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The Dapp of 2019? How MakerDAO Took Charge of the DeFi Field

The MakerDao project is the contemporary success story for decentralized finance (DeFi). The project went live in December 2017, with DAI as the USD stablecoin and MKR functioning as the governance token. In the world of decentralized finance, MakerDAO is by far the most popular application running on Ethereum and has been steadily increasing traction since its launch. After only a year and a half into production, MakerDao reached its all-time high market cap of $97M on July 9, 2019.

In part one of our interview with Gustav Arentoft, Business Development, Dai Speaker, MakerDAO, he offers Blockchain.News insight into the home-grown success of his organizations in terms of transparency, governance and the interesting use case of Maker in Spotify.

Steady growth of DAI despite dropping market dominance

According to DeFi Pulse, the total ether deposited in MakerDao represents just above 50 percent of the total value locked into DeFi protocols. While still dominant it marks a significant decrease from the 90 percent recorded at the start of the year. While the percentage has fallen, Arentoft believes, “It really depends on what you look at as dominating factors. Currently, the rankings are defined by the number of crypto assets locked into a DeFi protocol. We were one of the first projects that you could actually lock up Ethereum to print DAI against so of course, our market dominance was much higher previously.” Commenting on the increased competition Arentoft said, “Fortunately some of these new players have come along, like Compound which has had a very strong performance over the last 12 months. There are also different protocols like Uniswap, but the incredible thing is these new protocols—they take DAI and actually one of their primary use cases in their system and protocols is using Dai. For example, Compound dominates the holding of DAI with 12.6M. So we may have lost market cap but that market cap went into other protocols that utilize Dai in efficient ways and even open up some very strong arbitrage opportunities.”

Exhibit 1: DAI Locked in DeFi 2019

Source: DeFi Pulse

Due to the nature of the DeFi ecosystem, ultimately Maker’s lost market cap is benefiting the end consumers as the various protocols are interoperable (see Exhibit 1). Arentoft said, “The protocols continue to leverage each other’s technology and awesome products and services are being created for end-users, so we are not overly concerned about the perceived loss in dominance because Dai will still be the stable value in these systems.” He concluded, “If you look at us from just a crypto perspective, we might continue to appear shoulder to shoulder against these very competitive and good products but if you look from the outside, I believe we will be one of the first projects to bring legacy world collateral into the smart contract-based systems.”

Bringing liquidity to Spotify’s artists

Turning to use cases and partnerships, Arentoft discussed a Maker’s collaboration with Paperchain—an extremely efficient data analytics provider which leverages data which can be publicly viewed on platforms such as Spotify.

Arentoft said, “The problem that we’re solving is that currently the artists streamed on Spotify have to wait a long time before they actually receive their royalties and payments, so we’ve created an extremely efficient and accurate data analytics tool to basically predict the amount owed down to a 1% difference. This creates an alternative asset that traditional institutions are not used to serving, however, it is an asset that’s actually relatively easy to price.”

On the Spotify project, Maker has been working with an open-source framework from Centrifuge, Arentoft said, ‘’We basically can take these individual royalties which are converted into NFTs and then you can actually create a standardized version of the collateral, which we didn’t aim to use in multi-collateral Dai.” He explained, “That basically means that U.S. and Spotify artists can predict their future income. They can leverage the blockchain and the MakerDao protocol to actually gain an advance payment on the royalties that the artist will be getting. It is a new way of bringing liquidity to artists basically.”

Maker’s Transparency and Decentralized Governance

Maker’s enjoys an unmatched degree of popularity among the DeFi community. Arentoft believes that this can be attributed to the very high degree of transparency within the organization. He said, “I think we have one of the only projects that has verifiable revenue directly on the blockchain, enhancing the transparency of fees coming to us and the overall movement of capital in the blockchain. If you want to check it out, you can go to the website called Makerburn.com which in real-time and shows everything going through the system.”

