March Newsletter
Hello Aave Community!
We hope everyone is staying happy, healthy, and at home <3
While we have been social distancing, Aave Protocol’s market size surpassed $37M USD, and we are excited to say we have moved up to #4 on Defipulse!
If you’re a developer responsibly chilling at home (as you should be!), there’s loads you can build with Aave to expand the composability of the DeFi ecosystem! Dive into our developer’s portal to get started.
Technical & Development Updates: “Crypto Black Thursday”
On March 12th, DeFi passed a major stress test with massive price crashes for crypto assets across the board. Catch up on our Crypto Black Thursday analysis and reflection on what we can build next to alleviate these situations in the future.
Stay on top of our biweekly Dev Reports on our blog. You can find the latest one here!
Events & Community
March kicked off with ETHLondon—it was truly inspiring to see all of the amazing hacks on Aave Protocol which we will cover below 😉 We also hosted a legendary event “$1B Locked in DeFi—What’s Next?” and afterparty. We loved seeing the London community show out!
Andrey reppin’ Aave at ETHLondon
Jordan speaking at ETHLondon
Francesco Renzi rocking limited edition “Eat the Rich” Flash Loans Drip
ETHLondon afterparty
After London, we flew to Paris forEthCC! We hosted a workshop on how to build your first Flash Loan, had a super cool evening full of debate and discussion about risks and privacy issues in DeFi, and hosted a legendary afterparty.
Stani giving his talk “Flash Loans: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
Irene (Aave), Vitalik, and Alex (Aave)
Devs learning to make their first Flash Loan with the Aave fam
Earlier this week we were at the CryptoCompare Digital Asset Summit, where CEO Stani Kulechov spoke on a panel and gave a talk on DeFi composability.
Stani’s talk “Flash Loans: The Newest Building Block of DeFi”
We were also at Monolith’s Digital DeFi meetup, where Stani was on the panel “Exploring Alternative Approaches to Design Trustless Stablecoins” which you can watch here in case you missed it!
Finally, our Head of Support Pablo Candela gave an introductory talk to Aave & Flash Loans (it’s in Spanish). Looking forward to more online events as we weather the COVID-19 storm together, and we have a few of our own coming up (keep reading)!
ETHLondon Aave Hacks
It was incredible seeing all of the amazing hackers show out on our home turf at ETHLondon. Of the extraordinary 16 submissions to Aave bounties, we chose 6 winners:
Blazar (formerly Daj)
Blazar allows us to benefit from our future money right here and now. Wouldn’t interest bearing protocols like Aave be even more awesome if you could receive your interest immediately?
Let’s take a closer look at how Blazar accomplishes just that:
Alice wants to lock in an interest rate and receive her money immediately. So, she locks 100 Dai into the Blazar smart contract for whatever period of time that she chooses and in exchange she gets 1) her full interest for that period and 2)100 fDai. This fDai represents a claim on Dai that she'll be able to exchange for actual Dai at maturity. Where might this model come in handy? Let’s say Alice wants to set-up a Gitcoin bounty with fDai in which the innovator on the other side of the bounty can claim real Dai by the time the fDai bounty is completed. Voilá, the innovation doesn't stop! You can watch Blazar at ETHLondon here!
This winning Aave hack consists of an easy to use CDP manager that utilizes Aave Flash Loans to migrate between positions on Compound, MakerDAO and Aave. The positions are imported via a proxy contract/NFT token and then the user is free to maneuver however he/she pleases within a fun and spunky UI. Watch 1hop.io at ETHLondon here!
FlashDash gives us a comprehensive look at the new and thrilling world of Flash Loans. This winning hack was inspired to create a clean dashboard that enables the community to easily explore high level trends as well as the specifics of any one Flash Loan transaction. Explore this cool dashboard and take a deep dive into exciting Flash Loan activity here.
This winner took on the arduous task of putting the “eval” command into Ethereum. Similar to what one can do in Javascript, one can now also do in Ethereum as a result of this good fellow’s efforts this past weekend.
Watch Lurch at ETHLondon here!
