ETH validator stats; Uniswap & Compound's missed opportunity

Plus Odds & Ends and Thoughts & Prognostications

Sep 22

Chart of the week: ETH validator market share

Shiny new leaderboard for the recently launched rated on what entities are behind the largest amount of Ethereum validators. At first glance, it looks like a healthy market share breakdown for an established industry with just over 60% market share in the ten largest entities. Lido’s 30% is big but not monopolistic, and most encouragingly there is a healthy breakdown amongst Ethereum clients - Prysm in first, followed by Lighthouse and Teku. With Tornado Cash still fresh on the mind, many have worried about the high % of validators that would be susceptible to sanctions.

Elsewhere in post-merge Ethereum, rated co-founder Elias Simos dives into the adoption of Flashbot’s mev-boost amongst validators. Mev-boost blocks now make up around 30% of all blocks and the Flashbots own relayer has dominated against Bloxroute and other options.

Tweet of the week: Multi-chain mishaps

getty.gfxlabs.eth @getty_hill

It's pretty wild how much market share Uniswap and Compound lost just by not deploying on more chains. Practically every chain has at least one clone of each, if not more.

DeFi governance voyager Getty from GFX Labs surveying the DeFi landscape and highlighting the missed opportunities of Compound and Uniswap to expand to new chains. This is especially true for Compound, which is still only deployed on Ethereum mainnet. Compound Gateway was supposed to be its multichain expansion but it was scrapped after running into issues with substrate. Its main competitor, Aave expanded aggressively and have leading market positions on three of the top 5 chains by TVL (Ethereum, Avalanche & Polygon).

Uniswap, on the other hand, is still probably feeling good about its positioning. It’s the #1 DEX on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism even after dragging their feet.

Uniswap and Compound share a reason for their slow march out of Ethereum mainnet: stale governance. Their core teams have taken a very hands off approach in governance for regulatory reasons so it was up to the community to push expansion through. This was doubly true for Compound because lending protocols require secure oracles typically provided by a core team.

Odds & Ends

Trader nets $500k exploiting GMX’s no-slippage offering Link
CoW Protocol August 2022 highlights Link
White House framework for digital assets Link
US House bill would put temporary ban on algo stablecoins Link
Uniswap Foundation Grants: Wave 1 Link
Introduction to development on Uniswap v3 Link

Thoughts & Prognostications

DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters [Vitalik]
An introduction to Replicating Market Makers [Robert Leifke/Numoen]
Uniswap v3 TVL is calculated incorrectly [Ivan Vakhmyanin/Coinmonks]

That’s it! Feedback appreciated. Just hit reply. Happy Solstice! Written in Nashville, with a crying, sick baby in the background.

Dose of DeFi is written by Chris Powers, with help from Denis Suslov and Financial Content Lab. Caney Fork, which owns Dose of DeFi, is a contributor to DXdao and benefits financially from it and its products’ success. All content is for informational purposes and is not intended as investment advice.

Dose of DeFi