The Rollup

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

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DeFi Slate Fam,

There’s many sides to building a successful protocol in this new community-driven, results-based, revenue-generating DeFi world.

Too often investors, speculators, and users drink the Kool-Aid and focus on ‘changing the world’ rather than ‘building a good product and massive community’.

But ultimately thats what were after here:

Long term sustainability through a killer product.

And that’s exactly what the team over at Akropolis has been putting together for years now.

In this episode, Rob & I had the pleasure of speaking with Yana - the lead community manager & all-around utility team member of Akropolis!

Lets gooooooo!

-Andy

🎙DeFi by Design EP. #9: Community, Governance, & Sustainability with Yana

Akropolis has been working mighty hard ahead of their recent Delphi mainnet launch. The team has built a platform with quite a few use cases, giving the honest farmer plenty of room to work with. Here’s the quick ‘n dirty on what Akropolis can do:

Delphi Explained

Delphi is effectively a yield farming tool, meant to bring all the services of other platforms to one place. Another term for this is an aggregator. With very little technical experience needed, users can operate and control high APY % savings accounts, dollar cost averaging (D-C-A’ing), and yield generating farms.

As with any protocol, this comes with risk, but the good news is Delphi just got an audit with Certik. Certik is definitely the leading auditor in the #DeFi space along with Quanstamp!

Akropolis took the calm and collected route to getting off the ground, another sign at their ability to think longer term and build sustainable products. Enjoy this episode, degens! 👨🏽‍🌾😤

📲 Join the Akropolis Discord here!

🙏 Follow Akropolis on Twitter!

📈 Invest on Delphi now!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

📈 Shoutout To Our Partner: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

👨🏽‍🌾Earn Interest & Leverage Your Assets with Aave, a non-custodial money market protocol leading the #DeFi charge. 

FARMING OPPORTUNITY: Deposit LINK tokens into Aave to get aLINK, then head over to Yearn to put your aLINK into the yaLINK vault for extra yield (20%+ APY currently). It all starts here with Aave!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join thousands of other crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord to get our freeV.1. yield farming guide!

🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Check out some previous interviews:

* DeFi Slate x Nate Hindman: AMMs & Bancor V2

* DeFi Slate x Jeff Jihoz: Web 3.0 Gaming Axie Infinity

* DeFi Slate x Nick Fett: Oracles, Tellor, and the future of DeFi

Last week in review:

* Master It Monday: Farming $FARM On Harvest Finance

* Tap In Tuesday: DeFi By Design EP #7: Interoperability & Cross-Chain Future with Ren Project

* Wiretap Wednesday: The genesis of fair launches with $YFI

* Thursday: DeFi By Design EP #8: L2 Scaling & zkRollups with Loopring

Recent tweets:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

Listen on YouTube | iTunes | Spotify | R.S.S. Feed

DeFi Slate Fam:

Its happening. It really is.

Ethereum is gearing up for a mainstream mania push & were at the forefront of the technology necessary to make it possible.

Welcome to the new world of L2 scaling, a much needed relief.

See here’s the thing, when new people learn about DeFi and see the 500+ gwei gas prices ($40 for a simple Uniswap tx), there’s no way in hell they are going to participate.

Introducing: Loopring.

Your go-to gasless DEX for trading on Ethereum utilizing the power of L2 solutions, specifically zkRollups.

This buzzword is definitely thrown around a fair amount in DeFi, but Matt does an incredible job explaining it in layman’s terms.

Perfect for me & you!

Enjoy this one & listen closely, its the future of Ethereum ;)

-Andy

🎙DeFi By Design EP #8: L2 Scaling & zkRollups

Loopring is in the trenches doing the good deeds the Ethereum community needs. They are like an angel amidst the sea of Ethereum warriors that we have in the community (which isn’t a bad thing, they all contribute in their own ways).

But man oh man if Loopring can pull off anything they aspire to, they will be one of the most valuable assets the ecosystem has.

As I write this, the gas prices are 500+ gwei thanks to the current Uniswap token madness.

But trading on Loopring’s layer 2 DEX? Still gasless.

Trying to farm some yield rn? That’ll cost you $80 to enter a pool.

And another $80 to exit.

But trading on Loopring’s layer 2 DEX? Still gasless.

That’s the power of L2 and Loopring. You don’t want to miss this one. We’re building together. Enjoy!

