1. DeFi Data Dashboard
Stablecoin issuance
As of March 27, the market capitalization of the top five stablecoins was 128.1 billion, down 2.12% from the middle of the month (130.8 billion).
USDC has resumed its anchor price, but it is foreseeable that discussions and thinking about stablecoins will return to the public eye. Coupled with the hot project crvUSD and dpxUSD scheduled to be released in the first quarter, a new round of protocol-native stablecoins will become a hot topic at this stage.
On March 15, Zhao Changpeng tweeted that Binance is moving zero-fee Bitcoin transactions from BUSD to TUSD.
TVL data
As of March 28, the TVL of the entire network was US$75.8 billion, an increase of 5.99% from the middle of the month (74.7 billion).
Affected by the recent Arb airdrop, Arb's TVL has increased significantly in the past month, reaching 12.08%. At the same time, the TVL of the Ethereum mainnet has rebounded by 5.96%, which can be considered as the result of the recent ETH price rebound.
The TVL market value of Ethereum in the LSD track continued to increase, reaching $13.6B, of which Lido's share continued to remain at 74.47%.
The Ethereum network’s total ether staking ratio continues to rise, reaching 14.71% (Dune@hildobby).
DEX Data
As of March 28, DEX trading volume in March reached US$99.7 billion, a significant increase of 32.28% compared to US$67.4 billion in February.
Lending data
As of March 20, lending volume under the main lending agreement reached $4.24 billion.
2. DeFi Information Aggregation
DeFi News
dYdX announced that it has completed the third milestone of the development of version V4, including dynamic funding rates, trading interface, etc. dYdX said that it will launch the internal test network on March 28, 2023, and it is expected to open the public test network at the end of July and launch the main network at the end of September.
Uniswap launches the Mini Portfolio feature, which allows users to view asset balances, token price history, NFT details, manage LP pools, and purchase cryptocurrencies using bank cards or credit cards through Moonpay.
Solv Protocol released Solv V3, focusing on on-chain fund issuance and investment. Currently, Solv V3 supports fixed-income funds, and will gradually support structured products and equity funds. More than 10 professional fund managers will be stationed to provide users with a rich fund supermarket.
The first product launched after Solv V3 went online was a market-making fund issued by iZUMi Finance, which provides a stable return of 11% to preferred share investors and is planned to continue to roll over to a scale of US$10 million.
The MetaMask institutional wallet has opened a new staking market where companies and investment banks can choose from different staking services. The staking market was launched a few weeks before the Ethereum Shanghai hard fork.
DeFi Industry Perspective
Synthetix V3’s ambition: to become the liquidity layer for the next generation of on-chain derivatives and financial products
Synthetix is a decentralized liquidity layer on Ethereum and Optimism that serves as a liquidity backend for DeFi. Stakers provide liquidity to collateralize synthetic assets and perpetual futures trading with oracle prices, without the need for traditional order books or counterparties. Liquidity is composable and fungible across markets with no slippage. Synthetix currently supports atomic swaps for Kwenta, Lyra, Polynomial, dHEDGE, Curve, and 1inch. Synthetix V3 creates a permissionless derivatives liquidity platform that can be used as a liquidity layer for derivatives. Synthetix has two key value propositions:
For users: A choice of mining pools/vaults is provided, which are linked to the derivatives market, and users can choose to obtain different returns at different market risk levels.
For the protocol: it provides pools/vaults for collateralizing new derivatives markets, and also provides tools for creating pools and using the returns to attract users.
Currently, V3 focuses on four key points:
Liquidity layer for derivatives: Synthetix V3 allows developers to easily create new financial derivatives, solve the cold start problem, provide services for on-chain derivatives liquidity, and will support perpetuals, spot, options, insurance and other products.
Power given to stakers through multi-collateral staking: Synthetix V3 establishes a universal vault system, where each vault supports a single collateral asset, but vaults can be combined into pools and connected to one or more markets. This approach brings three benefits:
Enhanced risk management capabilities: The pool is connected to a specific market and obtains specific risk exposure;
Better hedging capabilities: Pools are connected to specific markets, allowing for more accurate hedging;
Wider range of collateral: Expand the range of collateral to give pledgers more choices.
Simpler and cleaner developer experience: Synthetix V3 optimizes the system and provides rich developer tools and guides to make development simpler and faster and improve user experience.
Cross-chain: Synthetix V3 can be deployed on any EVM-compatible chain, supports synthetic assets on any chain, and has cross-chain capabilities, making asset transfer more convenient.
New Project Outlook
The decentralized options protocol Premia released version V3, which has five main features: users can choose market orders and limit orders to trade; liquidity pools will utilize centralized liquidity; there will be an automated strategy library; traders will be able to borrow asset collateral to leverage their active positions; any LP can create any type of options pool with the parameters they choose (underlying tokens, strike prices, expiration dates, etc.). This year, Premia announced the acquisition of the structured DeFi protocol Knox Vaults. Knox Vaults' flagship product is DeFi Options Vaults (DOV), which provides automated income strategies.
On March 24, Quasar Finance, a Cosmos-based DeFi asset management protocol, launched its mainnet, aiming to help investors manage their digital assets across multiple blockchains. Quasar Finance received $5.4 million in financing led by Shima Capital this year, with a valuation of $70 million and a total fundraising of more than $11.5 million. The Vault currently being run by Quasa is OSMO PRO, with a liquidity mining strategy, a TVL of $400,000, a deposit lock-up period of 14 days, and an expected APR of 43% including fees and incentives.
Flex Yang, the former founder of Babel Finance, will launch the crypto-native distributed stablecoin project HOPE. The planning of HOPE stablecoin is different from other stablecoins. In the early development stage, the reserve price of HOPE will start from $0.5. With the fluctuation of BTC and ETH, the main purpose is to become an important margin to connect DeFi, CeFi, and TradFi. HopeSwap, the first application of HOPE ecosystem, will be launched on the Ethereum mainnet in April.
3. Snap DeFi Radar Data
March was not a friendly month for the crypto world. In the first half of the month, the bank crashed, causing the stablecoin to depeg. In the second half of the month, the Euler Finance hacker attack caused the underlying lending protocol to lose $190 million. Other DeFi projects in the related portfolio also suffered tens of millions of dollars in losses. Opyn's Zen Bul strategy requires collateral assets to purchase ETH through leverage, which resulted in losses due to its collateralized lending in Euler. It has not yet recovered, and the APY is shown as -95.3%.
After the Federal Reserve announced the easing of monetary policy, assets such as BTC and ETH saw a sharp rise as they are not under regulation or within the banking system. BTC is still above 28,000 points.
In terms of TVL, the top three are Diamond Unibot V2's LP-WETH/USDC Neutral (15%), Ribbon Finance's Coverd Call-T-ETH-C and Coverd Call-T-SETH-C strategies, with $32.37M, $10.53M, and $9.87M respectively.
Although Ribbon Finance's Covered Call series of strategies have high expected returns, they have suffered considerable losses in the past two weeks of trading, so the current cumulative returns of T-WBTC-C, T-ETH-C, etc. are all negative. Polynomial's Put Selling - USD has performed well in the past two weeks of rising market, with an expected return of 30.03% and an APY of 35% last week.
