The overall trading volume of DEX has exceeded 20 billion U.S. dollars in September, of which Uniswap has reached 13.8 billion U.S. dollars.
Original Title: “Monthly Track: DeFi-DEX”
Author: First Class
In September, as Sushi opened the prelude to directly grabbing liquidity, the competition for DEXs became increasingly fierce. If a project does not issue coins, then liquidity may be directly removed by mining projects with higher returns. Therefore, in the end, Uniswap, the leader of DEX, was also “forced” to issue its own token. The UNI token has finally achieved a kind of universal participation effect due to its mechanism of issuance and DeFi in the past few months. On the same day, the gas cost of Ethereum was as high as 900, causing continuous congestion. We will look at the DEX transactions in September from the macro transaction data, and then elaborate on the progress of each project.
DEX transaction data overview
Note: The data is as of September 26, 2020. Exchange data such as Sushi and Swerve are not included.
The above chart shows that the overall trading volume of DEX has exceeded US$20 billion in September, and the month-on-month growth rates in the three months of 1989 and 1989 were 175%, 160% and 83% respectively. Although the growth rate is slowing down, in terms of volume, DEX has shown its strong potential.
DEX has entered a stage of explosive growth in trading volume starting in 2020. There are several important reasons:
1) Uniswap, Balancer and other AMMs create fund pools and add liquidity without review: this model is the key to new projects issuing tokens to bypass centralized exchanges, and is the technical cornerstone of the current liquidity grab battle.
2) Liquidity mining: DeFi’s mining enthusiasm has been detonated from the currency issuance model of Compound using deposits and loans to obtain COMP. Now it is basically “no mining, no DeFi”.
3) Liquidity robbery: Sushi opened the era of liquidity mining and looting. Uniswap, which did not issue tokens, became the fat meat in the eyes of robbers. Even Curve, which has issued tokens, is also labeled as a community issue, directly FORK without pre-mining projects. The tokens of these new projects contributed a lot of transaction volume.
The migration of tokens from centralized exchanges to DEXs caused by liquidity mining, until the subsequent liquidity wars and frequent occurrence of new coins, resulted in an explosive increase in trading volume in the above figure.
Note: The data is as of September 26, 2020. Exchange data such as Sushi and Swerve are not included, and there may be errors in the statistics of the balancer
The above picture shows the trading situation of DEX in September. There are some phenomena worth noting:
1) Uniswap Yiqi Juechen, its transaction volume and number of transactions has already significantly exceeded all other DEX, the transaction volume in September was as high as 13.8 billion US dollars, compared with 6.7 billion US dollars in August, an increase of 104.5%. Its transaction volume in September was much higher than the second place Curve’s 4.85 billion US dollars. Uniswap has 190,000 transaction addresses, an increase of 32.8%, which is much higher than the second-ranked Kyber’s 5,000 addresses.
2) The top three exchanges are all AMM, each of which has outstanding features: Uniswap is the simplest, Curve has the lowest trading slippage, and Balancer’s liquidity pool can be set to any ratio. The most important feature of Uniswap and Balancer is to add a liquidity pool without permission, and is now the preferred trading place for all new DeFi projects.
3) The number of transactions (the number of unique addresses) in the lower-ranked DEX has all declined, and the magnitude is large, which is in sharp contrast with the growth of the head. The main reason is that imitations are concentrated in Uniswap and Curve, which contributes to the transaction volume and number of transactions of both, while diluting the participation of other projects.
The project ranking selects the data of the Coinmarketcap website on September 28, 2020.
Uniswap (UNI), #39
September progress
Uniswap did one thing in September, issuing UNI tokens.
Issuance plan: The total amount of UNI tokens is 1 billion, 40% for the team, VC, and consultants, there is a 4-year unlock period, and 60% for the community. After 4 years, the annual total increase will be 2%.
