Being published on github furthers the new nativeness of reporting in crypto (it’s happening on open source platforms!). This is Yearn’s second report of this nature. Yearn is a popular DeFi asset that interoperates with many other popular DeFi products to provide yield aggregation for users and protocols alike.

Sushi launches a bridge with Polygon to facilitates instant, gasless transactions on Ethereum

We talked about Polygon on our last DeFi Drop, the suite of services enabling instant, gas free transactions across Ethereum and DeFi via what’s known as Layer 2 (L2) solutions. Now Sushi Swap, a leading AMM exchange in DeFi, has partnered with Polygon to offer their users instant, gas-free transactions for popular DeFi activities such as yield farming and liquidity mining.  By partnering with Polygon, Sushi users are already getting a taste of what the L2 future has in store for DeFi.