On Maker’s governance as a decentralized autonomous organization, Arentoft commented, “We have been live with the ability to execute on-chain governance since 2017. In the future, governance is going to be a little bit more tricky because there’ll be a lot more different kinds of decisions to make regarding the structure.” He continued, “But the governance of Maker was something which started out in many ways as an experiment and now with a proven track record, we have shown that this is something that actually works.”

MakerDAO’s Popularity: Behind the scenes

Arentoft believes that there are many different factors that have contributed to the success of Maker’s decentralized autonomous governance. He elaborated, “We have had very strong support within the Ethereum community and I think we have one of the first strong use cases has managed to manifest itself, which in turn has created a sphere of people who wants to participate.”

Maker has also been very open and transparent about issues within their protocol such as the common pain point of scalability but has continued to engage their community throughout the process of addressing these issues. Arentoft couples this enhanced transparency with Maker’s strategy to attach themselves to projects that have the greatest growth potential as further indications of the economic communities’ interest and patronage. Arentoft divulged, “We truly project that we can go out and change the lives of everyday people right, at tremendous scale. I think people want to join that movement and the future prospect and at the same time, the Maker project has drawn the attention of the people who tend to hang around in macroeconomics circles. We have some strong followers, both from central banks and prestigious academic communities so I think there’s a lot of different elements that when combined make Maker a pretty interesting and quite outstanding project.”

Stay tuned for Part 2 and 3 of MakerDAO’s interview.

DappRadar—What is the Dapp of 2019?

Skirmantas Januskas is the CEO and founder of DappRadar. He joined the crypto and decentralized applications (Dapps) space in late 2017 and found his interest peaked by the enthusiasm and kindness of those he interacted with in the community. He founded DappRadar in February 2018, a website that lists the most popular and utilized Dapps and ranks them by DAU (Daily Active Users) showing the authentic acceptance and usability of Dapps.

In the second part of our exclusive interview with Januskas, we discuss Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake, the growing Dapp ecosystem and the DeFi revolution instigated by MakerDao.

Staking and Scaling in the Dapp ecosystem

Ethereum has served as the main network for Dapps to be built upon, but since its creation, it has run on a proof-of-work consensus algorithm. With Ethereum announcing Eth2.0 with the transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), we asked Januskas what impact staking would have on transforming the current Dapp ecosystem. He said, “Many of the blockchains we already track such as EOS, TRON and Loom Network’s Basechain, use a Proof-of-Stake consensus so that part won’t be anything new. What may be more interesting with staking on Ethereum is how this could be integrated as a new feature into existing Dapps, or indeed create opportunities for new Dapps, especially in the DeFi category.”

Scalability of Dapps has been a well-recorded pain-point of blockchain adoption. Januskas acknowledged this point and commented, “Compared to centralized architectures, blockchains will always struggle in a relative sense with scalability. We’ve seen that regularly on Ethereum since CryptoKitties launched in late 2017 and EOS is currently struggling with similar issues because of the popularity of a single new Dapp which is incentivizing people to use their tokens in a new way. If you wanted to be philosophical about it, you could argue issues with scalability actually demonstrate the popularity of a particular blockchain. Or another analogy: building more roads encourages more people to buy cars and drive!”

State of DeFi

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been making waves over the last several months following the surge in platforms and products offering DeFi services and applications. Januskas is particularly pleased with this development, he said, “Yes, the explosion in DeFi Dapps on Ethereum is proof Dapps can offer great utility and do so in a manner that is very hard to copy in the centralized software space. The major driver of this is MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin, which enables developers to build increasingly complex products on top of a trusted layer. This level of composability is at the heart of DeFi and allows developers to come up with ever more sophisticated solutions to niche problems.”

Despite his positivity, Januskas offered a few words of caution for the DeFi space, he said, “Although a lot of value is being put into these new financial instruments, these products are no way near accessible to the mass market. And as all the developers point out, everything is in beta. It will be interesting to see the market reaction should any serious bugs or exploits emerge.”