Airdrop: 150 million UNI in the community will be airdropped directly to all historical users, liquidity contributors and Uniswap socks purchasers, of which 49 million will go to all liquidity providers, starting from the day V1 goes online; 100 million will be for all The users who have interacted, each address is 400 UNI, there are a total of 250,000 addresses; 220,000 is for all users who have bought socks.
Mining: Currently four pools of liquidity mining are opened: USDT/ETH, DAI/ETH, USDC/ETH and WBTC/ETH. In the next two months, each pool will be allocated 5 million UNI.
Governance: Starting from October 17th, community governance began. UNI holders can vote to decide how to allocate 43% of the community treasury, including whether to increase the liquidity mining pool and the number of allocations.
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Uniswap’s token issuance is a milestone event. If there is still controversy over whether good projects need to issue tokens to cut leeks, then the “urgent” issuance of UNI at least shows that even the best projects need to issue their own tokens. Whether the token is really “useful” in the project is no longer the primary issue. It can be governed, can be mined, and can increase the stickiness of users to the project seems to become more important.
According to Uniswap’s transaction data in the last 24 hours, 8 of the top 20 tokens by transaction volume are DeFi project tokens issued in the last two months, which is enough to see the popularity of DeFi and the importance of listing tokens without permission.
The above picture shows Uniswap’s lock-up volume. The current lock-up volume of US$2.21 billion occupies the top spot of all DeFi projects, which is higher than the second-place Maker’s US$1.97 billion. The figure shows that Uniswap’s lock-up volume rapidly increased, declined, and increased again around September. The corresponding events were Sushi issuance, Sushi liquidity migration and UNI issuance. So, is Sushi really “robbing”? In fact, this is not the case. After Sushi migrates its liquidity in the picture, Uniswap still has more locked positions than before the start of the Sushi project. Sushi actually speeds up Uniswap’s embrace of the current DeFi liquidity mining boom.
Another interesting phenomenon is that Uniswap’s airdrop has basically been received three days before, nearly 180,000 addresses. It is foreseeable that nearly 70,000 of the 250,000 airdrop addresses, most of them, maybe 80%, may not be retrieved for various reasons. According to the calculation of 5 US dollars per UNI, nearly 112 million US dollars are lost .
October plan
The Uniswap team started recruiting personnel for the development of v3 a few months ago. Recently, the main creator Hayden announced some features of Uniswap in the direction of Ethereum’s 2nd layer: 1) It can be compatible with the existing Ethereum infrastructure; 2) Large-scale Extensibility; 3) Compatibility with other 2-layer DApps, etc.
Sushiswap (SUSHI), #67
September progress
Since the establishment of the Sushiswap project on August 25, it has only been a month since the project, but the waves caused by the project can be described as magnificent. Let’s sort out the entire event from the timeline:
Issuing tokens: At the beginning, there is no upper limit on the total amount of SUSHI tokens. In the first two weeks, each block produces 1,000 SUSHI. After two weeks, the output rate drops 10 times, which is 100 SUSHI per block. 10% of the SUSHI produced will be directly given to the developer ChefNomi. In the future, of the 0.3% of Sushiswap’s processing fees, 0.25% will be given to liquidity providers and 0.05% will be given to SUSHI holders, which means that SUSHI is pledged to hold xSUSHI.
Founder sell-off: The anonymous founder of Sushi sold all his 2.56 million SUSHI tokens in exchange for 18,000 ETH (approximately US$6 million) on September 5, which caused strong dissatisfaction in the community. On September 6, ChefNomi handed over control to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Friend (SBF).
Migration: On September 10, nearly USD 1 billion completed the migration following Sushiswap. SBF transfers power to nine multi-signatures voted by the community. On September 11, SBF issued 2 million SUSHI, which were airdropped to liquidity providers supporting the migration.
Founder returned tokens: On September 11, ChefNomi returned 38,000 ETH to the project, worth 14 million U.S. dollars. The funds were voted by the community, and SUSHI tokens were repurchased in the SUSHI/ETH pool on September 15.
