ApeCoin and the number of bridges in a multichain world

Plus Odds & Ends and Thoughts & Prognostications

Mar 18

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Chart of the week: ApeCoin’s trade volume

BAYC’s hotly anticipated ApeCoin launched today with an airdrop and the subsequent trading frenzy. At the moment (Thursday evening EST), it’s circulating market cap is around $1bn with a $9bn FDV, which puts it in the mid-tier L1 or upper-tier DeFi echelon.

The token launch gives one of the most organic assessment on where liquidity is forming in the current landscape between DEXs and CEXs. With v2 & v3 combined, Uniswap is almost even with Binance for the most volume during the first day. No DeFi angle, but it’s impressive that Binance ‘s APE/BUSD pair is doing as much volume as Coinbase’s banner ApeCoin liquidity pair.

It’s also a little disappointing that there aren’t any other DEX’s anywhere in the top 20. Uniswap is miles ahead of all other on-chain liquidity sources.

HT: Hayden’s tweet (when Uniswap was still ahead of Binance)

Tweet of the week: Olaf on bridges

olaf @zxocw

a world of 25 chains needs 300 bridges this is why we need generalizable bridge protocols, not more bespoke 1-to-1 bridges long term, cross-chain protocols like @axelarcore and @anomanetwork could be even more important than underlying chains

Polychain founder Olaf Carlson-Wee has quietly entered the CT arena over the last few months. Apparently, Fortune covers and podcast appearances aren’t enough for influence in this town, or just that the allure of Crypto Twitter is too strong.

Anyway, bridges are having their moment in the sun, now that the multichain eocsystem is emerging. We’re not at the consolidation phase yet, so it’s a bit too early to crown industry standards while things are still being figured out. The IBC/Cosmos ecosystem looks set to capture when the bridge standards wars start.

Odds and Ends

Agave and Hundred Finance exploited on Gnosis Chain for $11m Link
Sen. Warren sponsored-bill likely lacks bipartisan support Link
Notional Finance: Weekly interest rate roundup Link
After vote, Juno is set to confiscate user’s funds Link
Alchemix announces v2 Link
ERC-4626 aims to be standard for tokenizing vaults Link
Optimism’s path to decentralization Link
dYdX DAO announces new legal structure Link

Thoughts and Prognostications

stkMKR: Maker Staking and Tokenomics Revision [monetsupply/Maker Forum]
Bringing HFT To DeFi With Doug Colkitt [Front Month]
Quarter II 2022 overview [Ansem’s Newsletter]
Anchor Proposal 18: A Retrospective [Josh/Polychain Capital]
A look into Lido Finance [Token Terminal]
Musings on why Uniswap v3 is bad for bootstrapping liquidity [zefram.eth]

That’s it! Feedback appreciated. Just hit reply. Written in Brooklyn. First Pi Day, then the Ides of March, then Austin 3:16 and now St. Patrick’s Day! And tomorrow’s Friday!

Dose of DeFi is written by Chris Powers, with help from Denis Suslov and Financial Content Lab. I spend most of my time contributing to DXdao* and benefit financially from it and its products’ success. All content is for informational purposes and is not intended as investment advice.

Dose of DeFi