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This Week In DeFi – September 8

This Week In DeFi – September 8

This week, MakerDAO is clashing with the wider Ethereum community as founder Rune Christensen proposes forking Solana for the project’s future appchain migration.

Alex Miguel
September 08, 2023

Happy weekend, DeFi readers!

This week, MakerDAO is clashing with the wider Ethereum community as founder Rune Christensen proposes forking Solana for the project’s future appchain migration.

Much of the community took the proposal as a bit of a kick in the teeth – with Vitalik going as far as dumping his MKR in response to the news. He then gave a subtle nod toward MakerDAO competitor Reflexer, recommending that they embrace minority liquid staking tokens (LSTs).

Giphy

Christensen's proposal is part of MakerDAO's "Endgame" overhaul, aiming to launch a new network dedicated to hosting MakerDAO with improved scalability.

https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1697960101255188673

Visa has also shocked some Ethereum fanatics by picking Solana as its blockchain of choice in its newly-announced pilot program. The program allows merchants to accept USDC payments via Solana, aiming to improve cross-border settlement speed.

Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa, emphasized the use of stablecoins like USDC and blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum for modernizing fund transfers within Visa's treasury.

Solana’s native SOL token saw a 5% increase in value following the news – maybe a little underwhelming for such a large endorsement. The news comes despite the number of daily active addresses on Solana reaching a two-year low.

https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa/status/1700038721192726603

Ethereum development powerhouse, ConsenSys, has announced plans to launch a decentralized version of Infura by the end of the year, seeking to involve major Web2 cloud providers in the network.

Right now, Infura serves as the go-to access point for DApps to access real-time data from the Ethereum blockchain. The downside is that it's controlled solely by ConsenSys – posing a risk as a single point of failure.

The project aims to create a decentralized marketplace with up to five different data providers distributed around the globe, making access to Ethereum more reliable and censorship-resistant.

The ultimate goal is to establish a TCP/IP-like architecture for Web3 that can't be easily regulated.

https://twitter.com/infura_io/status/1700186931219275916

Industry leaders including Coinbase, Circle and Aave companies have formed The Tokenized Asset Coalition (TAC) – an initiative aiming to bring traditional financial assets onto public blockchains.

The coalition's main focuses are onboarding institutions into the tokenized asset space, and promoting education about blockchain technology in finance. The coalition is looking to offer cost savings and increased liquidity as incentives for institutions to embrace on-chain finance.

TAC will hold its inaugural Real World Asset Summit on September 19 in New York, hoping to innovate and advance the adoption of blockchain in finance.

https://twitter.com/BuildOnBase/status/1699879711529386376

Development looks like it’s in full-swing this bear season, as a whole range of projects – big and small – are gunning for making big moves.

Somewhat controversially, some of these moves are testing waters outside of the Ethereum ecosystem, mostly in search of more scalability and customizability.

Firstly, we’ve got the highly-popular perpetual futures DEX, dYdX, looking for a complete overhaul as it branches out to its own Cosmos appchain. dYdX looks to decentralize its entire order book, which requires some serious throughput.

Although the order book won’t be on-chain, the decentralization will enable greater security than the current off-chain, centralized order book model.

A second major DeFi platform making large moves is Synthetix, which is looking to launch a decentralized perpetual futures exchange – funnily enough, in direct competition with dYdX above.

The proposed platform, called Infinex, will be launched alongside v3 of the Synthetix protocol, using Ethereum L2 Optimism as its network of choice. It seeks to close the gap between centralized derivatives platforms and decentralized ones, which currently tend to have a significant difference in their performance.

The third (and maybe most shocking) potential branch-out of the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem is MakerDAO’s proposed Solana fork for its app-specific chain, touched on above. Throw in Visa’s Solana adoption for its pilot program and Infura’s move to decentralization, things are moving fast on all fronts!

Overall, it’s a truly interesting time in DeFi, as the ecosystem continues to push for greater decentralization, performance and progress.

Will those projects moving to other networks see the same success they saw on Ethereum?