Community governance: On September 9th, the community voted to reduce the output of SUSHI and locked 2/3 of the newly minted SUSHI for one year. On September 18th, the community suggested adding a rotating incentive pool to increase the liquidity of the fund pool and attract new users. The incentive pool is selected by the community, a batch of 10 fund pools in total, and the next batch will be replaced after 7 days of operation.
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Sushiswap is a very controversial and dramatic project.
In essence, Sushi only has the liquidity migration code written by the founder ChefNomi, and its transaction fee distribution scheme is the same as Uniswap, except that it allocates 0.05% of Uniswap’s future to its team to SUSHI holders. Yes, and the founder of Sushiswap took 10% of SUSHI. This distribution method seems fair, but it is also the fundamental reason why ChefNomi can stage a sell-off.
From the very beginning, it was to grab liquidity. Uniswap had not issued any coins at the time, and it was the most fragrant meat of all DEX. Before the start of the Sushiswap project and after the completion of the migration, Uniswap’s liquidity was US$300 million and US$500 million, respectively. So in terms of results, Sushiswap actually increased Uniswap’s liquidity.
The figure above shows the liquidity situation of Sushi. It can be seen that after migrating USD 1 billion on September 9, Sushiswap experienced a short period of growth, reaching a peak of USD 1.46 billion. After Sushi’s liquidity mining decreased, liquidity decreased rapidly, and is currently only stable at around 430 million US dollars. Comparing Uniswap’s liquidity graph, we can find that the liquidity part of Sushi has returned to Uniswap after the migration. This is mainly due to two reasons: 1) The liquidity provider is profit-seeking. When Sushi cannot provide sufficient income, liquidity Providers will migrate; 2) Project stickiness. The preferred platform for most new DeFi mining projects to issue their own tokens is still Uniswap. This can also be seen from the number of top 20 new coins in trading volume. In the past two months, Sushiswap has only two tokens except SUSHI, while Uniswap has 8.
The picture above shows the transaction volume of Sushiswap. Since the migration, the transaction volume has fallen all the way. According to preliminary estimates, Sushiswap had nearly US$2.07 billion in trading volume in September, ranking third among all DEXs. But the key issue is that, in accordance with this downward trend in trading volume, Sushiswap in October will obviously be difficult to compete with Uniswap.
October plan
Sushi’s latest proposal, BentoBox, is to use trading pairs as a lending pool, invest two coins, one more, and the other empty. The characteristic is that it can directly borrow and recycle in one step, the leverage is fully used, and each transaction pair is independent, avoiding systemic risks. The success of the project requires the community to pay a total of 100,000 SUSHI as compensation for code development.
Balancer (BAL), #95
September progress
FeeFactor and ratioFator: Same as before.
WrapFactor: The soft anchor is reduced from 0.7 to 0.2, and the hard anchor is still 0.1.
BALFactor: Cancel the original 1.5 times calculation formula for BAL. Instead, take out 31% of the 145,000 BAL distributed every week, or 45,000 BAL, to BAL/WETH, BAL/DAI, BAL/USDC and BAL/ WBTC.
CapFactor: Divide the original cap into five standards, cap1 to cap5, which are US$1 million, US$3 million, US$10 million, US$30 million, and US$100 million. The original tokens on the whitelist are cap3 by default. That is 10 million U.S. dollars, and the tokens that enter the whitelist afterwards are initially cap1, which is 1 million U.S. dollars. All adjustments to the cap level of tokens must be voted by the community. The proposals that have been voted on include: increasing MKR from cap3 to cap4, removing DZAR from the whitelist, reducing RPL from cap3 to cap2, and increasing UNI and PERP from cap1 to cap2.
Whitelist: Balancer will only guarantee the basic smart contract compatibility between the token and the protocol, and the risk of the project will be left to the liquidity provider’s own judgment.
Multi-path order routing: Balancer has updated the order matching function across multiple pools, which means that even if there is no direct trading pair, the transaction of two tokens can be completed in one order.
