ON–031: DeFi (Part 2)
Jul 24, 2020
This week the PoolTogether protocol passed the $25,000 mark in total prizes distributed. (Source)
The second primary KPI for PoolTogether is the number of unique wallets holding tickets. Despite lower yield rates creating smaller prizes, unique wallets has continued to grow and is just shy of 10,000. (Source)
- User churn is an important metric. Since inception the Dai Prize Pool has had 9706 unique wallets deposit funds. 7477 have never withdrawn. This equates to 76% of all users having remained in the prize pool. (Source)
- As a protocol, it's important to integrate with many pieces of the ecosystem. PoolTogether now has more users joining through native third party integrations (Argent, Pillar, etc.) then directly through the PoolTogether.com user interface. A sample of all new deposits in the last 72 hours (July 22 - 24th) showed 58% came from interfaces other than PoolTogether.com. (Source)
Contributor: Jon Itzler, Research Intern at Accomplice
tBTC is the first application built atop the Keep Network. It serves as a cross-chain bridge that allows users to deposit Bitcoin and mint a fully-backed ERC-20 called tBTC, as well as redeem tBTC for the underlying Bitcoin deposit. The differences between tBTC and more permissioned Bitcoin <> Ethereum bridges include:
The lack of reliance on a federated signer set
The guarantee that depositors have recourse in the case of signer misbehavior, due to overcollateralization of each BTC deposit in signer-bonded ETH
On May 18 after discovering an issue with redemptions, the Keep team decided to trigger a 10-day pause of deposits (link) and ultimately phase out the release candidate 0 (rc.0) version of the tBTC contracts. All depositor funds were safely returned and the majority of the outstanding tBTC was manually redeemed by the Keep team.
Source: Dune Analytics
The new version of tBTC, as well as the commencement of the stakedrop rewards program, is expected to launch in the coming months. KEEP tokens distributed in the stakedrop are rewarded to signers as a function of their total *bonded* ETH backing BTC deposits. Bonders are randomly selected amongst all signers with ETH staked, where long run selection probability is primarily weighted by the size of a signer’s ETH stake, and secondarily by size of their KEEP stake.
Source: Dune Analytics
The new contracts also feature a hard cap on tBTC supply, starting at 100 BTC in the first month, 250 BTC in the second month, etc. Due to the cap in the total amount of bonded ETH that can back deposits, early signers participating in the stakedrop are strongly incentivized to have their ETH bonded before additional signers come on. It seems likely that early signers will act proactively, doubling as BTC depositors, and we may see the amount of minted tBTC reach the first month’s supply cap quite quickly.
Additionally, we can expect both the amount of ETH staked and the number of new nodes coming on to the network to spike as supply cap increases are approaching. Both of the following charts provide a way monitor the ongoing dynamics and will be fun to watch:
Source: Dune Analytics
For people that are interested in contributing to the project in any capacity, Playing For Keeps July is going on right now. Over 3M in KEEP rewards have been distributed on-chain so far.
Source: Dune Analytics