Sexy Dexy & NFTs
Dexes have had a revival of real usage in 2020, maybe two years after people thought that they would get some adoption. http://duneanalytics.com/dex for some of the best data on dexes.
1b. Dexes have been on a tear as Messari noted. But it’s interesting to me that IDEX, which ranks here as 3rd in the last 7 days, is actually first amongst teams with tokens (Uniswap, dYdX do not have tokens), ahead of Kyber, 0x, and Oasis (MakerDAO’s dex), and LoopRing.
Cross-cefi/defi arb strategies are now at the scale of 30M USD - Blockchain analytics courtesy of Danning Sui. It’s been a long way since Binance Research first suggested strategies like this. https://research.binance.com/analysis/defi-arbitrage-strategies
Now imagine as dexes and decentralized lending pools like Aave or Curve add more of these assets and offer more interest rates on products. Interest rate arb is the new sexy.
Compound governance token’s distribution has finally been tested on testnet and will go live soon. With products like Balancer, Futureswap, Curve.fi, UMA, and many other projects adding a “earn” token, we should see a heavy battle in different projects fighting for marketshare with their earn token being a signficant part of the “Liquidity provider” rewards or yield. What do you guys think will play out here? Let me know by replying to this email
Thought this was a very nice way to explain why NFTs are relevant as an investment asset class. Would be perfect to explain to the non-crypto friend of yours.
On the topic of NFTs, a topic that has been popping up in my feed lately is the concept of “embedded NFTs” - NFTs that don’t just look cool, but actually hold some intrinsic value by embedding stablecoins, gold tokens like DGX, or other assets of long-term (read: non-crypto) assets. Here, Bullionix offered an NFT that wraps 5 grams of real gold into the asset, and sold it to raise funds for RocketNFT, a platform for undercollateralized, NFT-backed loans. What do you hope to see next wrapped in an NFT?