This Week in DeFi: Panoptic Launches, Rango Exchange and more...
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Last week was a relatively chill week for DeFi launches, as it was a holiday week and a lot less going on.
Panoptic Mainnet Launch
That being said, I found Panoptic's mainnet launch quite meaningful. Panoptic is founded by Guillame Lambert, who wrote about Uni V3 positions being essentially perpetual options positions a few years back. Panoptic is the realization of that.
Because Uni v3 positions have properties of options, but are not exactly options themselves, Panoptic essentially is a layer on top of Uniswap that adds the tooling, and UI to create an options trading platform.
Panoptic targets Uniswap LPs, passive LPs, as well as options traders. It lets Uniswap LPs earn additional yield from options premiums. For options traders it provides a simplified options experience through perpetual options, and for passive "LPs" it allows them to provide assets to other users on the platform in exchange for yield without IL.
To me Panoptic is quite exciting because options are quite hard to trade, especially for retail. You have to not only consider where you think price is going, but when.
Perpetual options simplify this equation greatly by letting traders focus more on just price rather than time (there is still a time component but it is abstracted much more than with traditional options).
Rango Exchange
Rango exchange is a DEX that uses Wormhole and Mayan Finance to power cross chain swaps. This functionality is very similar to Uniswap, which has now integrated Across Protocol to power cross chain swaps, but in some ways its more powerful.
While Across is limited to L2s, Rango also swaps between L1s, allowing you to swap between say Arbitrum and Avalanche.
The other interesting part of this is the intent layer: the swaps are powered by Mayan Finance which is a cross chain auction protocol built on Solana. Each cross chain swap conducts an auction on Solana for the best quote, which fills the swap on Rango exchange.
While cross chain functionality has been around for a while, I really enjoy seeing progress like this because it moves us closer to a future where we really dont need to think about chains anymore.
Other Interesting Launches
- Sonic adds Sushiswap, deBridge, and Kyberswap
- Redotpay launches on Solana, enabling crypto to fiat payments
- more details in Last Week in DeFi
Major Updates
A pretty cool update from Metamask - users can now do swaps without gas on mainnet. Metamask will instead just use the token you're swapping to pay for gas.
This feature is limited to swaps in Metamask itself, so I'm probably not going to use it myself, but I do like that it exists. Gas on Mainnet is often expensive so for regular users this is a super useful feature.
Another interesting update is that Rabby wallet now supports Safe. I like Rabby a lot as it has much better transaction readability than Metamask. It also has a ton of security features like address whitelisting.
At Today in DeFi we also use Gnosis Safe internally, so we'll probably be trying this feature out. Gnosis Safe's internal transaction readability is mediocre at best so anything that makes what we're signing more legible (and safe) is very welcome.
Other Interesting Updates:
- IRS confirms crypto staking rewards are taxable
- Sonic announces upgraded tokenomics
- Inverse Finance introduces scrvUSD as sDOLA collateral on FiRM
- more details in Last Week in DeFi
Upcoming Launches
A few things we're looking forward to: Defi.app and Berachain launch.
DeFi.app is aiming to be a Defi "superapp". It's a no-seedphrase wallet that also supports leverage trading, swaps, and yield farming. IMO DeFi is still way too hard to use for normies, so this is a pretty welcome step towards mass adoption imo.
Berachain launching in "Q5": Berachain has been hyped since forever, so it's nice to see its launch potentially eminent. It doesnt seem to boast much new tech, but it does have a lot of DeFi partnerships, and its Proof of Liquidity mechanism means it may be worth paying attention to.
More interesting Upcoming events
- Wormhole DAO set to go live in Q1
- Securitize proposes to enable fiat redeem ability for frxUSD
- More details in Last Week in DeFi
Last week's airdrops: todayindefi.com/airdrops
Upcoming Events: Todayindefi.com/calendar
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