Volume 3
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.
Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin voices a vision for Uniswap as an oracle for all of Ethereum
In a discussion proposal on the Uniswap community forum, Vitalik expresses a number of challenges that the current DeFi space encounters due to varied trusted price oracle. Many different applications and protocols rely on price information relative to the ETH price. In Vitalik’s proposal, he frames Uniswap as the best oracle for such a task. This is a rare hand raise from the Ethereum founder himself.
Balancer Labs launches Balancer V2
One of the first protocols to popularize AMM exchanges and liquidity pools, the Balancer Labs team announced they’ve shipped their V2 product. The update includes updates to the user trading interface and website, a new $BAL liquidity mining program, and maybe most notable: 40-50% reduction in gas fees. The team also announced a new team of community multi-sig to replace the former community governance. Read the full announcement post to see the details, including a full list of V2 launch partners.
Fei Protocol offers $800k bug bounty following disclosure of a discovered issue
In a recent post, the Fei team disclosed the discovery of a potential exploit that the team patched and described in detail in their post-mortem. The actor who helped discover the bug, which affected the protocol’s integral bonding curve, was awarded $800k paid in TRIBE from the Fei Labs treasury.
Alpha Labs ($ALPHA) announces Grants Program
The yield aggregator protocol has been announcing a number of updates to their application and their partnerships. Included is the new Grants Program which will fund proposals submitted to Alpha governance. In DeFi, app decentralization paves way for community governance through voting and proposal processes. In communities like these (e.g., DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations), the token holders own respective pieces of the community treasury. The new Alpha Grants Program will fund developers and also “Alpha Thinkers” who propose helpful ideas.
A conclusion to the Vitalik dog token saga
Following the heat of DOGE coin, a number of canine coins have popped up in the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum. Many of these meme coins sent major amounts of their supplies to Vitalik’s Ethereum address, which is well known among the community. The most notable of the pack is $SHIB, which sent half of its supply (at one point worth several billion dollars) to Vitalik. Coins do this as a marketing activity, and in the short term, the price ran up in the hype across many of these dog-meme projects. At the heat of it, not enjoying being pulled into the mix without his consent, Vitalik sold much of his gifted dog coins into ETH and donated that ETH to various charities. In a final move, Vitalik burned his entire remaining stack of SHIB tokens.
