This Week in DeFi - December 31

This week, Centrifuge and Aave bring real world assets to DeFi, DeBank raises $25 million, and SOS and GAS airdrops for (almost) all

Dec 31

To the DeFi community,

This week, Centrifuge and Aave launched the Real World Assets (RWA) market, allowing users to borrow tokens against non-crypto collateral including trade receivables, cargo and freight invoices, and more.

Centrifuge @centrifuge

We've launched the RWA Market with @AaveAave 🎉 🌀 👻 Let's dive in on what this means for DeFi — and cryptocurrency as a whole! medium.com/centrifuge/rwa…

RWA Market: The Aave Market for Real World Assets goes live.Today the Real World Asset (RWA) Market goes live! Built on Centrifuge and the Aave Protocol, the RWA Market is the first diversified real world asset market on the Aave Protocol, bridging DeFi to…medium.com

DeFi data aggregator and portfolio analysis tool DeBank raised $25 million at a valuation of $200 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital. DeBank supports nearly 800 protocols across 15 blockchains,allowing users to track DeFi positions across a wide swathe of the fractured ecosystem.

The Block @TheBlock__

ICYMI: DeFi wallet DeBank raises $25 million in equity funding round

DeFi wallet DeBank raises $25 million in equity funding roundDeBank has raised $25 million in an equity funding round led by Sequoia China. Other investors include Coinbase Ventures and Ledger.theblockcrypto.com

And airdrops have been in overdrive in the final week of 2021, with OpenSea users receiving SOS tokens based on their activity and amount spent on NFTs, and active Ethereum users receiving GAS tokens based on transaction fees accumulated on the Ethereum network. Both tokens are independent of the project their distribution is based on, and only time will tell if they develop utility or staying power in the highly competitive crypto markets.

cr0ss.eth @cr0ssETH

I love that everyone has been waiting for Opensea to do a token drop and since they didn’t do it a couple people came together and did one for them using the Opensea data $SOS That's Web3 for you, if you want something done right, do it yourself!

Free money is always exciting, but it’s worth considering if the spirit of airdrops is starting to trend more towards the first examples seen in the 2017 era, when the mechanism was used almost exclusively as a marketing tactic to raise awareness for a given project. In almost every instance, the tokens rapidly lost all value (if they had any to begin with) and left more clutter in wallets and little appreciable impact.

That’s part of the reason airdrops from the likes of Uniswap and ENS felt so exciting; instead of a shotgun strategy to all addresses on the chain, these tokens came from well established players already providing value and working hard to increase it. The addition of treasuries funded by these tokens also vastly expanded the potential to impact the future growth of a protocol, adding real economic considerations to the trading and allocation of protocol tokens.

Now we’re seeing a divergence in which projects like Paraswap tighten requirements for receiving an airdrop so severely that the community sees little growth and utility is for some in question, and others like GAS are distributed so widely and sold so quickly that they’re hardly worth the fees to claim and generate little interest in their nascent projects.

As we enter a new year, some reflection might be in order on why airdrops became popular in the first place; as a means of capturing and ultimately retaining the limited attention of users in the crypto ecosystem. Free money is nice, but creativity and a real product to believe in will be more rewarding for all in the long run. Happy New Year!

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