This Week in DeFi – December 17

To the DeFi community,

This week, Balancer announced a new integration with Aave, allowing unused liquidity from trading pools to be locked in Aave to earn additional Yield. Boosted pools will increase capital efficiency, and connections to other lending protocols will be rolled out over time to LPs additional options.

Aave Boosted Pools deposits @BalancerLabs liquidity into @AaveAave Protocol to capture higher yield and making more capital efficient DeFi, congrats @fcmartinelli and the team 👻 https://t.co/1H2aZFXpx0

— stani.newt (👻,🐻‍❄️,🦎.🦎) (@StaniKulechov) December 15, 2021

Optimism, the Ethereum L2 scaling solution first employed by Uniswap has deprecated their developer whitelist, allowing a wide swathe of new talent to start experimenting with and deploying contracts on Optimism. While still controlled by a group of developers, Optimism has plans to become fully decentralized in the future.

Today is the day. 🍾

The whitelist is officially gone and anyone can deploy to Optimism!https://t.co/XFCL7yKh8n

— Optimism (@optimismPBC) December 16, 2021

Perpetual Protocol announced new liquidity mining rewards for LPs on Perp v2 on Optimism. The program is retroactive to all LPs who have provided liquidity since the launch of Perp v2 with total weekly rewards starting at 10,000 PERP.

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🕯 Liquidity Providers 🕯

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🕯https://t.co/OPPSU3hHmK pic.twitter.com/aTDG0nYtIB

— Perpetual Protocol | V2 Is Live! (@perpprotocol) December 16, 2021

And Coinbase announced new ways to access DeFi for retail users – outside of the US. Coinbase will allow users in more than 70 countries to opt-in to the program, where DAI held on Coinbase is routed to the Compound protocol to earn variable interest. Coinbase will also cover transaction fees for users, leading to potentially substantial savings for market participants below whale size.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rleshner/status/1469015685439410187

Although we focus on the positives and the builders here, DeFi can and has been a messy space since coming into the spotlight just a bit less than two years ago. It’s an industry that requires constant new learning, challenging of preconceptions and open-mindedness about what the future might hold. It has also brought the opportunities and challenges of a world with crypto into focus for policymakers and financial professionals in a way nothing else could.

Some notable US policymakers have become increasingly vocal in opposition to seemingly the very idea of DeFi, and the BIS recently released a scathing take that questions many of the fundamental tenets of the nascent industry.

But unlike much of what we see being developed in DeFi, this is not a new phenomenon. In the early days of the internet, policymakers were similarly suspicious, often pushing for levels of control well beyond reason simply for lack of understanding of an emergent technology – there was a time when license requirements for publishing a website were real considerations.

So as we move through another holiday season, it’s worth keeping in mind that if you’re here now, you are still incredibly early, wrapping your head around developments and concepts that would have been unimaginable just five years ago. Family and friends, just like policymakers, need sober discussions about the importance and development of truly decentralized entities and frictionless transfer of value on the internet more than they need to know how much your portfolio is up (or down) or the size of the latest rug.

Education is key, and it’s clear we have a long way to go before DeFi can truly deliver on the global promises of better money and finance we’ve been making since the beginning. Let’s do our part to onboard the next wave of users, and help them understand the issues their representatives will be making decisions on sooner than later.

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $94.71B (down -5.24% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $133.67B (down -2.45%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $24.43B (down -31.4%)

DAI Supply: 8.87B (down -0.45%)

Total DeFi Users: 4,182,200 (up 1.07%)

[Hisham Kahn – The Defiant] – DeFi Needs to Simplify Design to be Truly Accessible to the Masses

[Chris Powers – Dose of DeFi] – The Five Memes that Defined DeFi in 2021

[Kevin Owocki – Bankless] – The Internet of Jobs is coming

[Anthony Sassano – The Daily Gwei] – Distributing Web3 – The Daily Gwei #401

[Fabian Klauder – DeFi Times] – Will Ethereum Be Flipped in 2022?

Alex is a Content Writer at Circle, with previous experience at tech startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and as a freelance writer and analyst. Interests include cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and he has been in the crypto community since 2014.