📲 Join the Loopring Discord here!

🙏 Follow Loopring on Twitter!

📈 Trade on Loopring now!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

📈 Shoutout To Our Partner: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

👨🏽‍🌾Earn Interest & Leverage Your Assets with Aave, a non-custodial money market protocol leading the #DeFi charge. 

ALPHA LEAK: Deposit LINK tokens into Aave to get aLINK, then head over to Yearn to put your aLINK into the yaLINK vault for extra yield (40%+ APY currently). It all starts here with Aave!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join thousands of other crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord to get our freeV.1. yield farming guide!

🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Check out some previous interviews:

* DeFi Slate x Nate Hindman: AMMs & Bancor V2

* DeFi Slate x Jeff Jihoz: Web 3.0 Gaming Axie Infinity

* DeFi Slate x Nick Fett: Oracles, Tellor, and the future of DeFi

Last week in review:

* Master It Monday: Becoming a Uniswap Liquidity Provider (LP)

* Tap In Tuesday: Akropolis 101

* Wiretap Wednesday: How to turn your BTC into a productive asset

Recent tweets:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

Listen on YouTube | Spotify | iTunes | R.S.S. Feed

DeFi Slate Family:

Its obvious. Bitcoin on Ethereum is absolutely blowing up. There’s no doubt about it.

We are seeing massive yield farms pop up all over the place leaving the the Bitcoiners hanging out on the BTC chain wondering what they’re doing leaving their BTC unproductive while everyone else is farming food coins.

More important than the flashy, short-lived xx,xxx% APYs is the ability to use assets cross-chain.

This opens up new realms of endless possibilities: lending & borrowing on different chains, scaling solutions cross-chains, payments globally across different networks, credit and DAOs, yield farming on multiple chains at once - the list goes on.

In this episode we’ll deep dive into RenVM, bringing BTC onto the Ethereum blockchain & how REN Project is playing a massive role in the current DeFi industry.

Welcome to the show.

-Andy

🎙DeFi By Design EP #7: Interoperability and Cross-Chain Future with REN Protocol

We’ve been following Ren project for quite awhile. In fact we just did a piece on turning your BTC into a productive asset here, using renBTC as your BTC value on Ethereum.

With the recent launch of RenVM in May 2020, the value of the REN token has seen insane gains & the project thousands of new users.

First ever 1000 BTC transaction? We go into that.

How does the Ren token accrue value? Got it.

What does TVL in Ren Protocol represent? Covered.

Whats left on the roadmap for 2020? You bet.

Listen to the episode now!

📲 Join the Ren Telegram here!

🙏 Follow Ren Project on Twitter!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

📈 Shoutout To Our Partner: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

👨🏽‍🌾Earn Interest & Leverage Your Assets with Aave, a non-custodial money market protocol leading the #DeFi charge. 

ALPHA LEAK: Deposit LINK tokens into Aave to get aLINK, then head over to Yearn to put your aLINK into the yaLINK vault for extra yield (40%+ APY currently). It all starts here with Aave!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join thousands of other crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord to get our freeV.1. yield farming guide!

🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Check out some previous interviews:

* DeFi Slate x Nate Hindman: AMMs & Bancor V2

* DeFi Slate x Jeff Jihoz: Web 3.0 Gaming Axie Infinity

* DeFi Slate x Nick Fett: Oracles, Tellor, and the future of DeFi

Last week in review:

* Master It Monday: Becoming a Uniswap Liquidity Provider (LP)

* Tap In Tuesday: Akropolis 101

* Wiretap Wednesday: How to turn your BTC into a productive asset

Recent tweets:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

YouTube | iTunes | Spotify | R.S.S Feed

DeFi Slate Family:

Derivatives trading make up one of the largest industries in the entire financial world.

Would you believe Opium is working on olive oil futures? Ha, we didn’t either until we realized what Opium is trying to do can totally change the way derivatives are looked at.

The integrations between CeFi and DeFi are coming & Opium is at the ground floor.

Learn what Andrey and the Opium Team are preparing for the mainstream movement of DeFi.

We’re putting the pieces together.

The money lego’s.

Opium is playing its part, find out how below!

-Andy

🎙DeFi By Design EP #6: The Future of Derivatives Trading

Derivatives trading might be one of the best opportunities in DeFi available today. At least Andrey, a veteran in the CeFi and crypto space, thinks so.

