Messari's Defi report for Q2: Dex volume drops sharply, with Uniswap V3 leading the way

原文标题：《 Q2'21 DeFi Review 》

原文作者： Ryan Watkins、Roberto Talamas

原文编译： Moni，Odaily星球日报

Defi is the Tower of Babel for mankind. We have rebuilt money into a language...... A computer language accessible to all cultures in the land. Now that all of our talents, greed and ideals can be unified into one system, the growth of DEFI will be unparalleled and the next 1-2 years will be critical and will affect the decades and even centuries that follow.

- Redphonecrypto

A year ago, Compound  Launched the COMP liquidity mining program, revolutionizing the DEFI industry. With the new mechanism for channelling liquidity in the DEFI protocol, the decentralized financial sector has grown exponentially on almost every metric. In the process, Defi not only attracted the attention of investors, users and regulators, but also showed the world how to achieve product/market fit.

The DEFI market continued this momentum in the second quarter of 2021, with most indicators hitting all-time highs. However, as the digital currency market began to weaken in the late second quarter, Defi was not immune. In many cases, activity under the DEFI agreement declined in the second half of the quarter as market speculation declined.

But is that the whole story?

In this report, we will take you through the key performance indicators, market developments, and key issues to watch for in the coming quarters. Q2 2021 was another crowded quarter in the development of the DEFI industry, and while asset prices may be depressed, the fundamentals of DEFI are still developing and provide the foundation for the next phase of growth of DEFI.

Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

Dex trading volume continued to explode in the second quarter, reaching $405bn in the quarter -- a 117-fold increase from the same period last year and an 83% increase since the first quarter. May alone accounted for more than half of the quarter's transactions, which is not surprising given that May was also the month when the digital currency market peaked.

Dex trading volumes have halved since May, falling to $95bn in June. Despite the decline, June still recorded the third highest Dex volume on record.

Looking at the evolution of the competitive landscape throughout the quarter, we see. PancakeSwap  Has changed considerably in its position. For a brief time in April, though, the "breakfast" -themed Dex overturned the numbers. However, since then, the market share of Pancakeswap has plummeted due to the rise of Uniswap V3 and a number of problems with the Binancet smart chain ecosystem since May. By the end of the quarter, Uniswap accounted for 54% of all Dex trades on a weekly basis, also the highest since November 2020.

Polygon  The rise of BSC is also cannibalizing BSC's market share in decentralized transaction volumes. As more and more projects turn to Polygon and new tokens are available for revenue farming, BSC is being pushed out of the market. This situation is a good illustration of the ongoing liquidity "war" between public chains, showing that when token incentives are the main reason for capital to enter the blockchain ecosystem, liquidity will shift as soon as incentives decline or incentives elsewhere become more attractive.

Finally, looking at the overall DEX market, we find that for the first time since October 2020, the percentage of DEX trading volume as a percentage of CEX trading volume exceeded 10%. The data show that, over time, decentralized exchanges are eating into the volume of trading on centralized exchanges.

Uniswap V3 becomes the top DEX

In May, Uniswap finally launched its much-anticipated Uniswap V3 protocol, which features the centralisation of liquidity -- allowing liquidity providers (LPs) to make markets within a customised price range, creating individual price curves in the process. The design promises a 4,000-fold increase in capital efficiency for liquidity providers by enabling them to provide the same depth of liquidity as V2 within a specified price range, while making less idle capital. In a matter of weeks, Uniswap V3 became the industry's largest Dex, with nearly $28 billion in trading volume in June.

Uniswap V3 already accounts for more than 40% of all Dex transactions and continues to cannibalize the market with no signs of slowing down.

THORChain  Launched multi-chain ChaosNet

After more than two years of development and many delays, Thorchain, a cross-chain liquidity protocol, finally went live in the first week of 2021 Q2. Currently being rolled out in a protected manner, as the network evolves, the community will gradually raise the cap of the liquidity pool, prove its security and fix bugs. Thorchain currently supports five blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bentancin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin, and plans to connect more in the coming months. Although THORChain trading volumes remain subdued at the moment, liquidity is increasing in line with the ceiling increase, which also shows the increasing demand for cross-chain liquidity market. We are moving into a multi-chain blockchain of the future, with infrastructures like Thorchain that can transfer value between blockchains without a trusted third party.

Pancakeswap went down the drain

The Binance smart chain ecosystem was also hit hard after the digital currency market collapsed in May, with lockups falling more than 50 percent from their peak in just a few days. While lockups on all smart contract platforms shrank, Binance's smart chain suffered more, as most of the value locked up in its apps was capital for employment and consisted of assets that had little use other than to encourage users to speculate. Unlike Ethereum, which mixes a large number of stablecoins, Binance smart chain has a large risk of lockup, which makes it extremely sensitive to market fluctuations. That, coupled with a series of hacks and vulnerabilities in the Binance smart chain, has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. In addition, speculation on the Binance smart chain dried up sharply in June, leading to a 69 percent drop in PancakeSwap trading volume during the month. Its market share has also fallen.

