Projects like Dentacoin, which promised, uhhh, great things but had little to show for it, garnered hundreds of millions in value.
Look where they are now.
Literal billions in market cap reduced to ashes. And that's good.
"But have we *earned* it?"
Vitalik famously posed this question in late 2017, when the crypto market cap first reached $500 billion.
We're past $1 trillion now. Let's see what has changed in crypto, especially in Ethereum and DeFi, since then.
A thread. 👇
Projects like Dentacoin, which promised, uhhh, great things but had little to show for it, garnered hundreds of millions in value.
Look where they are now.
Literal billions in market cap reduced to ashes. And that's good.
Bitcoin dominance currently sits at 67% after bottoming at 33% in January 2018.
Ethereum dominance is also up from its lows.
Projects with big promises and no execution were flushed out.
Many coins in the top 50 have yet to deliver on promises they made years ago.
But this is changing as coins like AAVE and SNX enter the crypto market's top 20.
The confluence of money printing, political uncertainty, and more is driving the need for a scarce reserve asset not controlled by any central party.
While I loved CryptoKitties—and the gambling dApps were cool too—we're now seeing functional platforms used by hundreds of thousands built on Ethereum.
Think Uniswap. Think Aave. And so on.
Today, over 1,000,000 unique addresses have used DeFi.
Today, DeFi's total TVL sits at $22.5 billion, up from the ~$50m TVL as of Christmas Day 2017.
That's growth of 49,400%. Not bad.
SushiSwap did $395m in volume today. Uniswap did $728m.
Per @coingecko, Gemini did $275m, Bitflyer did $480m, and KuCoin did $453m.
Gone are the days of clunky DEX experience.
More from Crypto
I'm sure someone else has explained this, but it is just so cool and I want to explain how this works.
So Curve is awesome for swaps between similar assets, right? The fact that they trade very close to each other is a key part about how Curve works, using it's custom swap invariant function.
That's step 1
Step 2 is that Synthetix is awesome for creating "synthetic assets" (aka synths) which are assets that trade like other assets, that are backed by another, entirely different asset. Basically, a plastic banana that I can buy and sell like a real banana.
Synthetix has a feature that lets you swap between any two synths with zero slippage and a flat fee. That's because it is simply converting the sythentic asset into another synthetic asset, the backing for the synth doesn't change it just uses a different price oracle now.
This is important. Absolutely no slippage, at any size
Swap $1m sUSD for $1m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee
Swap $10m sUSD for $10m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee
swap $100m sUSD for $100m sBTC? Well, there isn't that many synths in Curve, yet but you get the point. The only limit is the pool depth
— Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) January 15, 2021
So Curve is awesome for swaps between similar assets, right? The fact that they trade very close to each other is a key part about how Curve works, using it's custom swap invariant function.
That's step 1
Step 2 is that Synthetix is awesome for creating "synthetic assets" (aka synths) which are assets that trade like other assets, that are backed by another, entirely different asset. Basically, a plastic banana that I can buy and sell like a real banana.
Synthetix has a feature that lets you swap between any two synths with zero slippage and a flat fee. That's because it is simply converting the sythentic asset into another synthetic asset, the backing for the synth doesn't change it just uses a different price oracle now.
This is important. Absolutely no slippage, at any size
Swap $1m sUSD for $1m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee
Swap $10m sUSD for $10m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee
swap $100m sUSD for $100m sBTC? Well, there isn't that many synths in Curve, yet but you get the point. The only limit is the pool depth