Dapp Growth and Dapp of 2019

While DeFi has emerged as the most significant vector for Dapp growth in 2019, the game sector hasn’t been slacking. 2019 has seen the launch of new titles, some of which have quickly grown to become the most popular Dapps in terms of active wallets. In addition, some older games remain in contention for the top spot. Januskas said, “The result is that as we enter Q4, at least four titles are sustaining more than 2,000 daily active wallets. The blockchain game sector remains incredibly buoyant. The current games are a small subset of the total projects in various stages of development, with 2020 shaping up to be a very important period for this nascent industry.”

If forced to choose a “Dapp of the year” in 2019, Januskas was quick to comment, “There’s no question that MakerDAO has been the most impactful Dapp in 2019 in terms of number of users and token volumes, plus the opportunities it’s created for the entire DeFi ecosystem.” He added, “I also have a soft spot for Uniswap, which makes a complex thing – creating a crypto trading platform – very simple, also enabling users to provide its underlying liquidity.”

Dapps Should Focus on Users

As one of the main people aiming to grow the Dapp ecosystem, Januskas advised, “Dapp developers need to keep the user at the heart of everything they do. In its infancy the internet was similar. Programmers only cared about getting a site live and having it provide valuable info. The aesthetic and user experience were not even on their radar and as such it took quite a long time for the internet to become truly appealing to the masses, a transition that really happened once user experience and aesthetic became paramount.”

According to Januskas, Dapp developers have to make their products as accessible as possible and user-friendly to stand the best chance of discovery and retention. He said, “Providing users with understandable instructions and not assuming they are as knowledgeable as the developers is a good start, gameplay walkthroughs and advice for newbies on how to actually enter a Dapp is paramount to the long term success of Dapps in our opinion.”

DappRadar in 2020?

Januskas ended our interview by sharing DappRadar’s plans for 2020. He said, “We are using the $2.3M investment led by Naspers Ventures and Blockchain Ventures secured in September 2019 primarily for R&D, developing new functionality to help the business expand its services and reach the next stage in its growth. By the end of 2019, we aim to be the most accurate and reliable Dapp data source on earth.” He added, “This process is already well underway, alongside a host of UX updates. Moving into Q1 2020 we have some very exciting developer and user product updates and further token tracking across TRON and Ethereum, integration of additional protocols and the release of a proprietary, robust artificial traffic filter as part of our ‘Clean Data Mission’ for 2020. We see lots of evidence that demonstrates the long-term potential of the Dapp industry and are building a business that maximizes that into the future.”

DeFi Liquidity Project Paradigm Labs Shuts Down, Unable to Find Niche in DEX Ecosystem

The ambitious DeFi liquidity project, Paradigm labs is shutting down its operations citing an inability to build a resilient business within the DEX ecosystem.

According to the post on Medium today, Liam Kovatch CEO and Founder of Paradigm Labs stated, “After almost two years of active research and development, our team has come to the decision that without significant product-market fit and limited resources to pursue emergent opportunities, the kind of success we envisioned for Paradigm Labs is unlikely.”

Where is the Niche?

The project began in 2018 with the impetus to enhance liquidity within the DEX ecosystem and was believed to be a gamechanger for decentralized finance (DeFi) and cryptocurrency.

In the announcement, Kovatch said, “The reasoning behind our failure to carve a viable niche in the DEX marketplace is multifaceted, and ultimately a result of both factors within and outside of our control. We have taken some time to reflect on our journey and would like to take this opportunity to highlight some of the challenges we faced that ultimately forced us to make this difficult decision.”

As outlined by Kovatch, the timing, hesitation to pivot, and capital constraints were at the heart of the decision to dissolve the company.

In terms of timing, the CEO believes they were unlucky as the decentralized exchange space witnessed a number of developments “such as the launch of Uniswap, the establishment of the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement and more,” that made the DEX space incredible fluid and challenging for an organization like Paradigm Labs to navigate.

During their time, Paradigm Labs had two different products on offer – Zaidan and Kosu. The former was far more effective than the latter and it was a failure of Paradigm labs to turn their back on Kosu and focus on Zaidan that accelerated their fate.