Andrey Belkyov had been working in a traditional derivatives trading shop until he had a lightbulb moment.

In front of his face appeared the Ethereum whitepaper in 2016, by the luck of a great friend, he decided it was going to be the future. Since then, he has gone all in on DeFi and building out what will be the future of the financial world.

Rob and I had a lot of questions about regulation, derivatives markets, the bridge between CeFi & DeFi and how Opium is pioneering the decentralized futures markets.

Opium also brought the world’s first credit default swap on Aave!

Wild.

Decentralized financial systems allow for so many possibilities.

Hint: Andrey mentioned something about Elon Musk futures markets coming soon!

We dove into how Opium picks its markets and what the future of Opium looks like in the coming months and years, enjoy!

📲 Join the Opium Telegram here!

🙏 Follow Opium Team on Twitter!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

📈 Shoutout To Our Partner: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join dozens of crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord to get our freeV.1. yield farming guide!

🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Check out some previous interviews:

* DeFi Slate x Nate Hindman: AMMs & Bancor V2

* DeFi Slate x Jeff Jihoz: Web 3.0 Gaming Axie Infinity

* DeFi Slate x Nick Fett: Oracles, Tellor, and the future of DeFi

Recent tweets:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

Listen on YouTube | Spotify

📈 Shoutout To Our Sponsor: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

DeFi Slate Family:

The real future of the decentralized finance world is adoption, mass adoption. Aave just announced a full-on fiat on ramp, Binance has listed 10+ DeFi assets in the last few weeks, and Coinbase has been offering steady 1.25% APYs on USDC for months now.

The hype is here already.

Now, we build the stepping stones and pave the foundation for the future.

Still, though, one of the biggest challenges ahead is the ability for the mainstream investor to use decentralized finance products and protocols.

Like, lets be honest, were not seeing the average joe hop into metamask, transfer BTC to renBTC using RenBridge then use that to get sBTC curve LP tokens to farm CRV and BPT.

No shot.

But, they would be able to use an all-in-one DeFi interface like Zerion to help them get started lending and borrowing.

In this episode, Rob & I dive deep into bringing DeFi mainstream using Zerion & how CEO Evgeny is trying to make his mark on the DeFi space!

-Andy

P.S. We have a special guest article below from Rebecca, a Zerion team member!

Zerion: Update

Guest Post: Rebecca Mqamelo, Marketing at Zerion.

2020 has been a big year for Zerion. The interface went from a simple portfolio tracking tool into one of the easiest places to explore the entire DeFi market, buy and sell tokens, and manage assets across multiple wallets. 

Since redesigning their product to be more market-centric, the team is now turning their attention towards making Zerion the one place where investors can access all of DeFi. This shift is a logical response to an evolving landscape of user needs: when they launched their Explore and Market pages – which allow you to filter assets by performance, protocol, and type – they saw a 50x increase in weekly active users, signalling the growing demand for tools that let you discover new DeFi assets and track a complex portfolio from a single platform. In addition, weekly active users on their mobile apps increases 6x.

Zerion’s roadmap is now entirely focused on supporting a wider range of transactions with DeFi instruments. This will build on the previous work they’ve done with DeFi SDK, an open-source library that makes it easier for dApps to integrate with protocols. Right now, Zerion lets you buy and sell a number tokens, but with new protocols and strategies cropping up every day, users are looking for ways to do more with the assets they have. This includes staking, yield farming and trading. The important part is they want to do this from the same place they manage their entire portfolio – and building towards this is now a top priority for most DeFi interfaces.

Tell your friends about this episode!

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

📈 Shoutout To Our Sponsor: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. This is not financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join dozens of crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

Listen on YouTube | Spotify

📈 Shoutout To Our Sponsor: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

Defi Slate Family:

Aave is the workhorse of the DeFi space, and none better than Marc Zeller behind the scenes getting it done!

Seriously though, this fella is a must follow on Twitter.

In this episode we chat about what makes Aave so special, the future of DeFi, and more.

We learned a lot and you will too.

Remember why we do this: Were on the route to take the power back into our hands once and for all.

We’re opting out of the current system.

We’re making our own path.

And we couldn’t do it without Aave.

Lets go lets go lets go.

-Andy

What’s next for Aave? 

