Self-Sovereign Identity. SSI refers to identity users have complete control over. They can issue, store and permit/revoke access to credentials rather than trusting centralized entities. SSI has a lot of overlap with blockchain, but they exist outside of one another.

There is some debate on the degree to which SSI 'needs' blockchain and vice versa (there are plenty of web2 SSI products emerging from Okta, Microsoft, and startups)

The main aspect blockchain brings to SSI is a trustless, censorship resistant way to store decentralized identifiers (DIDs). The tradeoffs associated w non-blockchain DID warehousing are the meat of the debate on how intertwined blockchain and SSI are/should be.

SSI and blockchain are both young, unestablished, and have struggled with the use case problem, so im hoping both lean into the relationship as much as possible

i'll touch on this more soon!

great question! not too sure right now, will look into this and get back to you

Capital efficiency here is referring to how Maverick and Uniswap service a large amount of volume relative to their TVL, while Curve has around $2B TVL and may do $100M in daily volume - 5% volume/TVL ratio.

Uniswap and Maverick can often be 50% or even higher. Maverick has $40M TVL and did $120M in volume past 24 hrs across all chains, pretty wild.

Doesn't necessarily mean Curve is incapable of being capital efficient, but its PMF and brand direction with the bribes and stuff has certainly shifted it more towards liquidity moat than swapping venue.

By liquidity moat, im referring to how Curve's big product now is essentially the ability to help stablecoins like FRAX or LUSD or DAI maintain their peg as this decentralized reserve bank for DeFi. A few years ago, atomic swaps with synths via Curve stableswap pools were the groundbreaking mechanism for best execution on large swaps.

Ever since Uni v3, Uniswap has become pretty much the dominant swapping venue for everything, and Curve has leaned in to this DeFi reserve bank type role, and has become arguably just as important as it was before in this evolved way

When crvUSD > $1, the pegkeeper mints crvUSD and deposits it single-sided into the crvUSD-USDC pool.

When crvUSD < $1, it can withdraw the crvUSD from the pool, reducing debt and gradually improving price.

By minting high and withdrawing/buying low, the pegkeeper can capture the spread as profit.

The pegkeeper is a big part of crvUSD revenue, and can be monitored here https://curvemonitor.com/#/platform/crvusd

Good question. The main reasons are subtle design/calculation differences, and the adolescence of the protocols (excl. dYdX).

Synthetix perps funding rate hinges on the velocity of the rate of change, meaning the funding rate continuously drifts higher/lower in the face of sustained imbalances, settling upon correction. This could theoretically result in the funding rate settling on a non-zero value, which could be pretty cool for crypto native stuff like pegged asset markets, rebase tokens, or other degen type stuff. GMX funding rate so far seems to remain much tighter, but is supplemented by an hourly borrow fee.

Funding rates for the oracle model are a relatively new idea, with Synthetix being live for ~6 months and GMX v2 being live for a few weeks. The designs are new and the footprint of these DEXs is much smaller than CEXs, so the funding rates are much more sensitive. DeFi derivatives are generally pretty immature at this point, and we see widespread mispricing in DeFi options as well.

The bright side to this is it could be a relatively sustainable source of yield for a while.

Thanks Christof! Great idea, we will.

Lyra has a pretty big lead and for what the options space is right now, Lyra is ideal. Of the projects mentioned here, Rysk is most similar to Lyra. Best odds of beating Lyra is prob by having distinct approach. Short term, I think Panoptic could make a splash, but they are sort of in their own category of perp options. Panoptic wont have bid/ask spreads or expiries, which is where on chain options can't compete with Deribit atm.

Longer term, Premia is quite interesting. Premia v3 will have a fully collateralized settlement layer made up of concentrated liquidity. There will be a margin system and messaging network on top, allowing for a similar degree of capital efficiency you get on Lyra (which is 60-70% cash collateralized since Newport upgrade). What premia is doing is complicated and difficult. and it will certainly take a long time to fully populate a robust on chain vol surface with concentrated liquidity. It's a cool idea though, and if you assume an abundance of liquidity and demand for options (we obv. dont have yet, but is a good assumption long term) Premia v3 is a really cool way to structure an options platform.

I don't think so. DYDX, along with GMX and the other perps projects, are in a race to the bottom, at least until the centralized exchange experience is completely replicated or improved upon.