🟪 PolyPulse: Liquid staking unlocks on Polygon!
And find out if you are eligible for Meshswap airdrop.
Howdy family!
Welcome to Poly Pulse - your guide to staying up-to-date on the latest trends in the Polygon DeFi ecosystem.
This newsletter breaks down top stories, developments, updates, and trends from the last week of April 2022 and first week of May 2022.
As the first quarter ended, various data sources like Nansen and Dune Analytics have highlighted the dominance of Polygon.
Nansen published their quarterly report for the first quarter of 2022 highlighting the absolute daily active addresses (DAU) to be holding over 400K on a 1,7 and 30-day average with the total users over the three different time frames of:
1 Day: 369K
7 Day: 992K
30 Day: 2240K
They also highlighted the Ethereum vs Polygon transaction count where it shows a stable range of 200-300% more than Ethereum, portraying a more mature behavior of its mean transaction count relative to Ethereum.
You can read more about the report here.
Alchemy, a leading web3 dev platform also highlighted the number of dApps running on Polygon crossed over 19,000, a six fold increase from 3000 in October 2021.
Talking about the weekly statistics, the weekly average users (WAU) compared to the fourth week of April, 2022, increased by 9% to 381K users. Pegaxy (77k), QuickSwap (74k), Metamask (49k) and Arc8 (43k), lead the way. New entrants under top performers in the past week were 0vixProtocol (10k), deBridge (6.6k), and The Farm House (5.8k).
Another good thread to read about the number of active users on Polygon:
📖 Also Read
Liquid Staking on Polygon
For all PoS (proof-of-stake) networks, security is paramount. Moving away from PoW (proof-of-work), PoS helps secure the network by relying on the capital that is “locked” up within the network. This is done by network participants, who get rewards from network inflation for committing their capital. This has two benefits:
A rational, profit-seeking network participant can extract sustainable rewards from network inflation for as long as their capital is “locked” up.
The PoS network remains secure as the amount of staked capital increases.
But a critical problem arises against the backdrop of the emerging DeFi ecosystem. For any profit-seeking agent, it’s all about the “yield”. Yields from DeFi and from staking can compete with each other, which results in users diverting their capital where it’s more lucrative. This problem gets further aggravated by the illiquidity of staked assets (PoS networks don’t issue on-chain synthetic derivatives that can be used in DeFi) and the incurred opportunity cost during the unbonding period.
Liquid staking unlocks the liquidity of these staked assets by issuing synthetic value-accruing liquid-staked tokens. These tokens represent the staked capital within the network and users have the freedom to use them in DeFi.
Thus, the liquid staking protocols not only helps in ensuring that users get sustainable yield (regardless of the prevailing market conditions) from network inflation in PoS networks, but it also helps them compound their yield by putting the value-accruing tokens to further use.
Currently there are four staking platforms namely Stader, Claystack, Lido and Ankr. For users who wanted to stake their MATIC on the Polygon chain without going to the main chain and spending high gas fees, this is now the solution available on Claystack and Stader. Lido and Ankr are working on enabling it on Polygon.
Disclaimer: Claystack, Stader, Ankr and Lido are audited. However, staking strategies entail protocol risks, market risks, smart contract risks, and more. Treat this strategy as experimental, and never deposit more money than you can afford to lose.
With the April month ending, the grants for the month of April’ 2022 have been disbursed by the DAO. Key updates for the last week of April are:
Project Acceptance: The May submissions of the grants are open. If you are a project building on Polygon, you can go ahead and submit your proposals.
Village talks: Consensys had a great session explaining how Infura can help projects with connecting to the blockchains of the world and how they can help improve projects transaction handling.
Educational session: CertiK will join the forum on the educational session of Village talks and help projects understand the nuances of audit in the web3 space.
If you are a project and want to apply for a grant or need more details on application for grants/ vouchers or partner with Polygon DAO, click here.
Farm on Algebra DEX.
Gamma launches new pairs for actively managing Uniswap V3 positions on Polygon.
The second epoch of Liquidity Mining 2.0 went live with 7 new dApps added to the existing list of 28 dApps.
Gains network begins fully on-chain leveraged trading for major US Stocks like Apple, Google and Facebook.
Claim your Meshswap airdrop here! Not sure what a PolyScore is? Read our past edition where we explained how it works and how to build yours.
What would be different in the summer of DeFi 2022:
DeFi advocates have every reason to believe that in 2022, a 'DeFi summer' - a period of unprecedented market expansion – will occur as DeFi innovators finally succeed in drawing mainstream customers into the DeFi ecosystem. Here are some of the things to focus on:
New Narrative: Every DeFi summer brings new narratives, and according to me, this one could point me more towards structured products and options markets. Keep a lookout.
Smarter Scams: With the evolving space, the scams and rugpulls are increasing even more. Reviewing a solution's whitepaper to learn more about its value-add and technical viability may be a beneficial first step to ensure you don’t lose all your money to hype.
DeFi will be more monitored: With the DeFi space evolving, so are the tracking and regulatory tools to help the lawmakers track movement of DeFi, so try not to hide your income and pay your taxes properly- Aishwary Gupta (Strategy/Marketing Lead at Polygon DeFi & Community Lead at DeFi Pulse).
Disclaimer:
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