Guest Post: Isa Kivlighan, Marketing at Aave.

Aavenomics & Governance -- A Move Toward Decentralization 

In the immediate future, Aave will be moving toward a more decentralized protocol where the governance is in the hands of the users. The Aavenomics proposal was released recently, which highlights the token migration from LEND to AAVE, Aave Improvement Proposals (AIPs), voting and governance, and the Safety Module. The governance is currently on the Ropsten testnet, and the community is welcome to test it out. 

The first vote on mainnet will be on the migration from LEND to AAVE!

Credit Delegation-- Synergies with “OldFi” 

For the full rundown on Credit Delegation, Stani wrote a great one here. Essentially, Credit Delegation allows party A to deposit in Aave and then delegate their credit line to Party B who can borrow without needing to put up their own collateral. The terms and conditions are all decided in a legal agreement with OpenLaw. The first Credit Delegation has already happened with DeversiFi as the borrower, a momentous step forward. 

Credit Delegation makes DeFi into a source of liquidity for all of finance. For example, a depositor could be a DeFi fund looking for credit exposure, and borrowers could be businesses, NGOs, institutions, etc. The future of DeFi is interoperable with OldFi. 

Aave V2

Aave V2 was announced recently, with many new features to make the Aave Protocol push the limits of what’s possible with DeFi. 

These features include (full list and more detailed explanations in this blog post): 

* Repay with collateral

* Debt tokenization and native credit delegation

* Fixed rate deposits 

* Private markets (including a collaboration between the Aave Protocol and RealT to bring mortgages on Ethereum!) 

* Gas optimisations 

* Native trading functionalities (debt trading, collateral trading, margin trading) 

* Governance in hands of users (vote delegation, cold wallet voting)

Tell your friends about this episode!

📈 Shoutout To Our Sponsor: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. This is not financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join dozens of crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

Listen on YouTube

Exploring the new DeFi frontier with Jason Wu, the CEO of the decentralized lending platform DeFiner!

Jason Wu is an experienced blockchain architect, project manager and digital finance entrepreneur. Jason has quickly established himself as a subject matter expert and adviser to numerous organizations in the areas of token economics, smart contact integration and blockchain architecture. In 2018, Jason established Definer.org lending platform to simplify the process of decentralized digital currency transactions. Jason holds an Master of Business with Honors from the Ohio State University. 

Tell your friends about this episode!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join dozens of crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/defislate

🎥Podcast: https://defislate.substack.com/p/defi-by-design-ep-1-introductions

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Welcome to episode #2 of the DeFi By Design Podcast! On today’s episode we had the opportunity to host Kenton Prescott!

Kenton is an Integrations Engineer at the Maker Foundation, which developed the Maker Protocol and is actively contributing to the MakerDAO ecosystem. Dai is an Ethereum-based stablecoin, pegged to the USD. It’s the world’s first global unbiased digital cash and is the core feature of the Maker Protocol. Kenton’s role is focused on improving the integration experience of Dai and Maker Vault functionality into supporting platforms, ranging from Crypto Wallets to Exchanges.

As the oldest stable coin in the industry, Dai is foundational to Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Manifested through varying products such as borrowing, lending, prediction markets, and trading, DeFi is an ecosystem and movement that utilizes decentralized networks and open source software to improve financial systems through transparent, connectable protocols.

Before joining Maker, Kenton was actively involved in rocket propulsion systems, working for SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and a NASA-funded Cryogenic Fluids Lab during his Aerospace Engineering studies at the University of Florida. He is a self-taught coder and occasional adventurer.

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join dozens of other intelligent DeFi enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/defislate

🎥Podcast Episode #1: https://defislate.substack.com/p/defi-by-design-ep-1-introductions

👉DAI: The Future Of Savings? https://defislate.substack.com/p/dai-the-future-of-savings

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Take one step closer sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

Welcome to the first episode of the DeFi By Design Podcast. In this shorter-than-usual episode, you’ll meet your podcast hosts Rob & Andrew! They discuss governance tokens, lending protocols and what they expect to see in the near future. Tune in now!

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. Please refer to our blog for more on mitigating your downside when using these protocols!

📈 Shoutout To Our Partner: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

Subscribe to the DeFi Slate Newsletter & join dozens of crypto enthusiasts:

🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!

🚀Join the community on Discord to get our freeV.1. yield farming guide!

🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com