We are deeply moved by our last night meetup and the possibilities that have been discussed on what can be built on top of existing decentralized finance applications. I will try my best to summarise the informative and inspiring talk of our guest speaker Tito Titov from WeiDex for those of you who have missed the chance to be with us in the room.
But first let’s go through the monthly overview of important dev news and updates, that were presented by hack’s CEO Milen Radkov.
As usual the news we grouped by relevance and ecosystem. Milen started with the most important updates in the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem. We got to learn about:
- Geth v.1.9.5 hotfix release
- Gas limit has moved up around 10m per block, (all time highs in terms of throughput) – low to mid 30s for possible transactions per second.
- The AZTEC Toolkit: An Introduction to AZTEC Proofs functions
- Send: The basic AZTEC transaction, sending assets privately across Ethereum
- Swap: Allows two entities to trade private assets without counterparty risk
- Dividend: Distribute private income pro rata to the asset holders
- Mint: Issue your custom asset
- Burn: Redeem the asset
- Public Range: Prove an encrypted number is greater or less than a public number — e.g. proving you are over 18 without revealing your date of birth
- Private Range: Prove the balance of an asset is greater than another private asset — useful for collateral management in DeFi systems
- ERC2280: ERC20 extension for native meta transactions support
- Maker and LoomNetwork creating bridges to take Dai to other chains
On another slide, we got to learn about recent developments in the aeternity ecosystem. Being involved in the project and working closely with aeternity developers is giving us a direct overview of their work. Milen shared what’s new in :
- Waellet – v0.1.4 beta
- Added options to contractCalls from Aepp()
- An aepp boilerplate at – boilerplate.waellet.com
- BIP39 issue fix
- AEX-2 compatibility
- AE SDK JS v4.7.0
- Base Aepp – v0.10.1 & v0.10.2 updates and bugfixes
- Language updates
- Removed intro overlays for Browser and Names tabs
- Extension removed from rendering of names
- Fixed rendering of transactions list
- Fixed language switch in transactions list
- Governance aepp
- reddit-style poll ordering algorithm
- each poll show if a delegatee or subdelegatee voted with the power of your stake
- implemented many design updates
- optimize caching in server for a responsive system with the maximum information shown
After this long and informative update, Tito got on stage to share with us his knowledge and experience on Decentralized Finance. His presentation started with a short evolution of money, from the exchange of goods, through the gold standard and paper money to the digital currencies. It is important to realize the chain of events that led us to the fiat currencies and the dependencies that we have created around money and on money printing organizations like FED, to realize the benefits of Decentralized Finance.
Before we dive into the details, Tito gave his best to explain to us what Decentralized Finance is, what are the use cases and what can we do on top of “Money Legos” as he called the existing DeFi platforms.
Let’s look at them one by one.
Contrary to the existing monetary system, where the money is printed by a government organization and the printed money is not backed by anything, since the removal of the gold standard, DeFi is based on digital assest and smart contracts build on top of blockchain protocols allowing fully transparent governance and creation of “money”, p2p lending and trading.
During his presentation, Tito introduced us to some of the most advanced protocols build to power the growing market of DeFi dApps.
First, he spoke about the biggest and most famous app Maker Dao. Brading itself as “Transparent and sustainable finance”. Maker is comprised of a decentralized stablecoin, collateral loans, and community governance.
Second to Maker by the number of users and revenue was Compound. Compound is an open-source, autonomous protocol built for developers, to unlock a universe of new financial applications. Interest and borrowing, for the open financial system. Their protocol is allowing many to build new and exiting application on top of it.
In addition, Tito spoke about Synthetix, running Synths, tokens that provide exposure to assets such as gold, Bitcoin, U.S. Dollars, stocks like TESLA, and AAPL within the Ethereum blockchain. And Insta dApp, Autonomous Banking Portal on Emerging Blockchain-based Financial Protocols.
All of the above-mentioned protocols and dApps could be used as building blocks of your future DeFi dApp, instantly and without need to pay additional fees. One can easily start a new business only by building a fancier UI on top of Compound’s protocol as Tito mentioned in one of his examples of successful ways to use the existing infrastructure.
As a CEO of WeiDex, Tito shared with us his company experience of using “money legos” in practice to boost the liquidity on their multi-chain decentralized exchange. Providing their users with excellent trading experience without the need to spend extra money on market makers and liquidity providers.
Shortly before the end, Tito walked us through a few smart contacts, showing us how we can build on top of the existing dApps or add them to our products to boost our revenues and to make the user experience richer and nicer.
In conclusion, we can say that the meetup was been equally interesting and important for developers, entrepreneurs, and investors giving to each group enough information to spark their interest in Decentralized Finance witch is considered to be the next killer application of blockchain.
What is your opinion on Defi? Do you believe that blockchain will revolutionize finance?
Join our meetup group to stay tuned for our next event!
Also published on Medium.
