Kyber Ecosystem Report #6
By: Deniz Omer
Tags: Featured, Ethereum, Blockchain, English, Kybernetwork

2 millionth KNC burn

After burning the first million KNC in May, KNC holders had another reason to celebrate this month with the second millionth KNC burnt on the 16th of August. The rate of burn has grown an order of magnitude this year and although it took 15 months to burn the first million KNC, it took only 10 weeks to burn the second million. We’ve released a special one minute video with Loi and Anton walking you through how burning takes place (with obligatory slow-motion glitter bomb celebration from the team included😎):

DeFi DApp Updates

DeFi dapps had their ups and downs in terms of volumes this month with some growing both in terms of ETH and USD, some growing in terms of ETH but not USD, and some dropping in both ETH and USD:

DeFi volumes were down 24% over the previous high of $10.8m but we are not worried about these volumes as they are still some of the highest we’ve seen for the DeFi space and there is a constant flux of new DeFi dapps joining the Ethereum space, innovating and growing demand organically.

Nuo continues to grow its on-chain activity and dominate our DeFi integration volumes but we are also pleased to see Fulcrum grow for the 3rd straight month since its integration and it now makes up 20% of Kyber’s DeFi volumes.

New Kyber-DeFi Integrations

It’s been a pleasure for us to witness first hand the building up of the DeFi stack within the last 9 months. There’s been a constant stream of new dapps in the derivatives, lending, borrowing, margin trading, prediction and stable coin space. This month’s new Kyber integrations build up on this stack by introducing fixed interest rate borrowing and lending options, as well as new marketplaces for loans.

bZx Torque — bZx (the team behind Fulcrum) unveiled Torque, ‘the first borrowing platform with indefinite-term loans and fixed interest rates’. Fixed interest rates are a vital function of any financial ecosystem but Torque goes further by developing an ENS loan system which allows users to borrow assets by sending collateral to human-readable ENS domains from any wallets. Similar to its usage within Fulcrum, Kyber is used to swap back and forth between DAI and ETH. We recommend reading their blog post for more info.

DeFiner — Definer is a borrowing and lending platform that uses a marketplace to match borrowers with lenders. Users also have the option to buy crypto with their credit cards through Wyre while Kyber is used to build leveraged trading positions. DeFiner recently won the 2019 Detroit Fintech Challenge beating 17 other local fintech startups.

DeversiFi — DeversiFi is a great example of how the DeFi value chain can extend across multiple hops to bring value to a wide range of users. DeversiFi, the newly announced successor to Ethfinex, is a DEX with margin trading and lending services. Fulcrum is integrated into DeversiFi to provide these trading services, and Kyber in turn, is integrated into Fulcrum to swap between the collateral and borrowed assets to create the leveraged positions.

The chain is further extended when we consider Kyber is pulling in liquidity from Uniswap, eth2dai and other liquidity providers, and end users provide liquidity to Uniswap. We end up with a single transaction that includes value input from end users locking up liquidity in Uniswap to Kyber Network to Fulcrum to DeversiFi. True composability in action!

Alice.Finance — Alice.Finance is another new savings and loan platform that gives users the option to take out loans in fixed interest rates. Kyber integration allows end users to use ETH to take out DAI loans on the platform. You can read more about the integration in their blog post

Non-DeFi DApp Updates & Integration

StablePay — StablePay is a dapp that helps manage tips, donations, payrolls and bulk payments. It also allows third parties to send ETH or any ERC20 token to the receiver with Kyber used to convert the received asset to stablecoins.

Multis — We are really proud to see Multis, a Kyber-integrated crypto management dapp for companies, join Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch. Y Combinator is an extremely prestigious startup accelerator that helped launch AirBnB, Reddit, DropBox, and Coinbase amongst many others and this is a great endorsement of Multi’s vision to be the cryptobank for companies. We wish them good luck!

Reserve and Token Volumes

With volumes dropping across the crypto space in the last six weeks, we finally had our 7 month growth streak, stretching all the way back to January, come to an end. All reserve managers saw their volumes decrease except for the WBTC automated price reserve.

Reserve Manager Types

We thought we’d use this section as an opportunity to refresh our knowledge on the Kyber Network Reserve Manager types and how they provide liquidity:

Fed Price Reserve (FPR) — Reserves manually update prices on-chain and actively manage their tokens across multiple exchanges to balance their inventory. This method is used by the Kyber Reserve and a few other professional market makers.

— Reserves manually update prices on-chain and actively manage their tokens across multiple exchanges to balance their inventory. This method is used by the Kyber Reserve and a few other professional market makers. Automated Price Reserve (APR) — Hands-off approach that uses a fixed algorithm to automatically update the price based on the latest trades for any given trading pair. This is not too dissimilar to Uniswap’s pricing algorithm and is used mostly by ERC20 token teams to provide liquidity for their tokens (ie. SNX, REN, GNO)

Hands-off approach that uses a fixed algorithm to automatically update the price based on the latest trades for any given trading pair. This is not too dissimilar to Uniswap’s pricing algorithm and is used mostly by ERC20 token teams to provide liquidity for their tokens (ie. SNX, REN, GNO) Dex Bridge Reserve (DBR) — Automated feed that pulls in price and liquidity from existing on-chain liquidity pools such as Uniswap, Oasis (eth2dai) and DutchX.

Kyber Around The World

Kyber #DeFi Virtual Hackathon

We’re very excited to announce our very own DeFi Virtual Hackathon! We’ll be publishing full details on Monday 9th but for now we can share that we’ll be hosting the DeFi hackathon in partnership with bZx, Chainlink, Compound, Melon, and Synthetix. Over $42,000 worth of prizes will be up for grabs and the focus is on “novel and practical solutions for DeFi ... and greater composability between Ethereum projects”.

Join our developer telegram channel to keep up to date with more info on the hackathon.

Stansberry Research

This month we had the privilege of being the subject of Stansberry Research’s latest Crypto Capital report. Stansberry Research is the largest independent investment newsletter network in the world with over a million paid subscribers and this month they turned their lens onto Kyber world. The 9 page report introduces Kyber and KNC, dives into its competitive advantages compared to other liquidity providers, highlights its rapid growth, expands on its future plans, and makes a very bullish case for KNC’s future price.

The publication is for paid subscribers so we can’t re-publish its contents but we’ve been given permission to share a snippet from the report to give you a taste of the 9 page report. Thank you to Fredrick Marion and Eric Wade for the report.

Kyber Community T-Shirt Contest

And we have our winners! The Kyber t-shirt competition funded by the DAO experiment and organized by the community held its public vote between the 7th and 14th of August. With 170+ votes cast, Kyber Mustachoed Surfer Dude won first prize, cuddly Kyberra came second, and KNC Hawaii came third.

Special thanks to Jacob Pugely, DidYouSayBitcoin, M L, and the rest of the @KyberSquad gang for making this happen, and thank you to all the designers for their amazing submissions.

Winners of the Kyber Community T-Shirt Competition

Events

August was a particularly busy month on the road for us with trips to Berlin Blockchain Week and talks in Saigon and Hanoi.

We’ve written an extensive recap of our Berlin Blockchain Week experience but the tl/dr is that we had an amazing time in Berlin, learnt a lot about new developments in the Ethereum space, and shared our own DAO and DeFi experiences with the community. These type of events are so important to facilitate the exchange of ideas and expand our horizons within the crypto space.

Happy faces from Berlin

Loi was also busy with DeFi and Beyond Consensus events in Hanoi and Saigon. He shared his thoughts on what is DeFi, what do we mean by decentralized liquidity, and how Kyber’s liquidity protocol enables the DeFi space.