Defi Farm #12 - July 9th Weekly Update

Hi everyone,

We had some modest relief across the board this past week that roughly retraced the drop from the week before. Let's dive in 🤿Over the past 7 days:SPY: +3.2%BTC: +11.4% ETH: +13.9% 

Here are how the some of major L1's performed:

SOL: +15.5%AVAX: +22.7%Near: +11.1%Algo: +4.8%FTM: +14.2%Today I'll go over:- Some things happening in Defi that I don't think got enough coverage- Random but cool news from this past week- Cool projects and protocols I came across this week- A new defi farming strategy of the week

Two big things happened in defi

There were two things that happened recently from 2 of the most trusted defi protocols and I think got lost in the noise and deserve more emphasis.

AaveAave announced a proposal to create a stablecoin $GHO. There's still a lot of information that will come out about the details of this but you can read the initial thread here. I think this is interesting because it continues to show just how much effort is going into stablecoin development, innovation, and experimentation. There's Aave launching $GHO, rumors of Curve preparing their own stablecoin, and all the other flavors of stablecoin that exist: DAI, USDC, FRAX, USDT, MAI, MUSD, BUSD, USN, etc. I think it will be interesting to watch the total Market Cap of these stables and their dominance % over others. I personally think that in the next 5-10 years there will be some consolidation and while many stablecoins may exist, 1-3 will suck up the vast majority of onchain liquidity. But time will tell!

MakerMakerDAO is making serious strides to integrate traditional finance and defi and it's really impressive.MakerDAO was doing some balance sheet restructuring and put up a DAO proposal for how to allocate $500million USDC. The DAO decided to put that into US Short Treasuries (80%) + IG Corp Bond(20%) purchased by Blackrock. To my knowledge, this is one of the first examples of a DAO owning RWA (real-world assets) at such a large scale.

In addtion to holding RWA on its balance sheet, Maker has also been making a push to expand its reach and business by making vaults and providing loans to more "traditional" businesses.

A recent proposal was passed that approved a 100million DAI vault to Huntingdon Valley Bank. HV is a Pennsylvania-based bank that's 151 years old! This will be the first collateral integration from a US-based bank into the defi ecosystem. Ever. Incredible.

(MakerDAO already has some RWA vaults created but at much lower debt ceilings compared to this $100million vault.)

Interesting news and things from this week

• Reddit announced an NFT-based avatar marketplace that will be built on Polygon.

• Jump wrote a really awesome piece about token design. I think tokenomics, token design, inflationary rewards, etc are all incredibly important to read about and understand if you're going to be doing a lot of farming 🌾

• You can now start an investment club on polygon thanks to Syndicate. (Formally just on ETH mainnet).

• Instagram is testing a new feature that allows to you place NFTs on a surface using AR

Interesting protocols/projects I found this week

Unique (link) - easily form an on-chain VC fund. Has the ability for the user to select many different (out-of-the-box) governance and financial configurations in the setup process.

Superfluid (link) - allows wallets to send a "flow" of money to another wallet. A true "cashflow". This can be used by DAO's or normal businesses to handle subscriptions, salaries, etc. These streams can create a lot of capital efficiency for large treasuries.

Aura (link) - If Convex is to Curve, then Aura is to Balancer. 

Interesting Farm of the week

You can currently earn 16.5% APR paid out in the QI token by adding USDC-MAI liquidity. MAI is a stablecoin of the QiDAO protocol.

That's all I have for this week! Stay safe out there and as always, stay yielding!

Very best,Andy