ON–046: DeFi

Issue #46 of the on-chain analytics newsletter that reaches 6000 crypto investors every week 📈

• 1inch Exchange, whose v2 offers the best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes across all DEXes—swap on the customizable new UI.
• Aave, where you can experience DeFi: Deposit, Earn, & Borrow on Aave.

This week our contributor analysts cover DeFi: Nexus Mutual, PoolTogether, Opyn, Instadapp, and ETH Gas.

• Opyn is a product and open protocol on Ethereum that allows users to buy, sell, and create options on any ERC20. In October, Opyn recorded its highest level of monthly users to date, reaching 539 users. This is an 18% increase from the previous high set in September. (Source)

• On October 29th, Opyn recorded its highest TVL ever reaching USD $2.56mm. At the time of writing, Opyn had a TVL of USD $2.33mm. (Source)

• UNI tokens launched on September 17th and the Opyn team issued UNI put and call options soon after. Due to the excitement around UNI’s launch, the UNI Oct 16th $2.5 Put and UNI Oct 16th $10 Call contributed to one of Opyn’s largest volume options ever. (Source)

• Since the beginning of August, the value of total weekly trading volume of Opyn options has generally trended upward, peaking the week of October 26th with $3.7mm. This could be attributed to many factors, including the following: traders reacting to underlying asset volatility, investor uncertainty, or an increase in the number of unique Ethereum addresses holding oTokens, among others. (Source)

  

• Instadapp’s flashloan (InstaPool) facilitated approximately $1.3B in flash loans for features like the Refinancing Tool, Leverage, and Debt Swap. The resulting flashloan volumes from InstaPool were roughly twice as high as previous editions. (Source)

• More than 9000 DeFi Smart Accounts (DSAs) have been created, and several people are increasingly utilizing the platform to farm tokens and earn yield. Around 4000 more DSAs were created from the previous editions to this date. (Source)

• The use of debt swap, collateral swap and leverage as part of yield farming strategies lead to approximately $429M of swap volume being facilitated by Instadapp’s DSAs. A major part of this volume was swapped through Kyber, Curve and 1inch. Around $201M of the volume was swapped from previous editions to this date. (Source)

• Since the launch of the COMP tokens, around 24,778 COMP tokens have been farmed and claimed on the DSA platform by the users. However, there are more COMP tokens accrued but not yet claimed. (Source)

• PoolTogether is a protocol for no loss prize savings on Ethereum. Users of the protocol deposit funds into “prize pools” and randomly chosen winners are awarded the accumulated interest. The V3 of the protocol launched 14 days ago. In the first 14 days 2,509 unique deposits were made into the protocol, averaging 187 new deposits per day. The chart below shows total unique deposits:

• In addition to unique wallets, another important KPI is total assets deposited. The more assets deposited the larger the weekly prize. In the first 14 days, $1.4 million was deposited and $1.15 million is currently deposited. This is notably higher than the V2 protocol which never exceeded $900,000 in total user deposits. The chart below shows total deposited capital:

The final KPI is prizes awarded. The V3 of the protocol introduced the ability for anyone to add additional prizes to the pool. This proved quite popular and thus far over 30 tokens representing most major DeFi protocols have been added to the prize. Total prizes awarded by the V3 protocol already exceed $13,000 in the first two weeks. In comparison, the V2 awarded $35,000 over the course of 14 months.

Thus far, the average deposit size into the protocol is $753, as compared to other DeFi protocols PoolTogether tends to have smaller amounts of capital deposited by a larger number of unique wallets.

• Nexus launched shield mining, a feature in which projects can offer their native tokens as bonus incentives for NXM holders to stake on such projects to open up new cover capacity. Keep Network was the first to participate in shield mining. Staking capacity on Keep’s contract maxed out in just a single day with over 225k NXM staked, making it the second most staked contract after Compound. Likewise this opened up over $6M in cover capacity on Keep. (Source)

• Since its launch, Nexus has generated almost $2.5M (6k ETH) in fees from cover purchases. Most of the fees occurred on September 14th when SAFE farming launched and cover capacity on every contract immediately maxed out. (Source)