Chapter 24DeFi Summer
Governance tokens were like acne in 2020, and DeFi was like a teenage boy who would only drink Dr. Pepper.
A little while after the comp mania kicked in, Balancer, a protocol for making indexes of tokens, started luring users with its own token, balancer (BAL). In July, RARI, a platform for selling crypto art and collectibles (non‐fungible tokens), released a new token to everyone who had ever owned an NFT, rari (RARI).
They started yield farming too, rewarding rari to anyone who traded on their platform, pushing up volumes. Liquidity mining was expanding beyond finance.
As I mentioned before, another automated market maker blew up in the summer of comp, and it was called Curve. Curve had a very special niche in the decentralized exchange business. It specialized in swaps between tokens that tended to have the same value, such as between stablecoins that followed the price of the dollar. Curve was also big on bitcoin derivatives running on Ethereum.
Weirdly, this turned out to be an enormous use case. It was like a used car lot where no one bought or sold anything, but people showed up to exchange Camrys for Sonatas and Sonatas for Altimas and Altimas for Camrys again. And they just did it all day, every day. Why so much excitement over the most boring stuff? But this was and remains superhot on Ethereum, and Curve was king in the‐like‐for‐like, hella‐boring‐for‐hella‐boring game.
As it happened, the founder of Curve, Michael Egorov, had been working on ...
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