Ewallet utilizes Aave Protocol to create a secure native wallet on mobile. This wallet intends to push DeFi adoption to our friends and frenemies in enterprise, as it is meant to function with enterprise level management. With Ewallet, employees of large companies could start using crypto they receive from their respected managers.
Laxmi is a P2P non-custodial payments app that solves the problem of gas payments through the powers of DeFi i.e. Aave. Rather than asking users to pay prohibitive gas payments each time they send a transaction, Laxmi takes the Dai users add to their wallet and deposits it into an interest accruing position in Aave Protocol. It then uses that interest to pay subsequent transactions and provide cool rewards like discounts, scratch cards, and cash-back bonus. This rewarding system keeps crypto users coming back for more!
While it’s awesome to be paid on the blockchain, it’s less awesome that everyone that knows your address can see how much you are being paid. This hack builds on the work of money streaming by Sablier payments but modifies it to work with private zkAssets (built on top of AZTEC notes) rather than standard ERC20 tokens. Watch Quachtli at ETHLondon here!
This social blockchain savings game is the first of its kind. The game consists of a savings club of users in which all the users deposit Dai towards an Aave lending pool on a weekly basis. The Aave lending pool collects interest that will be paid out at the end of the year to all the “savers” who successfully save. The referral based game incentives users to invite other peeps in order to bear more interest. However those peeps that fail to “save” are immediately ghosted and kicked out of the club. These people get all their contributions back, but they do not benefit from the interest payout at the end of year. The rest of the pool benefits from the interest of those that were ghosted!
This gamified approach to DeFi and ghosting knocked our ghost-emoji-print socks off and thus took home the grand Aave prize. Check it out hereand watch GoodGhosting at ETHLondon here!
You can find all of the ETHLondon submissions here!
Shoutout to all the Aave hackers-- you did us proud <3
Integrations
This month we’ve integrated with DeFi Saver, a one-stop solution to stay on top of your DeFi protocols. DeFi Saver can be coupled with Aave Flash Loans to do some really cool things! DeFi Saver lets you set an automatic self-liquidation bot, so a dev could execute a Flash Loan to snag some funds to pay back their debt, free their collateral, and sell a part of it to reimburse Aave Protocol-- all in one transaction! No need to pay the liquidation penalty on MakerDao (this fee is 13% of the value of the debt!) Instead, you just pay a 0.34% fee (0.25% for DeFi Saver and 0.09% for Aave). This makes the whole process smooth and fast-- talk about DeFi composability!
We are also excited to announce that we integrated with Tether to bring widespread adoption of USDT and DeFi! USDT has played a growing role in Flash Loans, and integrating with Tether boosts DeFi composability for lending and borrowing.
More cool integrations include Alpha Wallet, imToken, Idle Finance, Kollateral, My Ether Wallet, and Zerion! We have also listed BUSD, adding another stable coin to Aave Protocol.
In case you didn’t know: 20% of Aave Protocol’s fees are allocated to reward integrations/referrals! This means that when Aave Protocol is integrated, integrators get a reward based on the volume they generate. You can find the details of our referral program here.
Stay tuned...
Just because we’re social distancing does not mean you can’t talk to us!
Join us and Chainlink for virtual fireside chat on April 2nd at 8 pm GMT! Sign up and tune in here.
We will be having our 2nd Community Call starring My Ether Wallet , Blazar, and our newest Aave team member David Truong on April 9th at 5 pm GMT! Details on that to come…
Don’t ghost us! Follow us on Instagram @aave.aave for some sensational content, and as always, join us on our Discord or Telegram channel!
Cheers,
Aave Team
P.S.-- We’re hiring!
We’re currently looking for some part-time community managers for our Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communities!
Profile/Job Description:
Fluent in English + Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese
Attend the community through different channels (mostly discord, telegram, and the live chat)
Task management, gitlab, and daily report of bugs or incidences
Technical knowledge & some crypto and DeFi knowledge recommended
Hit us up at wecare@aave.com if you’re interested-- we’d love to have you join the Aave fam!