Meow DeFi #1 - Bullish unlock

Hello reader, if you are here, that means Shanghai Update happened, and crypto didn’t go to 0. Bears in shambles.

Surprisingly, this week nothing major exploded - iearn had some weird issue, but that’s pretty much it. Andre Cronje strikes again. Building in #DeFi sucks.

Back to business then…

Euler

6th biggest hack in the history of DeFi was resolved with a hacker returning funds and users getting their tokens back. Some of them even earned some - the exploiter bought ETH with stolen stablecoins right before ETH went up. GREAT SUCCESS!

The moral of the story is don’t exploit DeFi protocols; if you do, don’t doxx yourself or send money to North Korea.

DeltaPrime

Gud article on how TradiFI institutions eat everyone’s lunch, why Aave sucks and why there is a need for on-chain prime brokerage. The article is just part #1 of a series, and there is a funny meme at the start - worth a read.

Fun fact - Delta Prime has $17m in TVL and no token - where are all the airdrop huntoors from Twitter looking?

Vela Exchange

An up-and-coming DEX on Arbitrum has abruptly ended its beta with a discord announcement due to an error in calculating the price of their LP token - $VLP.

Without focusing too much on Vela, I think this situation highlights just how hard it is to build a working exchange for perps in DeFi - big respect to those who’ve done it and “gl hf” to everyone else.

GMX

Speaking of “those who’ve done it”, the audit report for the GMX’s update got published, and it doesn’t look particularly inspiring.

Nothing the team can’t fix, but t seems like we won’t see GMX synths for a while.

Lexer

To wrap up the perp dex topic, the public sale for Lexer is today. It basically tries to answer the question, “What if instead of choosing one model for our perp DEX, we just combined all of them?”.

Indeed, all existing models suck in one way or another, so combining three approaches to liquidity provision might yield exciting results.

One big question mark around the sale is the platform it hosted on - Camelot. Their two last launches - $SECT and $PRY aren’t doing exceptionally well (down 42% and 65% from the sale price, respectively).

Abracadabra

Remember $MIM? They are back! Well, technically, they’ve never left, but that doesn’t sound as cool.

MagicG, the leading GLP wrapper on Arbitrum, is also live on Avalanchell. Only one piece is missing - a magicGLP cauldron to borrow MIM against it. Degen looping when?

Yama

Degen looping now.

Actually, to describe Yama’s $GLP strategy as “degenerate” is putting it lightly - max leverage for $GLP is 17x.

Obviously, cranking it up that high means you are almost guaranteed to get liquidated on the next wick, which doesn’t mean you can’t try it’s suddenly less cool. Triple-digit APYs for loopers are provided even with relatively small leverage. Meanwhile, lenders get 20% APY on USDT for providing capital to the strategy.

Did I mention there is no token, and new collateral types are coming?

gLoop

gLoop is yet another platform for leveraging your GLP yields. It also has a funny name. gLoop is basically Liquity (or Yeti Finance/Vesta) with a couple of twists and interest-bearing assets (wstETH, GMX, and GLP) as collateral.

Twists include a three-token design and their own custom wrapper for GLP. Launch details are still TBD, but hopefully soon™?

Arrow

Arrow, the good-looking options exchange on Avalanche, has been in alpha/beta/testnet for as long as I can remember. Last week they announced a gated mainnet launch.

Judging by the docs, the tech looks unironically good. DeFi option exchanges are miles behind perps in adoption/development/spread, so it’s always nice to see a new protocol join the competition. There are no special requirements to get into WL, and some places seem to be left.

Buffer

A binary options platform has had a bit of a rough patch lately. They run into the same issues as perp exchanges, but the nature of the binary options amplifies those issues.

The good news is that there seems to be a plan which includes, among other things, moving away from custom oracles to low-latency solutions built by Pyth.

They are also adding a second liquidity pool to isolate risk for users. Reminds me of Level tranches; could this be the new trend?

Meow

Meow, see you next week, maybe. Pls, don’t break anything in the meantime.

Disclawmer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, protocols, events and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Not financial advice.