This Week in DeFi - January 7

This week, Aave Arc is live, Serum's IEF raises $100 million, Yearn Finance governance lockups and rewards, and Goldfinch raises $25 million

Jan 7

To the DeFi community,

This week, Aave and Fireblocks announced the launch of the Aave Arc permissioned DeFi marketplace, allowing KYC’d institutional customers to be whitelisted into a walled garden of other verified institutional users.

CryptoKevin @cryptopediaK7

#Aave has launched its institutional product, #AaveArc It will initially be open to 30 institutions that have been whitelisted by #Fireblocks. #Bitcoin and #Ethereum saw a wave of institutional interest amid crypto's 2021 boom, but #DeFi is still unexplored territory to most.

The Incentive Ecosystem Foundation, a community-led group focused on developing the Serum network ecosystem on Solana announced a $100m fundraise to support growth and development from a combination of traditional finance and digital asset firms.

Awawat @Awawat_Trades

Watch out serum shorts

Serum Community Foundation Announces $100M Raise to Support Ecosystem Development & Innovation/PRNewswire/ --The Incentive Ecosystem Foundation, a community-led foundation that supports development on the Serum network, today announced that it is...prnewswire.com

The Yearn Finance community passed a vote that will require YFI to be locked to participate in governance, with the benefit of receiving staking rewards. The tokenomics design is inspired by the Curve Finance design, with higher annualized rewards for those who choose to lock tokens for longer.

0x7d54 @0x7d54

@BoredApe1000 A governance token is an investment in future value, even if revenue is currently being reinvested for growth (just like non-dividend paying growth stocks). e.g., YFI was long a "useless governance token" but we just voted to turn on the spigot - rev. starts going to YFI holders.

And Goldfinch Finance, focused on bringing undercollateralized loans to DeFi, announced a fundraise of $25 million led by a16z. Funds will be controlled by the newly formed Goldfinch Foundation, and will go towards supporting improving the protocol and helping more customers get DeFi loans.

Goldfinch @goldfinch_fi

Today, we are thrilled to announce an additional $25M in funding, led by @a16z: [1/5] medium.com/goldfinch-fi/g… #DeFi #goldfinch_fi

Goldfinch raises $25M led by Andreessen Horowitz to double-down on 154X growth in 2021Today we are thrilled to announce an additional $25M in funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto). This comes on the heels of the Goldfinch community’s tremendous progress towards solving the…medium.com

Two opposite ends of the market are getting a better deal in DeFi this week; institutions get access to one of the first true tastes of the power and efficiency of smart contracts on blockchain infrastructure via Aave Arc, and Goldfinch adds resources to continue leveraging the power of the community to underwrite and unlock undercollateralized DeFi loans on a large scale for the first time.

While the implications for the medium-term addressable market are weighted to the institutional side, the ideal and promise of decentralized finance are deeply embodied in the mission and implementation being pursued by Goldfinch. What’s more, in the long term, the potential to unlock and generate wealth for a bigger slice of the world population is likely far greater in the bottom-up approach to financial access being pursued by the Goldfinch team.

At its heart, credit has always been grounded in community, and it’s exciting to see the intersection of community input and governance combined with the huge reduction in overhead DeFi enables being used to make access to capital more equitable across the globe. There are many experiments in flight today exploring the capabilities, resilience, capacity for intelligent decision making and staying power of different communities, organized in different ways. But for my money, the real opportunity to make DeFi a force for good in the world is that presented by giving the global community something the West has enjoyed easy access to for generations - a partnership with an engaged organization focused on helping customers achieve commercial success through access to fair financing. DeFi is for dreamers!

Thanks to our partner:

Nexo – Unlock the power of your crypto with up to 17% interest and borrowing starting at 6.9%. Read our Nexo review.