First Published on @IOSG Medium on Aug 12, 2020
Welcome to our bi-weekly newsletter date from 30th July to 13th August.
🐱👤IOSG Insight
(1/4) Announcement:
We are thrilled to announce our investment in 1inch. 1inch is now a leading decentralized exchange aggregator that sources liquidity from various exchanges. Using smart contract technology to split a single trade transaction across multiple DEXs, and enable users to optimize and customize trades. We believe the team has the potential to bring DeFi to the next level. Read more
(2/4) Comparison of AMMs and perpetual swaps
Perpetual Swaps allow for speculation on price without having to own the underlying asset, therefore enabling traders to hold leveraged positions. Recently, competition among perpetual swap protocols is getting intense with several new protocols bringing innovative designs.
Strike Protocol is the most recent project to offer perpetual swaps, introducing “Virtual” Automated Market Maker (AMM), where AMM is used only for price discovery. This is different than the regular AMMs where the mechanism is used for both price discovery and token swaps. It connects to ChainLink once per hour to ensure the perpetual price is coordinated with the external market price. Once there is a gap in prices, the funding fee will ensure that long and short positions are properly compensated. Once the perpetual price is lower than external market price short positions would have to pay long positions the funding fee and vice versa if the perpetual price is higher than the external market price. In case long and short positions are not in balance funding fee payment would go to / come from Insurance Fund. However, Strike is designed so that the arbitrage is always incentivized to reduce the funding fee and if the perpetual price is perfectly coordinated with external price, the Constant Product Curve will ensure that one trader’s gain equals the other trader’s loss. This is the reason Strike Protocol doesn’t require liquidity providers and therefore there is no impermanent loss!
(3/4) Comparison of NFT platforms
Despite the stagnating growth of the NFT industry in 2019, the NFT Art market is rising rapidly with an increase over 500%. Digital art has been attracting attention, especially since the global pandemic. The high-end brand positioning of the Super Rare gallery has set a high standard for digital artists to enter into the platform and sell their artworks, which to a large extent guarantees the quality of the artworks on Super Rare. Although the number of sales for Known Origin is close to that on Super Rare, the latter has a dominant transaction volume advantage of over 10 times larger than Known Origin, which proves the effectiveness of high-end brand positioning.
Couple with excellent communication and organic community building, Super Rare has consolidated its leading position and set the standard of the industry. The NFT-backed gallery enables pricing, exhibition and auction with authenticity and originality of the artworks. The decentralized on-chain platform also reduced the cost of selling and exhibition compared to the traditional gallery and ensured the majority of the value of an artwork is captured by the artist, which creates incentives for digital artists to produce more masterpieces. In the near future, Super Rare is going to add timed auction and VR display to the platform as well as introducing mobile App and supporting multiple languages.
(4/4) With or without liquidity mining?
The entire DeFi ecosystem attracted a lot of capital attention in June-July 2020, with the Total Value Locked reaching $4.2 billion. Although decentralized derivatives platforms have also benefited, the growth of derivatives exchanges is far from catching up with the explosive 307% rise in DeFi as a whole in two months.
🐱🐉Industry
Uniswap raised $11M in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with additional investments from USV, Paradigm, Version One, Variant, Parafi Capital, SV Angel, and A.Capital. Read more
Grayscale Investments released a 30-second TV spot on its nine crypto trusts on major news networks this Monday, telling investors to move to crypto currency. Read more
**UMA announced Liquidation Opportunity Program,**creating an on-chain profit opportunity of ~$1,000 for any liquidator bot to take. Read more
KeeperDAO Raises Seven-Figure Seed Investment From Polychain, Three Arrows. Read more
Bancor announced Aave (LEND) as a Bancor V2 launch pool, allowing LEND holders to provide liquidity and earn a share of the pool’s trading fees while maintaining their 100% exposure to the token. Read more
Balancer Labs initiated a 100k BAL grants proposal to be allocated to teams/projects that are building on / contributing to Balancer. Read more
Reddit’s ‘Scaling Bake-Off Competition’ Comes To A Close With 22 Projects Applying. Read more
Set protocol, the leading DeFi asset management platform, announced Set V2 updates with yield farming and gas optimisation. Read more
Hakka Finance has released the white paper of BlackHoleSwap, a decentralized stablecoin exchange with unlimited liquidity. Read more
🐱🚀 Our portfolio companies
Synthetix announced the wind down of Synthetix Foundation, and the protocol will be governed by three distinct DAOs. Read more
Synthetix adjusted the assets tracked by its DeFi index token sDEFI and the corresponding weights in its Spica version deployed. Read more
The latest round of Polkadot (DOT) public offering was successfully completed in the first 100 hours and a total of 302,000 DOT was sold and 3949.57 bitcoins were raised. Read more
Polkadot has launched the first voting and will finally determine how many Planck decimal points the standard DOT has. Read more
The Polkadot token DOT has confirmed that it will split 100 times and transfer will begin on August 18. Read more
NEAR announced the introduction of the Chainlink oracle solution. Read more
NEAR has opened public offering registration from August 12 to August 14. Read more
Nervos kicks off first CKLabs cohort with Portal Wallet and Tocial. Read more
Bitfinex launched Lending Pro, a highly-customizable tool, launching at the start of next month, which will automate your lending strategies based on your specifications and market conditions. Read more
Mintable’s NFT Marketplace on Zilliqa now open for business, You can now monetise and trade unique digital assets through Mintable. Read more
Maker Governance approved MANA as Collateral Type in the Maker Protocol. Read more
Maker announced new debt ceilings for 4 assets and New global debt ceiling of 568M. Read more
Ava Labs has partnered with Polyient Games to build a dedicated NFT decentralized exchange (DEX) on Avalanche. Read more
Mainframe, has acquired Sablier, a streaming payment agreement on the Ethereum blockchain. Read more
🦄 About IOSG
Founded in 2017, IOSG Ventures is a research and community-driven concept.we are focusing on Open Finance, Web 3.0, and cross-chain industry. We have over 60 investments and been actively involved in various developer & DAO communities. We invest in top teams with innovative ideas, operational excellence, and a robust community, and always supportive to IOSG portfolios to grow local communities in China, the US, and Germany.
If you would like IOSG Ventures to consider your project, please send a summary of your project along with a pitch deck and/or white paper to [email protected]
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