What do users do now?

The post instructed users who are staking ZRX with Zaidan’s War Chest to deposit their stake with other validators as they will no longer be active on Paradigm Labs after March 16.

The project will be legally dissolving by the end of the month. The Discord Channel will still be available for users until the 1st of April, 2020.

Image via Shutterstock

ConsenSys Reveals How the Ethereum Network Weathered the COVID-19 Pandemic Market's Flash Crash on Black Thursday

The world of traditional finance has been in a state of recovery since the shock market crashes that began on March 12 due to the economic disruption of the coronavirus pandemic which was further exacerbated by Saudi Arabia’s sudden attempt to seize a controlling share of the world’s oil market.

While much debate has raged about the state and action of crypto’s main player Bitcoin, new insights generated using ConsenSys’ analytics suite, Alethio have revealed how the Ethereum network has endured the evaporation of liquidity in the global markets.

In a blog released on April 6, ConsenSys reported that the crash that occurred on March 12, dubbed “Black Thursday”, was proof that crypto and DeFi markets are still correlated to traditional markets. The report further revealed how the Ethereum network performed as well as interesting insights about the resilience of the decentralised exchanges (DEX).

Ethereum Maintained Hash Power

In blockchain networks, maintaining a high hash rate is critical in sustaining security and staving off a 51% attack. If an entity gains control of more than 51% of the total computing (hashing) power within a blockchain network. The protocol of a blockchain system validates the record with the longest transactional history. If the attacker has more than 50% of the hash power, they will have the longest transactional history.

Hash rate is indicative of the speed at which miners operate, specifically with Ethereum the number of hashes guessed per second for solving the nonce of a block of transactions.

According to ConsenSys, during the most volatile market day, March 12, “The hashrate on the Ethereum mainnet remained stable at ~170TH/s.” The enterprise ethereum firm also reports that “During the week of March 12-18, the daily average hashing power was ~165TH/s, nearly identical to March’s daily average level of ~167TH/s.”

Source – ConsenSYS.net

What this really reveals is that on the darkest day for the market where the ether price fell over 40%, Ethereum’s miners did not abandon the network but maintained the hashrate throughout the price volatility which allowed the network to remain secure and speaks volumes to their belief in the network.

DEX Not Halted Like Traditional Markets

ConsenSys also highlighted that during the market drop on March 12, the Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) for Decentralized Finance (DEFI) protocols handled an “astronomical amount of trading volume without any major issues, attacks, or outages.” The DEX has appeared to pass this flash test with flying colours easily traversing the obstacles that halted traditional markets.

According to data from Alethio, the panic was intense but short lived. Per the report, “$70m USD was traded on March 12 alone, with Uniswap handling $42 million USD, nearly 6x the daily average trading volume in March. By March 17, daily volumes of ETH and the number of unique traders across DEXs returned to pre-crash levels.” By comparison, US stock exchanges were forced to halt trading four times in mid-March via the circuit breakers which are established safeguards to prevent flash crashes driven by high-frequency trading.

Robinhood, the commission-free trading platform also experienced technical outages at the beginning of March, ConsenSys notes but believed the outages were unrelated to the market circuit breakers, but rather due to stress on Robinhood’s infrastructure.

What is Sushiswap (SUSHI) and Why it Enabled Uniswap’s Trading Volume to Surpass Coinbase

The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry has surpassed $9 billion in total value locked (TVL) recently resulting from the latest surge in popularity. Projects such as Aave and Yearn.finance have also been in the spotlight, with their native tokens making big moves.

Uniswap, one of the most popular projects in the DeFi sector, has a daily average trade volume of over $575 million. Uniswap has also taken first place in the DeFi market, reaching over $1.67 billion in total value locked, surpassing MakerDAO and Aave on the list, according to DeFi pulse.

Uniswap’s trading volume has also surged recently, overtaking Coinbase. Uniswap’s trading volume was higher than Coinbase’s by 20 percent. The surge in volume for Uniswap was also due to its hard forked version, Sushiswap, which offers greater rewards for liquidity providers on its platform.

