Kyber Ecosystem Report #17
Hello fellow Kyberians
It’s finally happened! On July 7th we launched the KyberDAO and the Katalyst upgrade and we’ve been truly humbled by the level of interest you’ve shown in participating and governing Kyber’s future. Off the bat a quarter of all circulating KNC, worth more than $80 million, was staked in the KyberDAO and in what we believe is an Ethereum-wide high, more than 2,500 of you cast your vote in epoch one to decide on how the collected network fees should be allocated and we thank you so much for this.
We get into more details on our launch below but July was also significant for Kyber’s on-chain activity as we recorded for the 11th consecutive month our highest number of total and new users while total volume reached a new monthly high of $275M. For context, our total volume for all of 2018 was $70M and $380M in 2019, Kyber is growing fast!
KyberDAO
The KyberDAO’s first order of business was to vote on how the network fees should be distributed between burning, rewarding, and rebating market makers (aka the BRR vote). With 2,580 votes in epoch one, the KyberDAO decided to:
- Burn 4.3% of the network fees (burnt in KNC)
- Reward 70% of the network fees to KNC stakers (reward in ETH)
- Rebate 25.7% of fees to FPR liquidity providers (rebate in ETH)
The community discussions during this voting process have been invaluable to us and we’ve written a blog post diving into the key governance insights we take away from this first BRR vote. And of course, don’t forget this vote happens every epoch (roughly two weeks) and you can vote for the latest BRR vote on Kyber.org.
Together with the launch of the KyberDAO we also announced a number of new avenues for staking participation and these expand on what we hope will turn into a vibrant and healthy KyberDAO ecosystem and community. These avenues also provide a cost effective way to participate in the KyberDAO since they can negate the need to pay the currently high Ethereum transaction fees to vote every epoch.
xToken’s xKNC
xToken’s novel new way of participating in the KyberDAO involves users staking their KNC to mint and receive xKNC. Two different xKNC token flavours represent minter’s staking and voting preferences with xKNCa always voting to increase stakers fees and xKNCb always voting to increase reserve rebates. Stakers are free to mint either one of these two xKNC tokens and can redeem their KNC and staking rewards at any time by burning their xKNC tokens. At redemption stakers end up receiving more KNC than the xKNC they hold since the KNC they receive has accrued the ETH staking reward since minting. You can read a great explanation of how it works here.
Binance
Binance announced support for KNC staking on its platform to allow its 100,000+ users who hold KNC to benefit from KyberDAO governance. All Binance KNC holders receive their staking rewards automatically without having to take any action and while at the moment Binance votes on whichever voting option is leading the vote towards the end of the voting epoch (so as not to change the outcome of the vote), in future Binance KNC holders will also be able to state their voting preferences. We welcome such large platforms taking an interest in decentralized governance mechanisms and representing their token holders.
Wallets, Exchanges, Dashboards,
Over the last few weeks we’ve also had a plethora of wallets, exchanges and DeFi platforms adding KyberDAO staking and voting functionality into their products. These include Enjin, Smart Valor, Midas, Status, imToken, Trust Wallet and Zerion amongst others. As we continue announcing new platforms and products that support staking please reach out to us if you’d like to build services around the KyberDAO, we’d love to support you.
Kyber Network Stats
We promise we’re not copy/pasting the same paragraph every month but as mentioned in the intro July has been another month where Kyber saw it’s highest number of total users, new users, and total volume in a month. Volumes increased 76% from $156M to $275M while we had our third month with over 100,000 transactions. We’re observing a broad increase in demand for token swapping across Ethereum as a whole and this definitely reflects in Kyber and other large liquidity providers’ volumes.
Adoption also continues to increase amongst crypto wallets and DeFi products, and coupled with increasing market volatility of the last few months, almost all DApps saw increases in their consumption of Kyber Network liquidity. 1inch.exchange now takes the first spot as the largest consumer of this liquidity while Trust Wallet, DeFi Saver and Kyber’s Android and iOS apps all had 50% to 200% month-on-month volume increases.
DeFi Updates
1inch.exchange has grown into the leading liquidity aggregator on Ethereum at the moment and recently surpassed the $1 billion cumulative volume mark which is very impressive for a project that we watched come to life only a year ago in May 2019 at the EthNewYork hackathon. DeFi Saver was another strong performer in July with its deep integration into the Maker ecosystem allowing it to boost and repay Maker CDPs.
MakerDAO Kyber Light Feed
Oracles are important infrastructure pieces on Ethereum as they bridge real world data (ie. market prices such as USD/ETH) with the Ethereum network where it is used by a wide range of dapps . Commonly used price oracles include MakerDAO’s Oracles & Feeds and Chainlink, and different oracle implementations come with different compromises and benefits and as part of MakerDAO’s efforts to further decentralize their price oracle system, Kyber along with Infura, Etherscan, and Gitcoin, will be joining the oracle system to act as a light price feeds. You can read further details here.
