DeFi Saver Newsletter: February 2022

February saw the continuation of the crypto market downturn, which began at the end of the last year. The world entered uncharted waters as one of the most significant geopolitical conflicts in the modern era came to be.

While the entire crypto market was hoping for recovery after a breezy January, Vitalik was fighting bears by turning into a Bufficorn at ETH Denver; our team and many others were trying to make the best of the biggest Ethereum event, the world was caught in a significant geopolitical shift which has affected all markets with increased volatility, traditional and crypto alike.

In February, the world was rocked by the news of Russia deciding to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although many signs were there, like the amassing of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, few geopolitical analysts thought that the attack was likely to happen. This sad state of world affairs raised many questions regarding global security and division of power but also affected global markets in numerous ways.

Mentions of the bear market were sprawling on social media last month. Given the geopolitical and economic turmoil, it doesn’t come as a surprise. February started with a strong move up with ETH gaining 8%, and signs of strong recovery. A drawback occurred after news of the highest inflation in US in 40-years, after which we saw ETH tank hard amid news of the invasion. Markets experienced extreme volatility.

In other news, we saw the launch of two crypto ETFs with Fidelity and Grayscale launching their own. Consensys continued its wave of acquisitions by announcing it acquired MyCrypto, one of the beloved interfaces from the early Ethereum days.

MetaMask and MyCrypto will be combining their efforts under a shared banner to further improve the security of all the products and create a cohesive user experience across desktop, mobile, extension, and browser wallets.

What’s a month in crypto without one big hack, eh? Wormhole was hacked with quite a sizable sum of $325M being taken due to a Github repository. Wormhole team allegedly returned funds to users and offered a generous reward to the hacker. Yet, this isn’t even the craziest news about hacking we saw in February. After attempting to launder some $4.5 billion 🤯 in stolen funds, the duo arrested by the Feds turned out to be none other than the Bitfinex hackers. The story itself is wild, with the bizarre pair, especially Heather Morgan doing various crazy stuff and posting on her digital channels. Of course, we will be seeing a Netflix documentary, what did you think? 😂

Some interesting and positive news came out of India. Though we’re not fans of a hard regulatory approach, we have to agree that although steep, the proposed 30% tax on crypto is a sign that the 2nd most populous country in the world recognizes crypto as a legitimate and important industry, which is definitely a step in the right direction.

To finish on a positive note, Super Bowl 2022 saw several crypto companies take the number 1 advertising space in the world, with commercials from Coinbase, FTX, Crypto.com, and a few others.

DeFi Saver news and updates

During the previous month, our team was split between devs working hard on the Automation update from our Belgrade office and a few dev & marketing Nikolas that went to support ETH Denver. February was another month with a bit fewer updates, for a good reason, though. The bigger part of the team was focused on lots of cool stuff we were preparing to release for our users and DeFi community during March.

The primary focus of our crew was the next Automation update we were hoping to release during ETH Denver, but one we had to postpone to make sure everything is in place security-wise and that we haven’t missed anything. Alongside this major overhaul of our flagship feature, there were lots of other minor updates you’ll be able to read about in the next edition.

DeFi Saver attends ETH Denver!

We met with the founder of ETH Denver, John Paller, at Liscon, which we attended last year, and right there and then, we knew we’d be either attending, sponsoring, or engaging in some way with the community once the time for this festival of ETH comes. A remarkable thing about ETHDenver is that John and the crew hosted both the live and virtual versions in the period when live events weren’t possible, to great success. There were no doubts that the 2022 edition would be a blast.

With a few of us preparing for our first team trip to the US, we truly were stoked to go to Denver. As already mentioned in the previous blog post, our Discord community, and social media channels, there were many cool things we heard about ETHDenver and its prior editions. Early on, we knew that it was the biggest Ethereum event, very much true to its roots and a community ethos with a strong emphasis on decentralization and building.

Given that covid restrictions got lifted around the world and the new strain didn’t pose a significant threat, we were delighted to be on our way to the US and the start of the ETHDenver #BUIDLweek. You can read more about our plans for involvement in one of the previous posts. With a team of 4 Nikolas and one awesome Junior Solidity dev Nebojsa we were off as sponsors of the big event. We decided to sponsor ETHDenver and do our part that way, but also to secure a spot so we’re able to hear what folks from the community think about the current development of our product and our future plans.

ETHDenver 2022 was intended to be divided into two different tracks, #buidlweek with various teams organizing meetups, mini-events, and parties around Denver, and the Main Event at the famous Web 3 Castle.

One could feel the vibe and energy from the initial lines of people in front of the Art Hotel, where the kickoff for the whole event was scheduled. The famous Denver hotel served as a hub for the first part of it. The first track was pretty cool as we met all the friends and teams we worked with over the years.

We hosted our little side-kickoff event together with close friends from the Tenderly team, which has become our thing. We love these guys, and it was indeed a pleasure to again bring together a bunch of friends and folks from the community. Our Happy Hour/dinner was hosted in 100% de Agave restaurant, with truly fantastic food and drinks. We’d like to thank Maker, Yearn, Qi Dao, APY vision, and a few other teams and lovely people that made our little event incredible with their presence.

