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This Week In DeFi – September 22

This Week In DeFi – September 22

Tether appears to have gone back on its word on secured USDT loans, resuming them after saying it would discontinue lending this year.

Alex Miguel
September 22, 2023

Happy weekend, DeFi readers!

This week… 👀

Tether lends another 5.5B $USDT to clients
Optimism plans to sell 116M $OP to private buyers
Venmo announces PYUSD support
dYdX integrates Axelar for Cosmos onboarding

Tether goes against word, continues loaning $USDT

Tether appears to have gone back on its word on secured USDT loans, resuming them after saying it would discontinue lending this year.

The company's last quarterly financial update showed an increase in USDT-denominated loans, totalling $5.5 billion as of June 30 – up from $5.3 billion the previous quarter.

Tether confirmed the loans were granted to prevent customer liquidity depletion or to help clients avoid unfavorable collateral sales, but says it intends to reduce such loans to zero (again) by 2024.

Gif by timanderic on Giphy

Optimism to sell 116M $OP tokens

Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism plans to sell 116 million OP tokens to seven private buyers for treasury management purposes, around $159 million at current prices.

The sale, which at first worried the community about downward pressure on price, may not affect OP token prices significantly as it is conducted privately, and the tokens come from the unallocated part of the OP token treasury.

These tokens will be locked up for two years, but can be delegated to third parties for governance purposes, and the sale aligns with Optimism's original budget plan.

Optimism also recently announced that unclaimed funds from its first airdrop will be directly distributed to the remaining eligible addresses.

Starting today, there will be several transactions totaling approximately 116M OP tokens. We’re sharing as a heads up to our community that these are planned transactions.
— Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@optimismFND)
6:04 PM • Sep 20, 2023

Venmo announces $PYUSD stablecoin support

Venmo, the social payment platform under PayPal, is set to introduce the PayPal USD stablecoin (PYUSD), expanding its digital asset range.

Users will soon be able to buy and send PYUSD on Venmo, PayPal and compatible external wallets, enabling a seamless wallet connection between the platforms at no cost.

The announcement comes not long after PayPal's recent launch of PYUSD, backed by U.S. dollar deposits and short-term Treasuries in partnership with Paxos.

dYdX exchange integrates Axelar for one-click onboarding

The largest decentralized financial derivatives platform, dYdX, has integrated Axelar's cross-chain infrastructure to enhance onboarding to its upcoming version 4, featuring its own appchain within the Cosmos ecosystem.

The integration will use “Squid,” a single-click cross-chain transaction builder provided by Axelar, to enable an efficient transition for users onto the forthcoming v4 platform.

The launch of dYdX's appchain will depend on a governance vote, with the open source code for version 4 expected to be ready and shipped in October.

1/ One-click to the dYdX Chain 💪
We’re excited to announce that the dYdX Chain will integrate with @squidrouter x @axelarcore.
Users can now integrate with dYdX Chain from Ethereum, app-chains, or supported L2s w/o the hassle of bridging 🧵
— dYdX (@dYdX)
6:09 PM • Sep 20, 2023

The calm before the storm

The last week or so has been relatively quiet in terms of news and development, as we may be reaching the peak of the bear market.

Rather than alarming headlines about DeFi “dying” or any major announcements, nothing seems to be louder than the silence around the industry right now.

Could this be the proverbial calm before the storm?

Everyone who was never really in it for the technology appears to have disappeared, while those who get things done and build, are are doing just that – building.

Recent trends are continuing to play out, as Canto becomes the latest L1 to cave and pivot into an L2 scaling platform for Ethereum. Major stablecoins continue to propagate and find where they fit in the ecosystem, as USDC reaches Polkadot, while USDT finds its way into more hands via secured loans.

Web3 gaming appears to be brewing a little storm of its own, as a Farmville co-creator lands $33 million in funding for the creation of Web3 games – something he believes is important for the staying-power of future games.

A now-quiet reorganization of the industry looks as though it is taking place now; the bad actors have been removed, things are falling back into place and the work is being done in silence.

The calm is well and truly here…but how long will the storm take to follow?