The Defi industry is moving forward, and one of the common themes is the introduction of a Layer 2 extension solution on Ethereum that aims to extend Defi's performance by several orders of magnitude without compromising security. The most anticipated launch of these solutions is Optimistic Rollups, which allows thousands of transactions to be bundled into a Rollup block, with the leading solutions being Arbitrum and Optimism, expected to be launched in the third quarter.

Dex will benefit from Ethereum network extension solutions that will enable them to focus more on capital efficiency. Uniswap V3 is a great example of this design philosophy. While Uniswap V3 is still an Automated Market Maker (AMM), it is now closer to the Order Book in pursuit of capital efficiency. In addition to the early success of Uniswap V3, the recent rise of Polygon has created a lot of excitement about the Layer 2 solution's future.

Lending platform

After a boom in the first quarter, Defi's lending cooled in the second quarter. However, the second quarter of 2021 continued the momentum of the previous quarter. Between March and May, total lending surged from $25 billion to a peak of $45 billion (an 81 percent increase in just six weeks), largely as investors tried to capture the high loan yields on the Defi loan agreement. However, as the market improved, the upward trend suddenly stopped. The total amount of assets locked up by major lending platforms rose only 15 per cent month-on-month as investors fled for safer assets amid heightened market turmoil.

Unsurprisingly, the volume of outstanding loans follows a similar pattern. Total outstanding loans rose 62 per cent in the first six weeks of the second quarter. Total outstanding loans over the next 10 days were just $4 billion, down just 21% from their peak. At the end of the quarter, total outstanding loans increased by approximately 44% from the previous quarter.

In addition, yields on supply across all lending platforms have fallen as investor borrowing demand has dwindled. In the space of three months, the stablecoin lending rate, particularly the USDC, fell from an average of 9.6% to 1.4%, a drop of 85%.

Source: Loanscan

Aave  Join the multi-chain world

At the end of the first quarter of 2021, AAVE announced the launch of Polygon, which aims to escape Ethereum's high-fee environment. Then, Polygon teamed up with AAVE to offer early adopter mobility mining rewards. The project has proved a huge success, increasing AVE's lockup capacity from $6 billion to $12 billion in just two weeks.

Buoyed by the launch of Polygon and a host of token incentives, AVE's market share of total outstanding loans soared in April, leaving Compound in competition. By the end of May, AVE had replaced Compound as the leading lending platform, occupying more than 37% of DEFI's total lending market.

Bridging the gap between cryptocurrency and traditional banking - Compound Treasury

At the end of the quarter, Compound Labs partnered with Fireblocks and Circle to launch Compound Treasury, a product designed specifically for non-crypto businesses and financial institutions looking to enter the crypto rate market. The product allows organizations to access Compound available USDC-based products without having to worry about the complexities associated with encryption, such as private key management and cryptographically converted to fiat currency, and guarantees a fixed interest rate of 4% per year on deposits - an astronomical amount compared to the average U.S. savings account.

Compound Gateway Lending Base for Multi-Chain World

As the multi-chain future becomes more evident, existing lending agreements have begun to explore solutions to accommodate this new way of operating. As a way to embrace this emerging paradigm, Compound Gateway has launched Compound Gateway, a Substrate-based blockchain designed to serve as the infrastructure for a cross-chain interest rate market. Similar to Thorchain's Thorfi Lending feature, which will launch later this year, Gateway aims to enable users to use the native assets of one blockchain (such as Ethereum) as collateral for other blockchains (such as Solana).

In short, Gateway enables blockchain interoperability by using a connector contract called Startport as the core mechanism to connect and transfer value between different blockchains. Starports act as contracts in the peer ledger (such as Ethereum smart contracts) and have the ability to lock assets until they are released by the gateway validator node.

Source: Compound

Defi's new frontier - fixed income markets

While fixed income remains an emerging niche at DEFI, it is huge in the traditional financial sector. In this context, fixed income refers to any instrument that generates stable and predictable cash flows, such as corporate bonds, Treasury bills, and fixed income mutual funds. The fixed interest rate concept is a relatively new and unexplored area of DEFI where variable interest rates offered by agreements such as AVE and Compound will become the norm.

So far, the fixed income space can be broadly divided into three different categories:

1. Securitization and spin-offs

2. Fixed-rate borrowing

Interest rate swaps

Stable currency

Total stablecoin issuance exceeded $107 billion in the second quarter of 2021, up 70% since the first quarter and up 803% year over year.

There are many reasons for the widespread adoption of stablecoins:

● 稳定币很容易被接受作为付款，因为您只需要一个公共区块链上的地址即可

● 稳定币在全球公共基础设施上运行，而且是 24/7/365 运行，这使得它们非常可用和可靠

● 与需要 KYC 且经常限制访问的现有支付解决方案相比，稳定币为用户提供更强的自主性、隐私性和互操作性

● 稳定币是可编程的，允许开发人员使用它们轻松构建和部署具有全球分布和即时资本访问权限的应用程序

During the quarter, stablecoin trading volume reached $1.7 trillion, up 1,090% year over year and up 59% since Q1. That's impressive!