Insights into DeFi
The fast pace of innovation within DeFi can be hard to follow at times and as we build various infrastructure layers (liquidity provision, oracles, insurance, etc, etc), we’re seeing exciting new layers of services build on top of this infrastructure. We recently came across a great podcast episode between Parafi (we introduced them to you last month as investors and believers in KNC and Kyber’s mission) and Delphi Digital that dives into how this innovation is evolving, what kind of dapps are being built, and DeFi’s significance within the broader financial and social world and we highly recommend a listen.
Reserve and Token Metrics
July has been a busy month for reserves on Kyber with FPRs more than doubling their volumes month-on-month and APRs run by project teams showing double digit growth, while only the Oasis bridge reserve, QNT and 2Key with slight dips in volume.
Stablecoins continue to be the most swapped assets on Kyber while the increased appetite for project tokens continues with the top ten all showing double and triple digit month-on-month growth.
July’s New Tokens on Kyber Network
Compound [COMP] — Compound is an algorithmic interest rate protocol with COMP distributed to users to govern the protocol. Link
bZx Protocol [BZRX] — bZx is a protocol for tokenized margin trading and lending. BZRX captures protocol value through various mechanisms. Link
renBTC [renBTC] — RenVM is a decentralized custodian bringing Zcash, Bitcoin Cash and other blue-chip crypto assets to Ethereum. Link
V-ID [VIDT] — V-ID is a way of safely certifying and securing digital assets to reduce fraud and error. VIDT is used in file validation. Link
KNC Updates
KNC Earn Campaign
With its simple fiat-to-crypto on-ramps and 35 million users in over 100 countries, Coinbase is undeniably one of the leading companies pushing crypto adoption across the world. Their Earn.com initiative allows ordinary users to earn crypto while learning about crypto and their users can earn KNC while learning about Kyber. The three available lessons cover what Kyber is, what KNC is used for, and how Kyber powers DeFi and uses simple videos to demonstrate various concepts. You can participate and/or watch the videos here.
Kraken
European crypto users will be pleased to hear that Kraken, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Europe, announced they would be listing KNC on their platform. Their blog post highlights the emergence of DeFi as one of the biggest trends this year with its staggering growth over the last 12 months and we are happy to see an overall influx of exchanges listing KNC over the last 6 months. KNC is now available on over 50 different exchanges.
KyberWorld
In July you could have caught us diving into Kyber and the crypto space at the Crypto.com AMA and Brave New Coin Podcast with Loi, at the Chainlink AMA and Gains Associates AMA with Shane and Sunny, Finance Magnates Podcast and Multi.io interview with me, Deniz, and the Japanese Ethereum Birthday Event with Taisuke
In the upcoming months we’ll be participating in various online conferences including Chainlink’s Smart Contract Virtual Summit, Dystopia Lab’s Liquidity2020 Virtual Summit and Indonesia Blockchain Week.
In The Media
With the launch of Katalyst there’s been a flurry of media attention around the deployment of the upgraded contracts on the 7th of July as well as the ensuing BRR vote and we’ve been happy to see commentary on just how fast a significant portion of KNC has already been staked and voted with within the first epoch. Some articles we recommend are:
Cointelegraph — New Kyber Upgrade Deployed to the Ethereum Mainnet
CryptoBriefing — One Month In, Kyber Katalyst Sees Mass Community Buy-In
BeInCrypto — Kyber Network Becomes Latest DeFi Star as KNC Staking Surges
Messari — Kyber Long-Awaited Katalyst Goes Live as KNC Soars
CryptoSlate — Kyber Network Joins the DeFi Party With Katalyst Launch
Yahoo!Money — Stelian Balta - Bringing Innovation w/ Decentralized Projects
Other Articles: BeInCrypto(Turkish) CoinMarketCap, CryptoBriefing, CryptoNinjas, CryptoTicker, Decrypt Media, Definity Labs, DeFi Library (Turkish), DeFi Rate, DeFiRate (2), EthHub, Every Bit Helps, Messari, Operation Crypto, Simetri, UzmanCoin (Turkish)
Conclusion
This month we celebrate not only the KyberDAO’s birth, but Ethereum’s 5th birthday. Ethereum has been a special home for us since its inception and as it’s arguably grown into the largest smart contract platform with the most vibrant community in crypto, we’ve grown Kyber alongside it into one of the most used dapps on the platform. We look forward to celebrating many more successful milestones together with you the Kyber and Ethereum communities.🍻🍻
Kyber Photo Album
