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Blockchain technology is about to transform every trust-based interaction of our lives, from financial services to identity, from health care to our Internet of Things devices. In this podcast, host Laura Shin talks with industry pioneers across tech, financial services, health care, government and other sectors about how the blockchain and cryptocurrency will open up new opportunities for incumbents, startups and everyday people to interact more efficiently, directly and globally.

Sep 1, 2020

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, and Dan Robinson, research partner at Paradigm, discuss the explosion in decentralized exchange activity on automated market makers from $1 billion earlier this year to more than $10 billion in August. 

  • Why trading in automated market makers has 8xed in a few months
  • how automated market makers work, and how specific dexes can specialize for the assets being traded on them
  • why traders would prefer to trade on a dex vs. a centralized exchange
  • how incentivized pools have drawn traders and liquidity 
  • why trading on a dex seems can be more appealing than on a centralized exchange
  • why trading on dexes now mirrors trading on Binance in 2017
  • how "DeFi is the hottest coolest place where people are making a lot of money"
  • the difference between the metrics of liquidity, trading volume and total value locked for a dex
  • why AMMs are capital inefficient
  • what it means that fees paid on Uniswap are about half of those paid on Bitcoin 
  • what the purpose of liquidity mining is
  • why Haseeb doesn't think that dexes have network effects and that once professional market makers come in the space, Uniswap will lose market share
  • whether users will use DeFi directly through the dexes or through another interface
  • why Dan thinks that DeFi is now comparable to financial investment in the 1970s 
  • whether or not yield aggregators like yEarn make it harder for AMMs to compete
  • what happened with the CRV token launch
  • initial dex offerings or initial DeFi offerings, like the UMA token launch
  • whether, because of the high fees on Ethereum and the how long its transition to Ethereum 2.0 will take, DeFi activity could move to another blockchain such as Solana
  • where DeFi will go over the next few years

 

Thank you to our sponsor! 

Crypto.com: http://crypto.com

 

Episode links: 

Haseeb Qureshi: https://twitter.com/hosseeb

Dan Robinson: https://twitter.com/danrobinson

 

Haseeb’s post on the rise of AMMs: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/what-explains-the-rise-of-amms-7d008af1c399

 

Haseeb's post on how Uniswap could be un-bundled: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/unbundling-uniswap-the-future-of-on-chain-market-making-1c7d6948d570

 

Dex volume: https://defiprime.com/dex-volume

 

Trading volume on centralized exchanges: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/74539/july-by-the-numbers-a-look-at-crypto-exchange-volumes-open-interest-and-miner-revenue

 

Incentivized pools: https://pools.fyi/#/?tag=incentivized

 

Top dexes by trading volume: https://www.coingecko.com/en/dex

 

Ethereum transaction fees: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html 

 

Uniswap website visits 15x in July: https://messari.io/article/uniswap-total-website-visits-grew-15x-in-july

 

Website traffic to DeFi platforms explodes in July: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/74231/defi-platforms-web-traffic-july

 

Fees paid to various crypto projects: https://cryptofees.info

 

Curve reaches $1 billion in TVL: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/75014/curve-becomes-third-defi-protocol-to-hit-1-billion-in-total-value-locked

 

The Block on dex aggregators: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/69468/dex-aggregators-user-experience

 

Delphi Digital on aggregators and why dexes will be like airlines: https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/dex-wars-and-aggregation-theory/

https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/are-amms-the-airlines-of-crypto/

https://twitter.com/ZeMariaMacedo/status/1298589417855168518?s=20

 

Mooniswap: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/74454/1inch-launches-automated-market-maker-mooniswap

 

Yield aggregators: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/75189/defis-yield-aggregator-dao-yearn-finance

 

How DeFi is affecting OTC desks: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/daily/75870/defi-otc-desks-lunch

 

Serum on Solana: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/daily/72924/ftx-dex-serum-solana-blockchain

 

CRV launch: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/74921/the-story-of-the-botched-crv-launch

 

UMA token launch: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/genesis/63611/uma-token-sale-retrospective

 

Serum on Solana: https://medium.com/solana-labs/ftx-chooses-solana-for-serum-a-high-speed-non-custodial-decentralized-derivatives-exchange-c346a27c1f2b

 

https://www.coindesk.com/uniswap-ftx-perpetual-futures