DeFi Saver Newsletter: May 2021

May was such a polarizing month, with the market making incredible new all time highs, only to drop 50% lower in the next ten days or so, causing over $370m worth of collateral to be liquidated across the DeFi landscape on May 19 alone.

Still, as always, the DeFi space was mostly unfazed by the violent market movements, especially given how much better all protocols performed in these conditions, with no issues with liquidations at Maker, Compound, Aave and even the barely one-month-old fan favourite Liquity (although the protocol apparently almost went into emergency mode).

The highlight release of the month in the ecosystem would surely be that of Uniswap v3, which became the #1 DEX by volume in a mere matter of weeks, while some other news worth mentioning include the launch of Balancer v2 (with some impressive gas savings announced), as well as Arbitrum, one of the most promising L2 networks, going live on the mainnet, though in a developers-only closed beta.

Here at DeFi Saver we continued polishing our new Recipe Creator and preparing new integrations, while Automation kept all protected positions safe from liquidation during the multiple large crashes.

DeFi Saver news and updates

New Recipe Creator integrations: Reflexer and Uniswap v2

We introduced two new integrations during June and anyone can now create custom combinations of interactions with two additional protocols: Reflexer and Uniswap v2.

The best part is that these two actually work great together and anyone can create a Reflexer Safe, generate RAI and deposit their RAI and ETH into a Uniswap v2 pool — all in one single transaction. And doing this also makes you eligible for future $FLX rewards, as mentioned here.

The Uniswap v2 actions can also be combined with MakerDAO, where users can now efficiently manage their Univ2LP Vaults. For example, anyone can create a leveraged UNIv2DAIETH position to make the absolute most out of the liquidity available to them.

MakerDAO Automation updates

For the longest time, there was a required 20% ratio gap between the minimum ratio for any certain Maker Vault type and the minimum (“Repay from”) ratio allowed in Automation.

Given how mature the Automation system has grown and how stable it has been through all of the recent market crashes and basically every larger market movement since Black Thursday onwards, we have decided to reduce this gap.

The minimum allowed ratio in Automation for MakerDAO positions is now just 10% above the minimum ratio for the used Vault type. For example, for ETH-A you can now set auto-Repay at as low as 160%. And, regardless of your configured minimum, if there’s a large price change in MakerDAO with a next price update that drives your position to liquidation — there’ll be an emergency repay kicking in based on that next price.

We have also greatly updated the Automation articles in our knowledge base to help onboard any users with crucial information and you can find those here.

May Stats

As of May 31st, there were 453 MakerDAO, 69 Compound and 49 Aave positions with Automation enabled — a total of 571 automated positions.

The total amount of managed collateral at the end of May was 165,000 ETH, 616 WBTC, 123,000 LINK, 162,000 UNI, and 5,000 AAVE, among other collateralized assets. In total, DeFi Saver Automation was managing over $502m of collateralized assets in different user-created positions at the end of May —an unfortunately noticeable decrease compared to April, owing for the greatest part the mid-May market crash.

The user activity at DeFi Saver in May was beyond anything we’ve seen so far.

In total, the transactions made in May resulted in an incredible new monthly volume record of $1.9b made in over 11,200 unique transactions.🤯

Community shoutouts

May was a pretty wild ride for many participants in the space and we really want to thank everyone who shared posts of appreciation for Automation features as the dust settled after the market crashes.

There was Nemo:

And Androo:

And Jonny:

And Wizard:

As well as Jacob from 0x:

And Jack who shared praise for how stable Automation worked through the wild market conditions and extremely rough network congestion:

Besides the Automation related posts, there were also a number of shoutouts for our new Recipe Creator, such as this one from Lefteris, a friend working on Rotki, the open-source privacy-focused portfolio tracker.

And, finally, we have to mention that there’s been a lot of people looking at our gas prices extension and commending the used permissions (or lack thereof) — thanks for everyone who helped shared the word about it!🙏

Thank you everyone for a truly incredible month. We’re VERY excited about all the news we expect to share in June!🙌

Stay connected:
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