This Week in DeFi - February 25

This week, Starkware beta and Opera browser integration, Yearn comes to Arbitrum, Zebec raises $15m for USDC payroll, and Celsius funds Maple

Feb 25

To the DeFi community,

This week, Eth L2 Starknet launched its public beta and announced an integration with the Opera web browser and DiversiFi, allowing users to trade digital assets on L2 directly from their browser. In addition to the substantial savings on gas costs, the partnership will seek to bring additional DeFi functionality to the user-friendly DeFi access point, including support for providing liquidity and earning yield on assets.

StarkWare @StarkWareLtd

Exciting times for StarkEx! 🥳 Millions of users will be provided with affordable low-gas-cost transactions, and with Ethereum’s level of security. How? @opera is integrating with @deversifi’s exchange, powered by #StarkEx 🚀

DeversiFi 🥷 @deversifi

We have teamed up with @opera and @StarkWareLtd to power the first mobile browser wallet on #Ethereum #Layer2 🚀 Transact instantly and gas-free with #L2 directly from the #Opera browser 🙌 Find out more here👇 https://t.co/qX4EJmaUFt https://t.co/8happjhtef

Yearn Finance added support for the Arbitrum L2, bringing gas savings and improved transaction throughput, while also allowing users to withdraw from Arbitrum using Binance or FTX.

yearn.finance @iearnfinance

Drumrollup please… 🥁 Yearn has launched on Arbitrum. Just four months ago, Yearn added support for its second blockchain: Fantom. Today, Yearn adds its first Ethereum L2: @arbitrum. 🧵👇

Solana-based Zebec Pay raised $15 million from a group of investors including Alameda Research, Coinbase, and Circle. The platform enables real-time settlement for payroll and other payments use cases using USDC and other stablecoins, providing documentation and support to make such on-chain operations easier for businesses to account for in their existing frameworks and for tax and compliance purposes. Funds will go towards additional partnerships with crypto projects and additional value-added services for business customers.

Zebec Protocol ⛵ @Zebec_HQ

🔥 FUNDRAISING ANNOUNCEMENT 🔥 👉Zebec raises $15M from top investors in private round!!! 🏁

Sam Thapaliya @sam_thapaliya

🚨 Fundraising announcement 🚨 We are excited to announce that Zebec has raised a $15 million private round from some of the best investors in tech and crypto to scale our product to support rapidly increasing crypto adoption. https://t.co/2TANdbsUA1 https://t.co/Jos8aXo9kN

And CeFi lending platform Celsius is getting in on the DeFi action with a $30 million allocation into Maple Finance. Maple uses a hybrid model where users can contribute to pools of capital designated for particular types of investments, while delegated analysts assess risk and help direct undercollateralized loans to promising projects.

Maple Finance @maplefinance

@CelsiusNetwork join Maple as the first CeFi institution to launch a crypto-lending business on Maple's DeFi rails🔥🥞 Joining as a Pool Delegate, the Celsius team will route capital to fast-growing crypto institutions from an initial pool of $30M in wETH maplefinance.medium.com/celsius-joins-…

Celsius joins Maple to lend to crypto-institutionsBecoming the first CeFi firm to leverage Maple’s infrastructure and run a lending business on DeFi rails.maplefinance.medium.com

Maple and Celsius teaming up is one of a handful of early examples of the crossover between centralized and decentralized finance, offering an early glimpse of what the evolution of finance based on blockchain infrastructure could look like. Centralized lending services are always looking for the best possible source of yield for their customers, and Maple has developed a unique system of managing lending risk that, in theory, will beat returns from overcollateralized lending platforms while reducing the overhead for making and maintaining such loans and unlocking new ways of attracting and rewarding delegates who assess risk.

We can envision this framework playing out on a much larger scale as an analogy for widespread DeFi adoption - one basket of protocols or services focused on providing a simple, easy-to-use user experience, managing the particulars of KYC and compliance reporting, and serving as a primary sales funnel to a mostly DeFi back end, with a second based focused on technical execution and managing risk in an effective but low-cost way.

Instead of relying on a handful of banks at massive scale to subsume all of these roles, seek rent, and limit their focus to only the most profitable or palatable opportunities, DeFi offers the opportunity to break these essential financial functions into constituent parts that can focus on a far wider set of priorities. Ultimately, such a system could allow humanity to work to address inequality, climate change, and a host of other pressing issues more quickly and directly, and without funneling the profits from doing so to a handful of executives or shareholders.

There will be many roadblocks and challenges along the way, but the opportunity to use our financial infrastructure to lift up communities and solve big problems the world over is too good to pass up. Keep your eyes on the prize!

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