Sushiswap is a hard fork of Uniswap, which means that it is a bi-product of the Uniswap project. SUSHI’s token price is now over $7, surging almost 1000 percent over the past few days. On its first day in the DeFi market, Sushiswap reached $250 million in its TVL in cryptocurrencies. Additionally, the governance token of Sushiswap is called “SUSHI,” which is similar to the “meme” cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.

Sushiswap is very similar to Uniswap, which also allows investors who provide liquidity to pools to be rewarded on their platform. The difference between the two platforms is that Sushiswap promises its liquidity providers its token SUSHI, also similar to lending projects such as Aave’s LEND and Compound (COMP) in the DeFi space.

Yearn finance sees multiple all-time highs

Yearn.finance has been entering multiple price discoveries in the past month. Before reaching its current new all-time high, the YFI token held highs of $38,000, $18,000, and $16,666.

YFI token’s bull run comes at a time when DeFi is increasingly dominant in the market, outperforming Bitcoin’s performance by a mile. The governance token’s surge is speculated to be partially due to the YAM project, a yield farming protocol that doubled in total value before it collapsed due to the discovery of a contract bug.

Aave took the number one spot on DeFi, for a while

Aave, an open-source and non-custodial lending protocol, recently reached $1.47 billion of crypto assets staked, overtaking MakerDAO, which has $1.45 billion in total value locked (TVL).

Aave became the second project that has ever had more total value locked than MakerDAO, according to DeFi Pulse. The first time a project has surpassed MakerDAO in TVL was the Compound token COMP, which took the lead in collateral locked up until late July. MakerDAO took back its position as first after gaining twice the collateral locked up since then.

Ethereum Crypto Crashes to $340 After SushiSwap’s Alleged Exit Scam

This year, Ethereum has outperformed Bitcoin on more than one aspect, displaying one of the most bullish momentums on the market for its price run.

But Ethereum (ETH) experienced a flash crash recently, dropping to a low of $315 over the weekend, after hitting its 2020 high of $487 last Wednesday. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has since then recovered a bit, bouncing back by 8% and consolidating at $340 at the time of writing.

According to CoinMarketCap, the surge to $487 has been the highest price level recorded by Ethereum (ETH) since its bull run in late July, where it outperformed Bitcoin by undergoing a 20% surge. As a result of Ethereum’s volatility, decentralized finance coin Yearn.finance (YFI) also dropped by 27% in market pricing.

Ethereum dominates the DeFi scene

Ethereum’s bullish momentum could mainly be attributed to the growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, with the majority of DeFi protocols running on Ethereum’s blockchain ecosystem.

Decentralized finance has been all the craze as of lately, with DeFi tokens such as Aave (LEND) and Chainlink (LINK) experiencing sizeable growth in terms of market capitalization. Both governance tokens leverage Ethereum, which is the first and largest blockchain ecosystem optimized for smart contract protocols. DeFi applications are also mostly all run on Ethereum blockchain.

Yield farming sinks with Ethereum

With Ethereum’s observed flash crash on the market, the yield farming sector also took a hit. The trend has been all the craze among traders recently, who have used the technique of swapping cryptocurrency coins for DeFi tokens as a means to grow their digital wealth. As lots of DeFi protocols offer extra tokens as rewards for investing digital currency in their blockchain project – the art of yield farming – significant monetary growth can be achieved.

Since most DeFi protocols operate on Ethereum, the yield farming sector took a hit with Ethereum’s bearish market movement.

DeFi-ing expectations: SushiSwap

An explanation for Ethereum’s plummet in price would be the sudden liquidation of SushiSwap, the hot token of DeFi. The move took the DeFi community by surprise, shocking many as the DeFi protocol was doing so well and dominating the market. In fact, SushiSwap’s governance token $SUSHI had recorded a peak of $285 million in market cap in just a two week span. Needless to say, the DeFi protocol was exceeding all expectations.