Nikola meme was doing its thing again, as we finally met some awesome folks we knew from before, albeit online. Facu from Yearn was under the impression that the meme couldn’t be true. Oh but it is! 😃

It was also our pleasure to be invited to several events hosted by the OG teams in the space. We had a lovely lunch with superhero Albert from Alchemy and his friends met with a bunch of folks from 0x at their mini Hangout event, and went to dinner with the mysterious folks from Yearn.

Nothing comes close, though, to the anticipation and hype of Maker’s DAIVINITY party at the famous The Church venue, a historic church repurposed into a nightclub and one of THE places to visit when in Denver. This thing was something else, and we want to congratulate the Maker team again on their incredible return to hosting cool events. As we all know, we crypto people love to party. We danced the night away with our incredible community and look forward to Maker continuing to host fantastic parties. Big kudos to Sam, Andrew, and the rest of the Maker team, we had a blast!

The crazy week filled with awesome events, parties, and some great food entered its second part as we prepared for the official Main Event part of ETHDenver. Teams, sponsors, and attendees moved to the great Sports Castle, renamed Web3 Castle for the duration of ETHDenver. As sponsors of the event, we were honored to be given the opportunity to present what we do and our product to folks familiar with DeFi and reach a lot of those that didn’t hear about DeFi Saver before. The crew was all set!

Each of us had some duties and responsibilities at ETHDenver, but we actually wanted to spend as much time at our booth as possible because as the gates opened, thousands of people came to the Castle to see where this Web 3 ship is heading. It was awesome meeting and talking with so many folks interested in DeFi Saver, what we do, what are plans our, are we going multi-chain, when L2 support, and of course hearing some wen token ser here and there.

Something that keeps happening at these events, brings a smile to our faces, and makes building DeFi Saver that much more enjoyable are the folks who come up to us saying “you guys saved me so many times”. Being the reason why we developed DeFi Saver, it really felt amazing each time. With many of our users from the US, it makes sense that we heard that more than anywhere else at ETHDenver. Talking to so many satisfied old users and those still using our product was nothing less than incredible.

We met so many awesome people and also some of our friends. 😊

Aside from the booth activities, backend Nikola was also busy with a Talk in which he wanted to share the story of how Automation came to be and laid out our future plans for it, while frontend Nikola gave his thoughts on the current development of UX in Web 3.

To wrap up, we want to also use this opportunity to thank the organizers once again for this incredible event and also for providing us a chance to be a part of it. Special thanks to John, Shannon, Erin, and Dani.

Although the weather in Denver was hectic, going from sunny morning to blizzard, we did our best to enjoy the capital of Colorado. ETHDenver was M A S S I V E in terms of the sheer number of people attending, teams, sponsors, hackers, and builders. The logistics of it all boggles the mind. There’s something to events being in-person that makes them so much more enjoyable than the stuff we do in our digital sphere, though we all love it nonetheless. We had a chance to meet our devoted users, friends from the community, and partners. The energy, feedback, and sharing of ideas and thoughts are that more pleasurable hearing in-person. We even had some old-school American fun, going to an NBA game and watching Superbowl from a classic American bar.

stETH Aave support

Aave added support for the Lido Finance stETH token, by the end of the month. Users could deposit and borrow Lido’s token that represents Ether staked in Lido. It combines the value of the initial deposit along with staking rewards. stETH tokens are minted upon deposit and burned when a user decides to redeem his ETH.

The market was available to users from the DeFi Saver dashboard from the end of the month.

February Stats

With the continued downturn we experienced through February after red January, the unique number of users visiting our platform relatively decreased. It isn’t that surprising, following the general market sentiment and global worries surrounding geopolitical issues. On the other hand, we witnessed also witnessed a significant drop in total volume and number of tx’s, clearly displaying the general risk-averse sentiment and global worries about what might happen next.

Users made $138M of actual trade volume during February, with over 1600 unique leverage management transactions and custom recipes done at DeFi Saver.

In terms of Automation specifically, there were 330 MakerDAO, 44 Compound, and 54 Aave automated positions  at the end of February— a continued drop that totals 428 unique positions with Automation enabled.

The total amount of managed collateral at the end of February was 136,000 ETH, 696 WBTC, 208,000 UNI, and 100,000 LINK, among other collateralized assets. DeFi Saver Automation was managing around $383M of collateralized assets in different user-created positions at the end of the month.

Community Shoutouts

…aaaand we get to the last month's shoutouts we picked out.

Gav wants to see an automated mechanism on L2s. We heard you, soon!

We always love to see our browser plugin appreciation. Kudos to our man Cuso!

Awesome to see Marc-Andre mentioning us in this great company.

Here’s monetsupply pointing out a cool tag Automation provides during hard times.

Stay connected:
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📢: Official Twitter
🗣️: DeFi Saver Forum