This Week in DeFi – March 11

To the DeFi community,

This week, the Kyberswap DEX launched on Arbitrum, continuing efforts to help users avoid high fees when the Ethereum network becomes congested. Kyberswap is now available on Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BSC, Fantom, and Cronos, making it one of the most widely available DEX.

🚀KyberSwap DEX Aggregator Launches Integration with L2 Scaling Solution @OffchainLabs #Arbitrum Network
Trade tokens on #KyberSwap at faster speeds and with lower costs, with the best rates!

🔄 Trade and earn now: https://t.co/Yl4MTlr0di

📖Learn more: https://t.co/ksSu1YjQkt pic.twitter.com/sUI00hnsk5

— Kyber Network (@KyberNetwork) March 7, 2022

The Avalanche Foundation launched the Multiverse incentive program, offering up to $290 million in AVAX to boost development of subnets, app-specific blockchain instances. The program will be supplemental to Avalanche Rush, a DeFi-focused incentive campaign rewarding developers building on Avalanche’s C-Chain.

1/ Incredibly excited to share the launch of Avalanche Multiverse, an up to $290M incentive program focused on accelerating the adoption and growth of Subnets, a technology unique to Avalanche that is poised to be the next growth engine in crypto. /🧵https://t.co/nsKMlf428u

— Emin Gün Sirer🔺 (@el33th4xor) March 8, 2022

Cega, building on Solana, announced a $4.3m seed round led by Dragonfly capital. Cega will help bring new exotic derivative products to Solana, starting with options contracts and developing more complex instruments from there.

1/ Cega is excited to announce a $4.3M seed round led by @dragonfly_cap with participation from @PanteraCapital, @coinbase, @AlamedaResearch, @SolanaVentures and more.https://t.co/Nr8jEyKEcl

— CEGA – we’re hiring! (@cega_fi) March 8, 2022

And Wirex Wallet added native trading capabilities to their mobile wallet application by integrating Paraswap and will offer no-commission swaps on the platform. The Wirex wallet also recently added cross-chain bridging through an integration with Celer’s cBridge application.

We’re excited to announce we’ve partnered with DEX aggregator @paraswap to make #DeFi more accessible than ever before! Using Paraswap’s market-leading price algorithm, #WirexWallet users will benefit from ZERO commission swaps between tokens! https://t.co/VMUErdgT36 pic.twitter.com/0zzA9exfMs

— Wirex (@wirexapp) March 8, 2022

As DeFi continues to mature, the volume of projects on specific chains as well as in aggregate may decline from high water marks set in 2020 or 2021. Leading players that developed applications we’re familiar with today like Aave or Uniswap continue to consolidate their brand recognition, and have ample war chests that allow them to continue to innovate in their original domains and beyond.

As the low hanging fruit of simple DeFi use cases is picked, incentives to try to compete in those domains decline, as existing players become the go-to providers of their respective services. Successful projects will increasingly need to rely on genuinely innovative protocols or services to attract investment and attention, and venture capital resources will have tightened up their investment criteria after having seen dozens or hundreds of similar pitches. The complexity in vision or execution for new DeFi projects may also start to require deeper knowledge of existing products and development practices, further reducing the raw number of projects attempted. 

The good news is, a reduction in quantity may well be associated with an overall increase in the quality of new DeFi innovations. As crypto markets warn of another down period, we could see another quiet but mighty period of innovative development without much fanfare, not unlike the period that led up to the explosion of DeFi in the first place. Whatever happens, keep your eyes open for the next big thing – the hits keep coming, if you keep looking.

Thanks to our partner:

 

Total Value Locked: $74.4B (down -4.57% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $114.02B (down -3.76%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $13.65B (down -28.42%)

DAI Supply: 9.41B (up 2.06%)

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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.