Meow DeFi - Pilot

April 10, 2023

Henlo people of the Earth, it’s me, Mario Sindermann, and this is the first instalment of the “Meow DeFi” newspaper.

Why “Meow”? Idk, cats are cute, and I’m terrible at naming things, I might change it in future. Why newspaper? Because Twitter is very limiting and doesn’t really work for what I want to do. Plus, all cool kids have a newspaper, so why not.

I originally planned to do it through Substack, but it seems like Daddy Elon is having a bit of a moment, making for a perfect opportunity to try Beehiiv. We’ll see how it goes.

For now, the plan is to do at least one of these every week, eventually (and ideally) scaling up to one every 2-3 days. Alternatively, I’ll give up in a couple of weeks, and you’ll never hear about this newspaper ever again.

Anyways, enough with the intros. Let’s talk DeFi.

ZkSync

After Arbitrum airdropped millions to its early users, everyone is rushing to get into the “next big thing”. Unfortunately, there is still nothing to do on zkSync. That is unless you are looking to buy some zero-knowledge dog tokens.

Velocore - a good-looking solidly fork, seem to be doing quite well. It remains to be seen how much of that success is due to cute anime girls in marketing materials. After all, the solidly model is still kind of meh.

Allegedly, there are even some Camelot forks being built on zkSync. The only missing piece is SushiSwap deployment, and we’ve got proper DEX wars on our hands.

SushiSwap

Speaking of SushiSwap, they’ve had a bit of an oopsie and got exploited. It seems like every time sushi gets into the news, it’s due to something negative - frog nation overtake, the “horse incident”, legal troubles, and the list goes on.

Thankfully, it seems most of the funds were recovered by whitehats. Still, the first major product release under new management resulting in an exploit is not a good look. #BringBackDani.

Moral of the story - infinite token approvals = bad.

Shanghai Upgrade

An anticipated Ethereum upgrade that will enable validator withdrawals is scheduled for the 12th of April. This means two things - LSD threads are hitting ATH numbers, and ETH bears are working overtime.

The bear thesis is clear - people will withdraw their stakes and dump in an “exit spiral”. An important metric to look at here is the number of exited validators and the size of the exit queue. Link.

LSD narrative is also pretty straightforward - if withdrawals are working, LIDO and others don’t need to subsidise the peg as much + can attract more users, and generate more yields in general. There have also been attempts to rename LSDs into LSTs, which, IMO is a complete downgrade.

Also, people have been turning everything into “LSD narrative plays" pls stop.

Pendle

Pendle is one of those “LSD plays”, even if it has nothing to do with LSDs directly. It’s simply a yield tokenisation platform which allows users to speculate on future yields.

For example, you can buy a token that represents a claim over the future yield of stETH (YT-stETH) if you think the yield will increase. Somewhat complicated stuff, but there are a lot of good threads on it on Twitter.

They also probably have the best docs in DeFi, so that’s worth something.

TraderJoe

The best DEX in DeFi started rolling out its v2.1, which is basically Uniswap v4 (yes, it’s that good). The timeline is bullish once more, gud times.

Impossible to list all the features, but volumes go brrrr, fess go brrrrr, everything goes brrrr. Brrrr. Meow.

CavalRe

CavalRe released a public testnet. There is no token, and you need to wear a suit while using it (JK).

Flashstake

Another protocol getting exposure due to LSD narrative. TLDR is that you can claim your yield upfront by locking (flashstaking) your interest-bearing tokens.

They’ve also got some pretty interesting take on tokenomics.

SoliSnek

One more solidly fork on Avalanche. Don’t ask why. There are reasons. Let’s hope it does better than its predecessors.

Meow

Ok, that’s all I wanted to talk about. See you next week or maybe in a few days. Idk, this one ended up being kind of short.

Subscribe to this newspaper if you want, and let me know what you think about such a format in general - the plan is to evolve it, as I’m not 100% set on it.

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. NFA.