📌 An opinionated recap of the most interesting new products in crypto
Token Economy
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DeFi Summit London update. This is shaping up to be a stellar event (Sep 10-11, mark the dates!)! More details on the exact schedule will be released in the coming days, but for now you can take a look at the confirmed speakers on defisumm.it and, for the first time, at a provisional list of sessions that will take place over the two days here.
If any of this sounds exciting, apply to attend via this form!
Now onwards with the coolest things new of the past couple of weeks (and remember you can submit them via this form to bring them to our attention).
A framework for contracting parties register and interact with any third party service.
OpenLaw serves one of the most important roles in the ecosystem: that of trying to connect the offline world to our decentralized internet, and it does so by turning paper-based contracts into programmable entities.
Now they're releasing their integration framework, which enables the connection of any third party service to their tools. The first example is DocuSign, where the signing of a contract can trigger various executions included in the contract itself.
tBTC is just like WBTC, but doesn't require any centralizing, censorable features (aside from having only one oracle for the price-feed for now).
So in reality, it's nothing like WBTC, as it is also fully redeemable in a trustless way.
It might seem a bit overly engineered at the moment (some people have questioned the need to actually have BTC deposited and instead advocated for a Maker/DAI-like scenario just pegged to the BTC price) - but we love it and think it shows what interoperability and open, permissionless innovation actually are.
A standard allowing reporters to sign key-value pairs (e.g. a price feed) that interested users can post to the blockchain
Speaking of single oracle problems, Compound has come out with a proposal (and early code) for an Open Oracle System, which divides the responsibilities for maintaining a price feed for example between 4 different parties: Reporters, Posters, Storage and View Contracts.
It seems to be missing some sort of staking or incentives to provide correct data, but I haven't dug into it yet - and I'm sure it's something that can be added.
It's gotta be the price feed oracle's week, as DIRT is also releasing an early version of their work.
The "decentralization" and trustless part here still need a bit of work in our opinion, as right now it works with limiting the ability to write to "whitelisted" (by whom?) sources (eg. exchange APIs). The smart contract then verifies the data with pke.
It's surely a faster and less expensive design that will be interesting for a number of protocols.
Amazing to finally see some more activity on this critical topic.
Compound was really an apt name, as new cool stuff keeps literally compounding on top of it (and not just interest!).
rDAI is the newest of those modules. A DAI holder can deposit it into a smart contract (rBank), which then auto-puts DAI at work on Compound while generating cDAI. The original DAI holder now has rDAI, an ERC-20 token always redeemable for the original quantity of deposited DAI ("redeemable DAI"), and can direct the flow of continuous interest earned by the underlying cDAI to any beneficiary address.
This allows all sorts of interesting 'passive' funding mechanisms by giving developers (eg wallets) a really simple tool to monetize or do other things like subsidizing txs etc.
An onchain, risk minimized seed funding mechanism.
Speaking of innovative funding mechanisms enabled by DeFi, here's a detailed proposal for an approach that leverages the Compound protocol to fund projects through interest and distribute tokens equivalent to the accrued interest. Aside from smart contract risk, the Patrons never risk their principal.
Open-source service that allows dapps to be indistinguishable from Web 2.0 apps
There's a great phrase in the article that explains it very well: "Transaction costs and gas fees are now part of your customer acquisition cost (CAC). Deal with it. Your users won’t."
The GSN is a network of Relayers that will submit transaction to the chain on behalf of users. Relayers are paid and incentivized to not cheat.
This is clearly a step towards the UX of the future - where users won't need to handle Metamask or private keys for most dapps.
After trying it out a bit I have a few questions. It seems that the public key who is assigned the data / results of the transactions is generated from the browser (eg. it doesn't use IP or cookies), so the questions are: - how can the user regain control of its assets if they lose access to the browser? - how can they synch their accounts with mobile or different devices?
It seems this would tie in perfectly with an ID protocol or standard that would let users use what they already know (maybe username / password with decentralized trustless recovery) and translate that to Ethereum public keys.
An non-custodial P2P fiat-to-crypto on ramp for dapps.
Team Ramp have unveiled a sneak peak of their instant product, which leverages a network of market makers to provide instant liquidity to crypto purchasers within dapps or wallets. The trade happens in a non-custodial fashion within an embeddable widget, via open banking APIs.
The product will be available in the autumn in the UK and a number of other countries.
This is only an announcement of future launch, so there's nothing tangible yet. However we are flagging it as, following MetaMoneyMarket feature in #105, we are starting to see an emerging narrative in defi aggregation.
Really important developer tool for the Ethereum ecosystem in the making, by the Ethereum Foundation: a decentralized database and search engine enabling to quickly find and verify source code of smart contracts.
Idea for a smart contract that pools together profit-seeking capital and provides liquidity to DeFi protocols.
Surfacing this really interesting 'open-source' idea by Felix of Set for a pool of capital that a network of keepers can trustlessly tap into to participate in (and profit from) on-chain events such as liquidation auctions, arbitrage, rebalances, etc.
Set is keen to collaborate and support any teams / individuals who are interested in working on it (and so are we!).
We featured Linkdrop for the first time in issue #90 when the team first shared a proposal for a unified standard for including digital assets/attributes into shareable links/QR-codes.
Just shy of 6 months later, they unveiled Linkdrop Dashboard, which enables DApps to trustless generate onboarding links for claiming digital assets (including Ether, ERC20s and ERC721s) without requiring a wallet in advance. An airdrop 2.0 of sort and a neat new distribution tool in the user acquisition arsenal of dapps.