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Balancer also increased the distribution ratio of its own token BAL when it was playing hot in other war zones, which to a certain extent shows that Balancer feels the pressure from the market and strives to increase people’s motivation to hold BAL. On the other hand, the fine-tuning of various factors will be a daily event that accompanies the BAL distribution, indicating that the team still pays attention to the fairness of its BAL distribution, because after all, fairness is a basis for the long-term survival of the project.
The cross-pool trading function should be a standard configuration of AMM, and Balancer has finally been updated.
October plan
The team sponsored the upcoming ETHOnline hackathon and proposed some ideas for the future development of Balancer: dynamic fee pool; self-starting liquidity pool curve and UI; exchange of BPT and underlying assets; loyalty pool: early LP can Get more BPT, and withdraw later LP, each BPT can get more tokens.
Curve (CRV), #126
September progress
Curve’s focus is on operations and governance.
Operation: U.S. exchanges Gemini and Kraken have launched CRV; BitMax will soon list CRV; and reached a cooperative relationship with S.Finance, a fork project of Curve.
Governance: Through governance, Curve has added 2 new transaction pools. The first pool is the hBTC/wBTC transaction pool, with a liquidity of 16,778,491 USD, and a mining yield of 21.90%. The second pool is 3Pool with a trading pair DAI/USDC/USDT, the liquidity is 296,831,084 USD, and the mining yield is 49.35%.
Now each transaction pool begins to charge management fees, that is, 50% of the transaction fees are taken as management fees. The current consensus is to use management fees to buy back CRV tokens, and then distribute these repurchased CRV tokens to VeCRV holders people. The specific allocation method and allocation share need to be decided by the DAO second vote.
Curve Emergency Handling Committee (Curve Emergency DAO) was established, with a total of 9 members. The community can increase/change/decrease the members of CED through Curve DAO.
Swerve bifurcation event: Curve imitation that appeared in early September, with a total of 33 million tokens, released through liquidity mining. 9 million pieces were released in the first 2 weeks, 9 million pieces were released in the following year, and 3 million pieces were released each year from the second to the sixth year. Therefore, in the first two weeks of Swerve’s liquidity mining, part of Curve’s liquidity was attracted to Swerve. At its lowest point, Curve’s liquidity was reduced by approximately US$300 million. Two weeks later, the mining yield of Swerve decreased, and Curve’s liquidity gradually recovered. Serve liquidity robbery failed.
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After Curve released the Boost plan in August, the pledged CRVs rose rapidly, and the pledged CRVs currently account for 16% of the current circulation. The current start-up management fee and community discussions to provide rewards for CRV liquidity holders on other DEXs are all aimed at encouraging users to hold CRVs, pledge them, and reduce the circulation of CRVs to alleviate the high release of CRVs. The team has done a good job in motivating users to hold CRVs.
The number of voters who participated in the 11 proposals released in September did not exceed 20. On the one hand, because the cost of participating in governance is too high, on the other hand, some VeCRV holders only care about mining revenue and do not care about project development progress. . It is worth noting that the address held by Year.finance holds about 10% of the total VeCRV, and the address of the founder of Curve accounts for about 6%. These two addresses will be decisive in the September DAO vote. effect. It can be seen that the current online governance is only a means of controlling projects by large households, and cannot achieve true decentralized governance.
October plan
Governance remains the main task of Curve. The governance solutions currently discussed in the community include: rewarding ETH/CRV trading pair liquidity providers on Uniswap; adding GUSD, HUSD, USDK and other poorly liquid stablecoins to 3Pool; and changing the trading pool parameters and adding trading pools.
Note: 0x, Kyber Network, Bancor have no major progress.
to sum up
“One day in the currency circle, one year in the world”, this sentence is the most appropriate to describe the DEX during this period. From the forking of Sushi Uniswap to the various swaps produced by the forking of Sushi, we can see that liquid mining can attract users, but it is not enough to retain users. The market is constantly evolving in the small innovation of products, and the soup is not changed. The imitations of drugs will eventually be eliminated by the market.
Source link: mp.weixin.qq.com
