Happy Thursday, Blockfolians
The Lede
In case it’s not clear yet, 2020 will go down as the summer of DeFi.
Since June 20th, the technical first day of summer in the Northern hemisphere, we’ve seen the total value locked in DeFi go from $1.6B to $6.75B (and climbing fast) today.
We’ve seen a raft of new protocols launch - Ampleforth, Aave, Ren etc.
We’ve seen new terms - liquidity mining, yield farming - become prominent.
We’ve seen spectacular explosions of value and spectacular implosions to nothing. <cough Yams cough>
An individual YFI token is currently more expensive than an individual bitcoin token.
What’s more, every day there is some new story about someone doing something around or moving into DeFi. Just check out “Highly Relevant Reading” below for a taste.
The point is: if bitcoin as a hedge against central banks gone wild is the macro narrative of the year, DeFi is the inside-the-industry companion that will drive this next bull market.
This is a good time to ask ourselves what we want out of this next bull run, and how we’d like to comport ourselves. Because the pressure to do increasingly crazy things is going to get nothing but bigger.
So as this thing runs, have some fun. Farm some yields. But do your best to not be one of those people who has to leave the industry in shame because of what they did when no one cared what anyone did.
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Highly Relevant Reading
Algorand gets into the DeFi game, sees token price boost
Check out the first bitcoin multisig in space
Robinhood’s former head of crypto is joining FTX.US as COO
Bitcoin launches DeFi staking with dai and Kava
Community Commentary
Need a more in depth look at this whole DeFi craze? Delphi Digital has you covered
Not everyone is convinced that the way DeFi is playing out is net good for the space
A Really Big Number We Should Be Paying Attention To
$50,000,000
That’s the size of BlockFi’s just-announced Series C round featuring some very interesting investors
Final Thought
What could go wrong?