Finance Redefined: Acala wins Polkadot parachain, and Iota set to launch Shimmer, Nov. 12–19

Published at: Nov. 19, 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter.

Read on to discover why almost half of the liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 are losing capital due to impermanent loss.

What you’re about to read is the smaller version of this newsletter. For the full breakdown of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below.

Acala wins Polkadot’s debut parachain auction

Decentralized finance protocol Acala was announced as the winning project in Polkadot’s inaugural parachain auction this week, beating fellow competitor Moonbeam to the finish line with a seismic total of 32.5 million DOT ($1.28 billion) raised from 24,934 contributors.

Acala is a multi-functional DeFi platform built on Polkadot that enables developers to build smart contracts applications with cross-chain capabilities, as well as being compatible with Ethereum. Its top investors include Digital Currency Group, Polychain Capital and Alameda Research, among others.

In the case of Acala, all of the proceeds from the crowdloan initial coin offering are classified as “crypto debt” and, therefore, must be paid back by the project following the conclusion of the rental agreement.

With over 32M DOT contributed by over 81,000 community members, Acala has won the first parachain auction on @Polkadot! Thank you to everyone who took part in this historic event. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/CL2jCwA9Re

— Acala - DeFi Hub of Polkadot (@AcalaNetwork) November 18, 2021

Iota Foundation set to launch staging network and reward token

The Iota Foundation, an open-source, nonprofit entity endeavoring to support the Iota ecosystem, announced the upcoming launch of a staging network, Shimmer, this week alongside an accompanying token asset, SMR.

Shimmer is a layer-one sandbox platform that will enable builders and developers to test the efficiency and compatibility of their decentralized applications within the DeFi and NFT space, prior to deployment on the Iota mainnet.

Expected to launch in early-2022, the network will also facilitate community governance confirmations for Iota’s large-scale network upgrades, including the upcoming programmable multi-asset ledger, smart contracts, full decentralization and sharding.

Almost 50% of Uniswap v3 liquidity providers are in the red

A research report published this week by Topaz Blue and the Bancor Protocol revealed that almost half, 49.5%, of liquidity providers on Uniswap v3 have experienced financial losses due to impermanent loss, a common occurrence on automated market makers when supplying two-sided, volatile liquidity pairs.

An instance of this would arise if, for example, a user has supplied equal values of Tether (USDT) and Ether (ETH) in United States dollars to a liquidity pool and the price of ETH goes up.

This would mean that arbitrageurs — investors who often work in accordance with financial institutions to benefit from price discrepancies in the market — will remove ETH from the pool to sell at a higher price. This leads to a decrease in the U.S.-dollar value of the user’s position and, consequently, an impermanent loss.

The report suggested that, based upon current statistics, it may well be more profitable to simply hodl the market, as opposed to actively participating in liquidity services, stating:

“The user who decides to not provide liquidity can expect to grow the value of their portfolio at a faster rate than one who is actively managing a liquidity position on Uniswap v3.”

Token performances

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked has decreased 7.89% across the week to a figure of $160.47 billion.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization performed indifferently across the last seven days.

Avalanche (AVAX) secured the podium’s top spot with 30.11%. Curve DAO Token (CRV) came in second with 0.67%, while Maker (MKR) came third with 0.34%.

Analysis and hot topics from the last week:

Airdrop rumors result in a swarm of activity on MetaMask Swap and Polygon The power of cheap transactions: Can Solana’s growth outpace Ethereum?‘We want to build Minterest as a fairer financial system,’ says CEO Josh Rogers

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.