With at least $250 million in total value locked (TVL) in crypto at the time of the deed, founder of SushiSwap Chef Nomi was accused by many traders of exit scamming.

A hard fork of DeFi protocol Uniswap – which has claimed the top spot in the DeFi sector for a total value locked of $1.56 billion – SushiSwap’s governance token “SUSHI” was trading at around $7 and was reported to have recorded a near 1000 percent surge. However, after Chef Nomi’s move, the token plummeted swiftly, dropping to as low as $1.19.

Chef Nomi denies exit scam accusations

Speaking about his brainchild, founder of SushiSwap, Chef Nomi denied the accusations of an exit scam and said that he made the move because he cared about the community. He had swapped his $SUSHI assets for more than $10 million worth of ETH and justified his cash-out move by saying that he wanted developers to take the rein. He compared himself to Litecoin (LTC) founder Charlie Lee, who had sold his digital wealth in 2017, when the cryptocurrency market was said to be in deep bubble territory. The former “head chef” said:

“People asked if I exit scammed. I did not. I am still here. I will continue to participate in the discussion. I will help with the technical part. I will help ensure we have a successful migration. @SatoshiLite did that and Litecoin had no problem surviving.”

Regardless of Chef Nomi’s justifications, SushiSwap (SUSHI) has significantly been impacted by the move, trading at $2.80 at the time of writing. The admin rights of the DeFi protocol has since then been transferred to the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried.

DeFi approaching bubble territory?

Though the DeFi sector continues to boom and increase in popularity, market experts are cautious. Some have speculated that DeFi may be approaching bubble territory, which would explain why Ethereum sunk over the weekend.

Despite the recent hit for the DeFi and Ethereum community, investors are hopeful that a bull run similar to that experienced earlier this year could be re-initiated.

Bitcoin Dropped Below $10K, 3 Reasons Bitcoin and Crypto Market Will Crash Again

Updated Sep 9, 2020, at 02:22 UTC

Technical analysis of bitcoin price

Bitcoin is the king of all cryptocurrencies, which can affect the crypto market overall. Bitcoin dropped below $10K yesterday and recovered above $10,400 at its highest today and slumped gradually. At press time, the Bitcoin price dropped around $10k again. This is similar to the price trend on Sept 5. After the price plunged on Sept 2 and 3, the bitcoin price consolidated around $10k. Both rebounds didn’t even touch the 5-day moving average (MA) and 10-day MA which are now strong resistance levels for the bitcoin. We can see the 90-day MA, which was once the strong support level for the last downtrend, is a support level again and the bitcoin price is in a consolidation mode for a few days. But it is quite weak and the second dip is a high probability.

Source: Binance

Sushi Price Analysis

It was apparent that the bull crypto market is driven by the overlap between internal and external factors; the economic stimulus plan which provided more money supply to the market and DeFi craze, especially the decentralized exchanges (DEX) like UniSwap and SushiSwap. The Ethereum and Bitcoin prices are pulled up by the DeFi craze. On Sept. 2, Uniswap’s trading volume has also surged recently, overtaking Coinbase by 20%. What’s behind the UniSwap’s huge trading volume is the contribution of SushiSwap. Like the impactTesla’s stock has on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, SushiWap token has a similar influence on the crypto market.

The price of Sushi token reached 15.97 on its first day on Sept. 1, then the price crashed to 1.13 of its lowest price the following days. The Sushi token crash pulled down the bitcoin price and the whole crypto market. This also overlapped negative news “McConnell Raises Doubts on Congress Getting New Stimulus Done”.

Source: Binance

It was no doubt Sushi price will affect the overall crypto market trend again. As many speculations, manipulations and news on SushiSwap, its future is unsure.

It was reported that Sushiswap founder has exited “scam”, then transferred control of the project to FTX’s CEO. FTX was an exchange backed by Binance. The Sushi token incentive model is also controversial. The Uniswap’s founder, Hayden Adams said, the Sushi project can be created within one day by any competent developer. we still don’t know who is the real anonymous founder Chef Nomi and how is it connected to other exchanges. In addition, the war between centralized and decentralized exchanges, and the war among different decentralized exchanges and their forks, make things much complex.

