Category Archive

Tokenomics (a portmanteau for token and economics) represents the monetary policy of tokens that directly contributes to their price fluctuations. In bull markets, tokenomics were given utmost priority, sometimes constituting full theses for investment decisions. When the euphoria wears off in the bear, however, founders and market participants are left realizing that tokenomics can delay a weak project’s demise, but …

Introduction and Opportunity In the last issue of DeFi Digest, we dove into decentralized options, a ‘Zero-to-One’ primitive that can onboard the next wave of DeFi users. Perhaps long overdue, this week we dive into decentralized perpetual futures, an instrument native to the digital asset space. A regular futures contract is simply a contractual legal agreement to buy or sell …

Introduction and Opportunity Options are one of the most popular derivatives in traditional markets among institutional and retail investors. Due to their versatility, traders use options to hedge existing positions, speculate on a security’s directional moves, or generate income. In 2021 alone, 33.3b options contracts were traded, up 35% from 2020. Much of this growth can be attributed to retail …

Zero-to-One (Z2O) Series Given the decentralization and transparency benefits of blockchains, many have pointed to DeFi as crypto’s ‘killer use case.’ After all, finance today is built along opaque and slower traditional finance rails ripe for disruption by distributed ledger technology. Sobering up from the highs of the bull market of ‘21, however, DeFi advocates are now left wondering: ‘How …

Since DeFi’s summer ‘20 peak, the general crypto narrative has indisputably shifted away from DeFi, to Web 3.0 and gaming. Granted, the next billion users to crypto are more likely to onboard through gaming than the 69th fork of Uniswap. Yet, many still rely on core DeFi principles to innovate continuously. NFT projects are incorporating airdrops and collateralization of NFT …

Although ETH remains the dominant Layer 1 for most on-chain activity, alternate Layer 1s have demonstrated product-market fit throughout the bull market run of ‘20/’21. Solana ($SOL) emerged as the ‘high-throughput chain’ focused on complex DeFi / gaming, BNB Chain ($BNB) offers easy fiat on/off-ramps through Binance CEX, while Avalanche ($AVAX) and Cosmos ($ATOM) are building application-specific blockchains that focus …

Correction: In the first distribution of ‘DeFi Digest 14: A Reflection on Liquidity Dynamics Through the Contagion & GHO Stablecoin’, we incorrectly referenced Voyager instead of Celsius as having a 1.2b hole in its balance sheet. The amount lent to 3AC by Voyager was $350m in USDC and 15,250 BTC, with their current asset-liability mismatch unknown. In last week’s DeFi …

Seeing the CeFi realm blowing up around us, it is perhaps pertinent to reflect and hammer the lessons into our collective crypto consciousness. Drawing from CeFi, DeFi and Everything in Between, it is clear now that Celsius, BlockFi, and Voyager Digital function as ‘CeDeFi,’ similarly to TradFi banking entities and are prone to the same weaknesses such as position opacity …

Everyone in crypto has heard of airdrops. Anyone who’s anyone, however, has actually received them. Upon receipt of a highly anticipated airdrop, the pang of dopamine from the financial implications and being rewarded for participating in the digital economy does urge one to wonder: “Rekt pepe, what exactly are airdrops? Are they free money? Where do they come from? What …