Stablecoin Inflows, zkSync Soars, & Loan Trends

Dec 8, 2021 · 3 min read

DISCLOSURE: DELPHI VENTURES HAVE INVESTED IN LUNA AND ZKSYNC. MEMBERS OF OUR TEAM ALSO OWN AAVE, UNI, SUSHI. THESE STATEMENTS ARE INTENDED TO DISCLOSE ANY CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND SHOULD NOT BE MISCONSTRUED AS A RECOMMENDATION TO PURCHASE ANY TOKEN. THIS CONTENT IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND YOU SHOULD NOT MAKE DECISIONS BASED SOLELY ON IT. THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE.

Stablecoin Growth On the Rise

Stablecoins grew substantially the past month, with the Top 5 Stablecoin Marketcap growing from $129B to just under $150B.
USDT and USDC were responsible for most of the supply growth, with USDC growing by $7.8B and USDT by $6B. Stablecoin supply growth, especially for centralized collateralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC, is a positive sign indicating money is entering the markets.
Also relevant is the fact USDC has been slowly growing against USDT in market share. The USDC/USDT ratio has grown from 0.19 at the start of the year to 0.53 today, a sign of market preference for USDC which is considered to have less risk compared to USDT.

zkSync Metrics Soar on ZK-Rollup Narrative

With the ZK-Rollup narrative popping off the past few weeks, we can see that users are moving funds over to ZK-Rollup projects like Loopring and zkSync to test it out.
Since the start of November, unique users grew by ~85k and deposits grew by ~$74.5M, the fastest pace seen yet.
On zkSync, the 2 main live projects now are ZigZag Exchange (Orderbook DEX) and Gitcoin (Funding Platform). According to L2fees, token swaps through ZigZag on zkSync have the lowest fees.

Loans Relatively Stable in Volatile Times

Given the volatile markets over the past month, it seems that on-chain leverage users are relatively unfazed.
MakerDAO has seen consistent loan growth (~$1B) since the beginning of November while Aave and Compound have been generally flat over the same period.
Interestingly, Aave had $30M in liquidations over a few day span in May on the back of the last major leverage-driven sell off. But compared to this most recent pullback, it only did ~$3M in liquidations.

Aggregator Reliance

1inch has been one of the go-to DEX aggregators on Ethereum since last year. Being an aggregator, using them will automatically route your DEX swaps to the best rate available.
Bancor has been more reliant on having its volume referred by 1inch, floating between 15-30% of volume daily; Sushiswap and Uniswap were on the lower end at 5-10%.
This doesn’t come as a surprise as Uniswap and Sushiswap are the top few DEXes where users go to swap or list their tokens.

Notable Tweets

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— Polygon | $MATIC – We’re hiring! (@0xPolygon) December 8, 2021

Messari Launches Governance Aggregator and Voting Platform

1/ We are excited to announce the launch of #MessariGovernor!

Governor is our free, first-to-market governance aggregator and voting platform.

Anyone can participate using @MetaMask, @CoinbaseWallet, or @WalletConnect

. A few reasons why you should use #MessariGovernor

— Messari (@MessariCrypto) December 8, 2021

Axie Infinity Breeding Cost Update

In 24 hours we will update the breeding fee!

The SLP cost per breed will triple.

The AXS cost per breed will be halved to 0.5 AXS.

Read about the principles and factors we used and examined when making this important decision:

— Axie Infinity (@AxieInfinity) December 8, 2021