It is no doubt the future of DEXs is promising. Exchange is the key to exchange values and trade. These DEXs removed the trust and reliance on “trusted third parties”, which further transformed our trust into blockchain-based trust machines. But these uncertainties may have a strong negative impact on Sushi token price, which in turn would affect the crypto market.

Uncertainty of New Money Supply and its scale

As we have analyzed before, the bull of the stock market is driven by the new money supply, so was the crypto market. We can hardly say there will be a second bull market soon, given three conditions: (1) The second stimulus package and its scale are not sure. (2) There are enough profits for parts of investors. We can hardly get that much profit even in a bull market. As reported by Blockchain.News on Sept. 4, Tesla’s price was trading around 70.10 on Mar. 18 and reached 502.49 on Sep. 1. This surge resulted in more than 7 times in value under the current economic turmoil. There were signals to cash out. the Tesla stock had plunged recently.

Opinions expressed are solely the analyst’s own. You should conduct your own research before making a decision.

DeFi Market Recovers as Sushiswap (SUSHI) Migration Resulted in 225% More in Total Value Locked

Decentralized finance projects recently witnessed its tokens plummet, crashing up to 50 percent. Recently, the DeFi industry has slightly recovered, rebounding 19 percent today.

According to data from Messari, 32 of 37 DeFi tokens have been seeing gains today, between 3 percent and 39.6 percent. Swerve (SWRV) has been leading the rally with 39.6% gains, Yearn.finance (YFI) with 37.6%, Loopring (LRC) with 29.9%, Aave (LEND) with 29.4%, and the infamous Sushiswap (SUSHI) with 27.8%.

The recent DeFi market crash

Up to 95 percent of DeFi tokens have been seeing losses in the past week, as the recent crypto market crash took its toll on the industry. The DeFi bubble seemed to have burst, with most DeFi tokens taking a turn for the worst. Top DeFi tokens including Curve Finance (CRV), and Meta (MTA) have lost more than 50 percent of their value.

Data from Messari indicated that Curve Finance (CRV) is down 65% this week, and other governance tokens have followed suit, with Meta (MTA) experiencing a 59% loss, REN with a 52% dip, and AirSwap plummeting and losing 51% of its fiat value.

According to Messari’s report, 32 of the 34 DeFi tokens the firm surveyed were down over the past week. With the recent sell-offs in the cryptocurrency industry as well as the DeFi sector, many investors have been wary about the end of the DeFi craze, after an incredible bull market.

Sushiswap migration: 225% more in total value locked

Recently, DeFi protocol Uniswap’s hardfork, Sushiswap (SUSHI) had endured criticisms of an exit scam, following the lead developer Chef Nomi’s decision to sell SUSHI tokens.

FTX’s CEO recently received control of the Sushiswap protocol from Sushiswap’s founder, Chef Nomi. A few days after receiving control over the Sushiswap protocol, FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried recently announced his ideas regarding the future of the protocol.

Bankman-Fried suggested that he will transfer the admin control to a multi-signature wallet. He enabled the decision to be based on a decentralized nature, therefore he put it to a vote, and the results read that 98.41 percent of the voters have agreed with him.

FTX’s CEO has moved forward with the migration of $830 million of value locked in the Sushiswap protocol from Uniswap along with its liquidity. Currently, the first Sushiswap pool migration has already been completed.

Currently, there is around $1.3 billion of liquidity locked in Sushiswap, compared to Uniswap, which has around $400 million.

Uniswap’s UNI Becomes a Top 10 DeFi Token After a Day, Driving Ethereum Transaction Fees to an All-Time High

Uniswap recently launched its own governance token UNI, and since its launch, Ethereum’s transaction fees have reached new highs. Within hours after the launch of the UNI token, Uniswap became one of the most valuable projects in the DeFi sector.

