About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund. Click here to share your project with us.

Network Coverage
Coverage on Goldfinch, Yield Protocol, Aave, and Compound.

• Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol that enables loans without crypto collateral. It is empowering financial inclusion by providing credit lines to fintech and lending businesses in emerging markets, now with loans spanning 18 countries. Active loans on Goldfinch have doubled every 2 months over the past year to now total $38.6m, up 154x from a year ago.

• The “senior pool” is automatically allocated across the senior tranches of all the loans. The senior pool currently offers 92% APY, split between 6% from the base interest and 86% from GFI liquidity mining, and fluctuates with the GFI price and pool size. With these APYs, TVL has grown to $68M.

• The Goldfinch protocol collects fees in the form of 10% of interest paid and 0.5% of withdrawals, which go to the protocol reserves. 30-day fees passed $70k this month, up 20x from six months ago.

• Yield Protocol is a collateralized fixed-rate borrowing and lending marketplace. Yield Protocol pioneered structuring fixed rate loans as liquid ERC-20 tokens and developed a novel AMM for trading the tokenized loans. Yield Protocol launched its V2 in October of 2021 and has seen consistent un-incentivized growth in TVL of the protocol reaching almost $20M this week. Yield will be taking steps to increase the returns to users providing liquidity over the following months.

• Yield’s fixed rates have been very competitive relative to variable rate borrowing platforms such as Aave and Compound. Current rates have been below 2% most of the last week. To encourage borrowing, Yield Protocol continues to add new forms of collateral including assets from Yearn and Convex.

• Borrowing in Yield Protocol has generally followed the growth in TVL reflecting users taking advantage of growing liquidity in USDC and DAI. At submission time, it was possible to borrow 1m USDC for over two months at a fixed rate under 3%.

• Llama provides economic infrastructure for DAO’s and is working with Aave via the Aave Grants program to offer Financial Reporting and Treasury Management contributions as an active member of the Aave community. Recommendations are made for how the reserve factors could be used to support growth, spanning strategic assets and earning yield within DeFi. Financial reporting consists of monthly insights into the effectiveness of spending coupled with performance analysis of the protocol.

• December has seen strong performance across all network reserves. Ethereum network V1/V2 revenue totals $2.26m. The Polygon Network experienced strong growth during December with revenue up 16.6% from November to $1.13m. With Aave V3 launching soon, the strong growth is expected to continue.

• The initial Treasury diversification proposal includes earning additional yield for the Aave and aToken holders. The proposal intends to deposit capital into the new Balancer Boosted Pool that deploys inactive liquidity into Aave V2 along with several Curve and Convex strategies.

• The Compound protocol is a set of globally accessible, open-source interest rate markets for Ethereum assets. The community is currently voting on the protocol's 82nd governance proposal, and since migrating to Governor Bravo, 30 were executed, 6 failed, and 4 were canceled. The most exciting of these proposals are B2DAO procurement models, where the protocol directly pays firms like Gauntlet to serve as the risk management expert and OpenZeppelin to serve as the security expert.

• Supply and borrow volumes on the Compound protocol have moved relatively in line with the price movements of the broader crypto market. Current supply volumes are at $13.4b from 299k unique suppliers and current borrow volumes are at $5.6b from 9k unique borrowers.

• USDC increased its dominance as the most popular borrowing market on Compound, making up 57% of the normalized gross borrow volume in January. This is up from 38.5% of the borrowing market in July of 2021 and mirrors the trend of USDC gaining significant market share in the stablecoin ecosystem.