Bring on DOT liquidity! (June 9th to June 15th)
The markets have just been hit with major liquidations around DeFi lending giants Curve, as reported by CoinDesk. Amid all the chaos, Polkadot appears to be getting its very own DeFi summer started and perhaps offers some refuge.
In this week’s top story, we will take a closer look at the surge of liquidity as well as the important news shaping Polkadot’s DeFi summer. Given the recently rebranded Hydration has kicked off the incentivisation, we will also provide a featured profile report on them in this week’s edition.
From DeFi incentivisation to content incentivisation, did you catch last week's featured update on bounties that have yielded rewarding content. If participation in content bounties is too soon for you, have you considered contributing to our finders program?
Sharing news also earns rewards and can eventually lead to contributing to this very newsletter. For instance, our finder-turned-writer earned 25.5 DOT from contributions to last week’s featured update and news coverage.
The full newsletter can be enjoyed via this link.
Dodow, Chief Editor
Top Story of the Week - Summer Rise Liquidity
Written by yay.oi
In DeFi, liquidity pools generally make up a large portion of the Total Value Locked (TVL) metric, which many view as an indicator of how healthy and active an ecosystem is. Higher TVLs foster growth and innovation by attracting new users and developers.
This week, Hydration kicked off its Polkadot Hydration campaign, which aims to deepen liquidity in the Omnipool and boost its TVL by $50M. Hydration believes that the influx of capital from their campaign will spill over to the entire ecosystem. The Polkadot community seems to think so too, because they approved proposals for a 1M DOT loan to inject liquidity into the Omnipool and 1M DOT for 12 months of liquidity mining incentives.
With initial incentives of up to 260% paid out in vDOT and HDX, Hydration hit an all-time high TVL of 32M within 24 hours. After a week, their TVL hit 44M overtaking Moonbeam to become the top parachain on Polkadot.
Though Moonbeam is doing its best to keep up, with the launch of their own self-funded liquidity incentive campaign. For their 4.5M GLMR Season 3 ecosystem grants they enlisted DeFI consultants Gauntlet to analyze and advise on the distribution.
On Gauntlet’s advice, and with the community’s approval via governance, 30% was allocated to a DEX (Stellaswap), 25% to a Lending Protocol (Moonwell), 25% for Cross-Chain Interactions (Prime Protocol), and 20% to Innovative Products (Beamswap)....….
Check out our full newsletter for the full story
Featured Report - Time for Hydration!
Written by Sanchez
Liquidity is the lifeblood of decentralized finance (DeFi), indicating how easily one token can be swapped for another. The DeFi sector, with over $20 billion in total value locked on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), still suffers from the inefficiency of liquidity caused by its fragmentation across different chains. This is likely to worsen as the crypto industry expands.
Liquidity fragmentation hinders the optimal utilization of liquidity. Small trades can cause significant price impacts and slippage, leading to price discrepancies for a token across different exchanges. Additionally, users face higher trade fees as the system hops through various liquidity pools to facilitate a trade. Those who try different chains for better trading results end up paying more transaction fees than if they had traded on just one platform.
Hydration (aka Hydra), formerly known as HydraDx, offers an innovative solution to liquidity fragmentation with its Omnipool. The Omnipool is a novel concept that combines all token assets into a single trading pool, as assets are supplied singly. This is unlike the usual XYK pools, where tokens are supplied in pairs and can only be traded against the tokens they are paired with....….
General News
Written by Dodow
Polytope Labs has teased the evaluation period for funding through Polimec for Hyperbridge is coming soon.
The Moonbeam foundation has allocated funds totalling 13 million USD towards innovation development of Gaming, RWA, and Moonriver. A partnership with N3MUS for mainstream gaming has already been confirmed.
Frequency has explained their recent spike in activity is due to the migration of social graphs (DSNP) from social network partner, MeWe.
DKG paranets and Initial Paranet Offerings (IPOs) have been introduced by OriginTrail. Paranets on NeuroWeb.AI are on-chain autonomous AI systems that establish knowledge graphs. The IPO is the mechanism to launch an initial set of knowledge assets with determined incentivisation.
Polkadot slot auction 71 has been won by Crust Network with a self-funded bid of 222 DOT.
NFT & DEFI News
Written by Dodow
Blockchain Gamer has reported that Mythical’s NFL Rivals has surpassed $1 million in NFT trading volume.
As the build-to-earn period comes to a close, those who staked with Astar Degens (AD) are set to get a bonus 20% distribution of the rewards earned by the dApp. Anyone who has staked with AD will need to make sure they have set up their Astar Pass, which binds the user's substrate account to their EVM account.
Youdles open their public mint on Singular. You can purchase and customize yours using the 9 slots and 300 plus items.
Moonbeam S3 Ecosystem Grants have been approved, with 4.5 GLMR allocated between Stellaswap, Moonwell, Prime Protocol, and Beamswap.
The much anticipated Polkadot Hydration campaign kicked off on June 10th, and in less than 24 hours, the Omnipool reached a new all time high of USD$32M TVL.
Ahead of the Season 3 ecosystem grants, Beamswap’s decentralized perpetual exchange, Beamex, has surpassed 90M in volume.
Juicy GLMR incentives go live on a few pools on Stellaswap.
Governance & Events News
Written by Dodow
OpenGov referendum 857 is the first of a series to tweak Asset Hub and help make Polkadot competitive in the stablecoins market.
Bifrost launches a vToken Reward-Share Program. Successful applications via Bifrost OpenGov become collaborator channels who receive special links for minting vTokens. A share of the reward fees are collected when users mint vTokens using these links.
Polkadot Insider hosted Braille on June 12th to discuss the #52 Polkadot UX Bounty proposal.
Snowbridge, a trustless bridge between Polkadot and Ethereum, is coming. Learn more about it in this session on June 13th.
Speakers from new projects raising funds through Polimec were featured on an X space hosted by Polkaworld on June 14th. There was representation from Polimec, Polytope Labs, Xcavate, and Gotem DAO.
Extras
Awesome cover art created by Dodow.
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