As users were in a rush to claim Uniswap tokens allocated to them, the Ethereum network faced massive congestion. This resulted in a spike in transaction fees on the Ethereum network, reaching a record high. Uniswap accounted for 35% of the total gas consumption in the past 24 hours, where gas prices were recorded as high as 700 gwei. Average gas prices are around 416 gwei, and according to Etherscan, 422 gwei is already considered high.

According to data from crypto analytics firm Glassnode, the total amount of miner fees recorded spike from $100,000 to $900,000 in less than an hour. With Ethereum’s fees shooting up, Ryan Watkins, research analyst at Messari said, “Ethereum is damn near unusable right now. I can only imagine what retail will think if they eventually come into this market and face $50+ gas fees and 10+ minutes transaction confirmations.” He added:

“This has been my biggest anxiety about this bull market. The protocols are ready, the infrastructure is not.”

Watkins believes that with Ethereum’s high transaction fees, it could be detrimental to the growth of the DeFi and crypto space in the long run. Ethereum’s high transaction fees may hinder the bull market, as the majority of retail users may get edged out of the market, leaving the whales to dominate.

Uniswap becomes the largest DeFi protocol

Uniswap recently became the largest DeFi protocol in terms of total value locked (TVL), taking up $1.4 billion in cryptocurrencies, according to DeFi Pulse. The UNI token also became the top-45 ranked crypto by market cap, according to CoinGecko, within 24 hours of trading. The UNI token has also been ranked in the top 10 DeFi tokens.

The UNI token has also been listed on crypto exchanges, including Coinbase Pro. Prior to Coinbase Pro’s announcement, Binance had already announced that it will list UNI token and open trading for UNI/BTC, UNI/BNB, UNI/BUSD, and UNI/USDT trading pairs. The exchanges are moving fast given that the UNI token was only launched by Uniswap earlier on the same day.

Coinbase Pro Will List Uniswap Token UNI Instead of Sushi Token

Major United States crypto exchange Coinbase will list the Uniswap token UNI which was launched earlier today.

Coinbase Pro has announced that it will list Uniswap’s newly minted UNI token on Sept.17—if a sufficient supply of UNI tokens is met.

Coinbase has been active in supporting Decentralized Finance (DeFi) tokens. Currently, the US exchange giant has listed yearn.finance (YFI), Loopring (LRC), UMA (UMA), Celo (CGLD), Numeraire (NMR), Band (Band), Compound (COMP), Maker (MKR), and OmiseGo (OMG).

The competition to list UNI first has been fierce. Prior to Coinbase Pro’s announcement, Binance had already announced that it will list UNI token and open trading for UNI/BTC, UNI/BNB, UNI/BUSD, and UNI/USDT trading pairs. The exchanges are moving fast given that the UNI token was only launched by Uniswap earlier on the same day.

Uniswap VS Sushiswap

The move by Uniswap to launch the UNI governance token comes just a week after its DEX competitor Sushiswap migrated over $800 million in cryptocurrency assets from Uniswap. SushiSwap launched with a token to enable liquidity mining, and encouraged users to load up on assets before migrating from Uniswap to maximize their potential rewards when SushiSwap went fully live.

Despite Sushiswap being considered the more decentralized automated market maker (AMMs) of the two—Coinbase Pro has not listed the Sushi Token.

Sushiswap’s roaring entrance to the market has been mired in controversy since it forked from Uniswap. Recently Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream tweeted that Sushi is a Ponzi scheme.

Back said:

“Airdrop+defi is just another airdrop Ponzi formula. You could as well play a stake-to-play video game, airdrop players with hook “game governance”. Has infinite varieties, yet they are all alike: in a ponzi, you are the yield. Punchline: airdrop exit scam, maybe stake too.”

Founder of Uniswap, Hayden Adams has also expressed his critique of Sushiswap, dismissing the forked DEX.

Adams said in a tweet on Sept. 1:

“Sushi is one day’s effort by any competent dev at most […] It’s just whales playing whale games trying to cash in on a hype cycle and the value created by Uniswap.”