📌 An opinionated recap of the most interesting new products in crypto
Token Economy
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A couple of reminders before diving in:
- anyone with an interest in DeFi is free to submit a session proposal for the upcoming London DeFi Summit that we are co-organizing (Sep 10-11) - don't forget to send *new* products our way via this typeform link (new as in ideally just released, not like 9 months ago) 🙏 - stay cool in the heatwave! 🔥
Public iOS and Android beta version of the Metamask app.
And 9 months later...safely delivered! The app is officially out in public beta, with v1 expected for the fall.
It comes with InstaPay, a built-in Connext payment channel integration, which lets users send and receive instant and free payments in DAI between each others, and a super simple onboarding including sync with browser wallet option by QR code and access to most defi protocols within it. Will no doubt be playing around a lot with it.
Infura is finally monetizing one of the most centralized points of failure in DeFi land.
I guess that's good news, meaning that it reduces the risk that they go away, but it would ideally be better to be able to do away with such a centralized model in the first place.
Coinbase will start surfacing a wealth of new "trading signals" based on the anonimized, aggregate activity of larger traders on Coinbase itself, available to let anyone create and deploy their automated trading strategy. Neat features, albeit obviously those signals will be biased towards a particular niche of the crypto markets (US retail).
Coinbase is clearly trying to make its product more sticky in the face of heating competition.
Straight from the team behind ETHlend, DLP protocol went live on the Kovan Testnet.
It's particularly interesting as it's a lending model that isn't based on P2P order matching but on a pool where lenders can earn passive income by providing liquidity and borrowers can deposit collateral of multiple kinds and borrow instantly against it (I guess we can now safely call this the Uniswap model?). Another interesting aspect is that borrowers are given the option of either variable or fixed interest rate (obtained via a market rate oracle that fetches from various lending platforms), and the ability to switch between the two at any time. It seems like Aeve is planning to step in and switch users automatically in extreme scenarios (eg high pool utilization, large spread between fixed and variable) so will be interesting to see that in production. Audit pending.
A protocol for tokenized indexes of positions in Augur markets.
The Flux Market team have released the first version of AugurSets, which allows anyone to create a tokenized index of weighted Augur prediction market positions. This would allow to create tokenized baskets of outcomes related to pretty much anything, like the success (or failure) of startups in a specific sector. A bit like Set by the sound of it, but for *anything*? 🤯
One of the projects coming out of the most recent ETHNewYork hackathon launched v1 on Ethereum mainnet.
It's slightly technical, but in short it makes Ethereum smart contracts extensible and securely upgradable on-chain via a configurable multi-sign framework.
The long awaited killer 0x feature is finally in beta! Relayers and traders can spin mesh nodes and receive/share orders throughout the 0x ecosystem, leading to greater networked liquidity.
An early, unaudited and unrefined release of Polkadot.
Really interesting approach to launching the main network by the Polkadot team, by releasing ahead of it a highly experimental, community owned version of it with real economic conditions and no central kill switch. Its native token will follow the distribution of DOTs and allow its holders to perform the sort of functions that DOT would enable in the main network. The incentive is that 1% of DOTs at Polkadot genesis time will be distributed to Kusama’s stakeholders and community.
There's not much info on this product yet, but it looks *very* useful on the surface if you are a dapp dev. Getting data from the blockchain is notoriously a massive headache requiring not insignificant infrastructure costs, so Hookpad aims to solve just that by plugging directly into any EVM based chain and storing the data in a readily consumable format and fully-managed fashion.
The team behind this is Experimental, who developed Cryptowars. The beta is open now.
A secure, private, serverless and unstoppable file transfer dapp running on Ethereum’s Swarm.
Despite being released on testnet in March, this is way too cool not to feature now! Thanks to the Fair Data Society team for bringing it to our attention last week.
Ever had any concerns crossing your mind about using centralised file transfer apps? Yeah, same. Well Fairdrop to the rescue: it doesn't collect any personal data at all and it is based entirely on decentralised storage (no central server). It can be upgraded with fund-transferring features and if you run it through your own Swarm node, it can transfer 100 GB+ sized files (between Fairdrop users). Once on mainnet it will cost ETH to pay for tx fees and it will be interesting to see how they plan to handle that from a UX perspective. And if that doesn't sound cool enough, its next stage of development is apparently "Fairdrive", which will enable decentralised and systematic file storage and sharing among Fairdrive users (think a hard drive with categorised folders for different app data that you can write to or give access to those folders to others).