This is issue #67 of the on-chain analytics newsletter that reaches nearly 10k crypto investors every week 📈

1inch, whose v2 offers the best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes across all DEXes—swap on the customizable new UI. And also Aave, where you can experience DeFi: Deposit, Earn, & Borrow on Aave.

This week our contributor analysts cover DeFi: Compound, Mirror, CREAM, Instadapp, and Aave.

• The Compound protocol is a set of globally accessible, open-source interest rate markets for Ethereum assets. Users can easily supply assets to earn an interest rate, and then use those supplied assets as collateral to borrow other assets. On April 10th, Compound became the first DeFi protocol in history to break $10B in Total Value Locked (TVL) and currently has $18.4B of assets supplied to the protocol.

• Outstanding borrowing on Compound reached an all-time high of $7.7B, with USDC, DAI, and USDT making up 91% of the volume. The increase in borrowing can likely be attributed to the rising price of collateral assets like ETH, which extends the borrowing power of user’s collateral.

• Governance participation is a key indicator of Compound’s health, as COMP token holders decide the future direction of the protocol. Proposal 40, which distributed $2m of COMP to fund the newly formed Grants Committee, smashed the voting record with 200 individuals participating.

• C.R.E.A.M. Finance is a decentralized lending protocol for individuals and protocols — live on Ethereum, BSC, and Fantom. On Ethereum C.R.E.A.M. powers v1, a long tail asset focused money market, and the Iron Bank, the first protocol-to-protocol lending market. The Iron Bank is growing exponentially, sparked by C.R.E.A.M.’s collaboration with Yearn. Driven by high yields via Yearn’s use of its veCRV, the crvIB yVault reached $140M less than a month after launch.

• C.R.E.A.M. recently revamped its interest rate model for the Iron Bank, increasing capital efficiency. The Iron Bank’s utilization rate is ~47.5%, compared with Compound’s ~40% and Aave V2’s ~20%. This gives borrowers much better rates — at a utilization rate of 80%, APY has been cut in half to 10%.

• Activity across the BSC ecosystem has gone parabolic this year and C.R.E.A.M. is no exception. C.R.E.A.M. volume on BSC is up 5x since year’s start (usage around October’s launch was driven by liquidity incentives). The protocol is seeing 1000s of new users on B.S.C. each week.

• Mirror Protocol's TVL recently surpassed $2.0 billion (currently ~$2.1 billion) and $1 billion in total liquidity, representing the total value of all mAssets and UST in liquidity pools. Including Terra, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain TVL (plus Pool2 MIR pairs), Mirror has become a top 15 cross-chain DeFi protocol (by TVL) within 5 months of launch.

• Mirror's community governance recently approved the whitelisting of COIN, Coinbase's IPO listing on Nasdaq. Once the parameters for a 200% OC mint ratio are registered, users can trade synthetic mCOIN (mirrored COIN) on Terra, Ethereum, or Binance Smart Chain and farm mCOIN to earn MIR rewards.

• Previously to earn MIR via Mint, users had to not only over-collateralize to mint, but also provide an additional amount of UST to the liquidity pools (a total of price*(1+collateral ratio)). Minters can soon use collateral ratio*price which changes the ROIC by ~50% if collateral ratio = 200%.

• Instadapp has grown to over $2.5B in assets under management, making it currently the 7th largest DeFi DApp by holdings. Instadapp currently holds 1.03% of all circulating Ethereum. In the past few months, Instadapp has made integrations with Gelato Protocol, Uniswap, and more recently with the Polygon Network, formerly Matic.

• Instadapp’s flashloan, InstaPool, has facilitated more than $5B in flashloans. Instapool facilitates features including refinancing. In the last five months, we have seen an increase of $1.7B more volume in flashloans, an over 50% increase from our previously recorded volume of $3B.

• There are currently more than 20.8k DeFi Smart Accounts (DSA) that have been created. Since the launch of Compound’s governance token COMP, over 53,000 COMP tokens have been farmed and claimed on the Instadapp platform by users.