DeFi Saver Newsletter: July 2021

The month behind us was a fairly odd one, with the crab market in full swing for most of it and the most significant news and happenings in the Ethereum world being those of numerous investments and all sorts of NFTs launched that caused short, but very wild gas spikes every day or two, something that has actually continued into August for now, too.

Still, though the market sentiment may not have seemed very confident, it was great to see the amount of ETH deposited in various defi protocols on the continued rise again, after the decline in May and June.

The greatest news we were hoping for were full launches of L2s including Optimism and Arbitrum, with permissionless deployment available, to allow any dapps to start rolling out on these new L2 networks with greatly reduced transaction costs. Alas, so far the only bit of this we’ve gotten has been the very limited alpha launch of Uniswap on Optimism. It’ll be curious to see if Arbitrum will beat Optimism to the punch, or if perhaps it will be zkSync that front runs both of the optimistic L2 networks eventually.

Until that happens, there’s still always more work to be done on Ethereum mainnet and we’ve actually had two new integrations launched during July, with more expected in August — so let’s talk about those, as well as some of the latest stats and numbers.

DeFi Saver news and updates

Uniswap v3 LPing is now available

The first integration was Uniswap v3 and all related liquidity pool management actions, where users can now create a new Uni v3 position using DeFi Saver, as well as add more or withdraw currently supplied liquidity and claim any collected fees.

The Uniswap v3 actions are all available in our Recipe Creator UI which you can also use to manage any existing positions. While the Recipe Creator is primarily targeted at creating unique interactions with multiple defi protocols, you can also use it for just one single action — such as creating or updating an LP position in Uni v3.

While this integration doesn’t currently introduce anything new for Uni v3 liquidity providers, once it’s combined with our upcoming Automation engine update it will allow anyone to create custom automated strategies, such as one where all collected fees are claimed and traded for one asset once their value reaches a specific threshold.

Lido ETH staking integrated

The other integration added in July was Lido.

Lido is a liquid ETH staking solution, allowing anyone to stake their ETH and collect staking rewards without having to run any validator or node services on their own. It’s one of the most popular staking options out there and one that’s perhaps most set on making their services fully trustless.

At the moment, usage of Lido at DeFi Saver is extremely straightforward — there’s just one action in the Recipe Creator that allows anyone to stake their ETH and receive stETH tokens in return.

As more integrations keep being added, you’ll be able to make more interesting Recipes interacting with multiple protocols at once. For example, once Curve and Yearn are added, anyone could stake ETH with Lido, then deposit the stETH into Curve and then add the crvstETH tokens into Yearn, to further amplify their rewards — all in one, single transaction.

Note that Lido takes a 10% reward fee, a service fee taken exclusively from staking rewards, not from any deposits made with Lido.

July Stats

In terms of activity at DeFi Saver, July was a slowish month, which was to be expected, with the crab market in full force for the most of the month. But yet again, even a slow month this year is almost equal to the full yearly activity of 2020.

In total, users made $191m of actual trade volume in various leverage management actions and custom recipes during July, with over 3,100 transactions unique to DeFi Saver executed.

In terms of Automation specifically, at the end of July there were 411 MakerDAO, 52 Compound and 42 Aave automated positions — a total of 505 with Automation enabled.🤖

The total amount of managed collateral at the end of July was 162,400 ETH, 610 WBTC, 420 MKR and 85,000 LINK among other collateralized assets. In total, DeFi Saver Automation was managing over $460m of collateralized assets in different user-created positions at the end of July.

Community shoutouts

When it comes to the kind words shared last month, we first really have to give thanks to two teams that published great posts about DeFi Saver.

There was Liquity with an amazing guide to using Liquity through DFS, written by Derrick, their community manager:

And there was the 0x team with their great integrators spotlight post, covering ways DeFi Saver utilizes the aggregated liquidity provided by 0x for the benefits of users:

As usual, there were other shoutouts about experiences with DeFi Saver. For one, there was Ilia who praised our latest Uni v3 integration:

And we really have to mention despo who had a number of DFS related posts throughout July:

As always, thank you for being with us. July felt like it was the summer break month for everyone and August is already off to a more interesting start.

We’ve got more integrations lined up, as well as some UX improvements and some more surprises —so make sure to stay tuned.👀

Stay connected:
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