The biggest winners in the quarter were USDC, BUSD and DAI, which increased their share to 23%, 9% and 5%, respectively. While the USDT is still king, its dominance is fading over time.

Finally, let's take a look at the central stablecoin market. In fact, the decentralized stablecoins continued to gain share from the centralized stablecoins in the second quarter, and the decentralized stablecoins now account for around 10% of the total stablecoin supply, a record high.

DAI's market share declined in the first quarter largely due to the rise of Terra's UST, but it still led the market by a wide margin with a 61% market share. In the second quarter, DAI regained some share while Terra stagnated.

USDC rose up and became the stablecoin of choice for DEFI

Perhaps no stablecoin has had a better quarter than Circle's USDC. Not only did Circle close a $440 million funding round and plan to go public via SPAC at a valuation of $4.5 billion, but it has made great strides in Ethereum's burgeoning Defi ecosystem. USDC is expected to soon surpass USDT as the main stablecoin on Ethereum.

More than 50% of USDC supply is now in smart contracts -- equivalent to about $12.5 billion. While this percentage is not as high as DAI's, USDC is still ahead in terms of dollars.

DAI has continued to achieve incredible growth while centralizing risk has increased

Makerdao had another incredible quarter with DAI supply up 76% and revenue up 136%. DAI supplies totaled an impressive $5 billion at the end of the second quarter, while MakerDao generated $43 million in revenue for the quarter.

The rise of unanchored stablecoins

When Bitcoin was born, it sparked imagination about the potential of non-sovereign digital currencies. But as Bitcoin began trading, it quickly became clear that it was unstable and certainly not going to be used as a currency anytime soon. At some point in the future, once bitcoin becomes a big enough asset size and builds up enough liquidity, it will eventually become less volatile. However, given that bitcoin is a fixed supply asset and cannot adjust its supply relative to demand, it could also end up being as volatile forever as gold.

To bridge the gap between the present and the future, the digital currency industry has created stablecoins pegged to the US dollar, which both addresses the volatility issue and facilitates the widespread adoption of many blockchain applications. The problem with these stablecoins pegged to the US dollar, however, is that they dollarise Ethereum, which is controlled by the Federal Reserve, thereby limiting Ethereum's ability to build a non-sovereign monetary system. In addition, stables have exposed Ethereum to systemic regulatory risk due to its reliance on grey market stables pegged to the US dollar (although this risk is decreasing as the USDC and USDT gain market share).

Fortunately, the digital currency industry has noticed the problems and recently launched a number of projects aimed at creating stablecoins that are not pegged to fiat currencies. These projects are called "unanchored stablecoins," and they offer Ethereum's monetary system more opportunities to achieve stability while eliminating reliance on fiat currencies. In the process, the "unanchored stablecoin" would not only liberate the Ethereum monetary system from the central bank's fiat currency influence, but would also introduce stablecoins that fit the entire Ethereum economy.

For now, however, unanchored stablecoins seem to be a distant experiment with no clear use case.

Asset management

As expected, as Defi protocol liquidity soared during the quarter, so did the total value of the lockup positions of the yield aggregators that put liquidity into Defi, with Asset Management Devil down 2% after peaking at $9.5 billion at the end of the second quarter.

In the revenue aggregator market, the second quarter is noteworthy. Yearn  's comeback and rise, with its market share surging from 29% to 69% in the quarter.

Yearn's market dominance is growing

The asset management field in the second quarter is the most noteworthy, Yearn recovery, market dominance is also growing. With Yearn's incentive adjustment problem solved in the first quarter, the current market focus has shifted to Yearn's new V2 vault. Yearn V2 has been a huge success, increasing Yearn's assets under management from $540 million at the beginning of the year to $4.1 billion at the end of the second quarter.

Yearn's revenue also grew, as did AUM's, up 236% from the first quarter to $18.5 million in the second quarter.

derivatives

Decentalized derivatives trading volumes continued to grow significantly in Q2 2021, and while still only a small fraction of decentralized spot trading volumes, perpetual swap volumes reached nearly $20 billion in the quarter, up 3,000 percent from Q4 2020 and 155% from Q1 2021. Despite the current barriers to scaling, decentralized spin-off protocols are starting to gain more attention from Defi users.

Given the current underperformance of the overall digital currency market, investors' "appetite" for risky assets and leverage has evaporated amid increased market uncertainty, with derivative trading volumes predictably falling in June. But even so, trading volumes are on a steady upward trend compared with levels at the start of 2021.

Defi's next stop

It was clear in the second quarter of 2021 that DEFI activities were negatively impacted by declining market sentiment and depressed asset prices, but the industry continued to grow in size compared to the beginning of the year. In the coming months, as Layer 2 extension solutions become available, more organizations will begin to dabble in the Defi protocol, and the Defi ecosystem will continue to mature, providing greater security for users. Defi may have a time for further growth.

DEFI will continue to move forward, every step towards a new, open global financial system.

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