DeFi Saver Newsletter: April 2025

Welcome to our latest newsletter, covering recent DeFi Saver updates, stats, and ecosystem happenings!

The newsletter is back! After a short break, we’re excited to bring you up to speed with what’s been going on in the DeFi community, and of course, all the latest from DeFi Saver. Going forward, you can expect regular DFS Newsletters, packed with details on latest features, new integrations, and improvements we’ve been working on behind the scenes. 

So without further ado, let’s cover the latest highlights and hot topics that have been making waves in DeFi recently.

What Q1 reminded us about crypto risk

The first quarter of 2025 kept users and investors on edge, as we saw a steep drop in crypto market cap by about 18.6%, with ETH fully nullifying its profits from 2024 and dipping below $1500. As its price fell by about 55% since the year started until April 7th, ETH total transaction fees also reached a record low since 2020, due to rising gas limits and migration to L2 networks.

To top it off, in February of this year, we also bore witness to the largest crypto hack in history, as Bybit’s founder confirmed it had lost around 1.5  billion dollars worth of assets in a single transaction, due to a highly elaborate phishing scam.

Bybit seems to have gotten back on its feet, however, we’d still like to use this opportunity to remind you all to be aware of various kinds of scamming attempts, especially concerning DeFi Saver. 

For example, phishing ads pointing to scam URLs are common, as you can see in the example below:

We are not, by any means, trivializing what happened to Bybit. This is simply a reminder that these things happen to all players, big and small.

So, do what you can to minimize the risk, and don’t forget to bookmark the official DeFiSaver app and keep in mind that our team will never ask for your private keys or any other sort of unnecessary personal or compromising information. 

DeFi Saver News&Updates

In April, we’ve had a few exciting additions to DeFi Saver to enhance the user experience and make finding the best investment options as easy as possible. 

Loan Discover(y) tool went live on DFS

Our team officially launched the new Discover page to directly aid users in finding the best options for borrowing, leveraging, and earning yield on around 50 different BTC or ETH correlated assets, stablecoins and other tokens that we currently support.

With DeFi Saver, all available protocols are already easily accessible in one app. Now, with Discover, it gets even easier, as all these options are available and comparable on one page.

We still have much planned for Discover, so keep an eye out and make sure to follow us on X  for regular updates.

Automated route switching for swaps

We’ve also introduced a new major upgrade concerning how swaps are handled at DeFi Saver.

The newest update introduces automated swap route switching, meaning that if a certain route fails during execution, DFS will automatically find the next best available route. This greatly reduces the chances of users having failed transactions, especially in critical moments.

We’ve also enabled a manual DEX aggregator selection to cater to more experienced users, who wish for more control in customizing their strategies. 

So far, we’re thrilled to share that this update has contributed to a 50% drop in failed transactions.

DeFi Saver goes to Denver

In March, our team visited the world’s largest ETH community gathering in Denver, Colorado. Though this is getting into old news territory, we couldn’t let it slip by the latest Newsletter issue.

We owe a big thank you to the organizers, as well as all of you who personally dropped by and gave valuable feedback, not only about what you liked about DeFi Saver, but also on what we can improve or maybe integrate or add next.

One of our Nikolas shared some of his most memorable moments from the conference:

“It was great hearing how DFS features helped people out. Visitors seemed to be most interested in our Repay feature, given the state of the market back then, as well as the fact that we’re non-custodial and don’t manage any funds directly. But Repay was definitely the star of the show.

The state of the market had also prompted many people to focus on yield, so they were also happy to hear about the Discover tool we were launching, as well as our good old Loan Shifter feature”.

And speaking of events, we look forward to seeing you all again at ETH Belgrade(June 3rd through 5th), and EthCC next.

April stats 

At the end of April, DeFi Saver Automation managed around $221M of collateralized assets. In terms of total transaction volume, there have been 6432 transactions in total (amounting to around $100 million), of which 63.2% were automated and 36.8% were manually executed. 

When it comes to the most common collateral/debt asset pairings, ETH/USDC remains the most popular, followed by ETH/DAI, ETH/USDT, WBTC/USDC, and WBTC/USDT.

Position(s) of the month

We’ll make this edition a Maker/Sky special, as two sizable positions came into the spotlight during the April market crash. These were CDPs #26949 and #1985. We know some refer to these as Vaults nowadays, but nostalgia keeps us calling them CDPs.

#26949 entered 2025 with some 72m of $DAI debt against more than 65.6k of ETH as collateral, as we can see from their latest transaction in 2024. While this was plenty safe at the time, that $1860 liquidation price proved rather risky as we got into March and April market drawdowns.

Luckily, though, it seems the owner knows exactly how Maker oracle updates work. He was playing the system like a fiddle, keeping their CDP just above liquidation before each price update.

For those of you who aren’t as familiar with Maker, here’s the short version: the protocol updates oracle prices once every full hour, and it updates to a price that was queued an hour ago, during the previous update. This means that you always know a full hour in advance whether your position will be liquidated or not, leaving you with plenty of time to act.

However, #1985 was not as vigilant. While they kept adding collateral through March and into April, it seems the Sunday crash on April 6 caught them off guard, and the CDP entered liquidation once the market dipped below $1600/ETH.

It’s interesting how similar these two positions were, as #1985 had 74.4m of $DAI debt and 67.5k of $ETH collateral before liquidation. Certainly enough to get a MakerDAO legend to try and alert them via Twitter/X:

Looking at their history, the sad part here is that this had been a very old position. If you look at its history on our Maker DeFi Explore you can see that it was originally migrated from the old Single-collateral Dai (SCD) protocol. This means it was at least 6 years old.

Ultimately, we’re not here to lament, but rather to highlight that we have extra tools to help you with keeping these positions safe. We’ll take a moment to mention a few:

• Notifications (super simple, but super effective): You can set up health-based notifications for any positions in supported protocols
• Loan Shifting: Risky positions can become noticeably less risky if moved to a protocol with a higher LTV, which is often available.
• Repaying (manually or by setting up Automation): While we understand many prefer to never sell, doing a partial unwind can help you keep the position safe and prevent liquidation penalties (which are as high as 13% in Maker/Sky).

As always, if you need any extra info on these, you can find us in the DFS Discord. We hope you made it through the pullback and are now reaping the benefits of the market moving back up, but best to stay alert.

That would be all for this issue of the DFS Newsletter. Thank you all for reading, and see you again next month!

Stay connected:
🌍: DeFiSaver.com
💬: Official Discord
📢: Official Twitter/X