Week in review
Curve Finance $CRV’s controversial launch
On 14th August 2020, Curve Finance ($CRV) was suddenly launched by an anonymous developer known as “OxChad”. Even the Curve Finance team was completely caught by surprise and initially scrambled to shut down others who were posting about the launch on Twitter. They also rushed to verify that the contract deployed by the developer had the same code and had nothing malicious in the contracts.
Finally, Curve had “no choice but to adopt it” and declare it as their official token launch. This did not sit well with the cryptocurrency community, particularly since in the hours between that developer launching $CRV and the Curve team declaring the launch, 80,000 CRV tokens were already mined by some daring farmers. This led many to complain that those miners got an unfair advantage since the Curve team had previously announced there would be 24 hours between the contract being deployed and the first token being issued.
Whilst this launch was highly problematic and damaging for Curve Finance’s reputation, long-term it is unlikely to affect the Company. In fact, after the launch, other farmers raced to put liquidity into the protocol, and currently, over $1 billion is locked in Curve Finance. It is the third-ever DeFi project to achieve this, after Maker and Aave. Curve Finance prices soared to over $50 at the first few hours of launch but crashed to below $4 as yield farmers immediately sold their $CRV tokens to maximise on their ROI. And it is unlikely that farmers will continue to sell their crops as soon as it is harvested, so those buying $CRV on the market need to be extremely careful.
SKALE auction delayed
SKALE Network was founded in 2018 as a blockchain scalability platform that provides high-speed consensus and empowers dApps to run smart contracts. This will help Ethereum Dapp developers by providing a Layer 2 platform with high speeds, fast finality and most importantly, at low cost.
SKALE Network’s SKALE token ($SKL) was supposed to be available for purchase through a 3-day Dutch auction starting from 17th August 2020. However, mere hours before the start of the auction SKALE announced the auction would be delayed due to “overwhelming amount of traffic”. This is likely from the waves of people rushing to complete the KYC process so as to be eligible to participate in the auction. As of 19th August 2020, there has not been any announcement on the date and time of the postponed auction. Though so far, people don’t seem to be that disappointed (probably because they were also waiting to pass the KYC process) and are eagerly waiting for further updates. So if you are interested in joining the auction, you may want to complete the KYC process ASAP.
Yam Finance is not giving up!
Yam Finance ($YAM) caused a huge stir last week when it rallied fellow farmers to “save yam”. Although there was enough support from farmers, it was found that the bug would interact with the governance module and prevent the governance proposal from succeeding. So $YAM can no longer be modified by governance and on a technical level, it will behave in a way similar to other rebasing assets such as Ampleforth ($AMPL).
But YAM is not giving up! The old $YAM will be migrated to a new version of $YAM, which will be a fully audited version of the YAM protocol. Currently, Peckshield Inc has audited the migration contract and reported it to be a success and any “low” or “informational” issues have been resolved. Yam Finance has deployed the migration contract which enables $YAM holders to migrate to the new version. But $YAM holders will only have 72 hours to complete the migration process i.e. until 22nd August 2020 at 4:20pm (UTC). After such time, YAM v1 tokens will no longer be eligible for migration. So pack up your $YAM bags and GET MOVING!
Details on how to migrate can be found here.
Polkadot $DOT launch and redenomination
Polkadot ($DOT) allows communications across chains and interoperability so blockchain networks can operate together seamlessly as an ecosystem. The project is made famous because it is founded by Gavin Wood- one of the Co-creators of Ethereum. Polkadot is also one of the most hyped projects in the Chinese cryptocurrency community. We recently swapped notes with a Chinese fund manager who’s highly active in the Chinese crypto community, here’s what she says about the hottest blockchain projects in China now.
Polkadot finally launched on 18th August 2020 so it is now transferable but there is a pending redenomination of $DOT which will occur on 21st August 2020. There are 2 versions of $DOT available on the market, the new version of $DOT is 100x smaller than the old $DOT. Most exchanges such as Binance or Kraken will automatically multiply users’ DOT deposits after the redenomination, i.e. if you deposited 10 old $DOT before the redenomination, you will automatically be credited with 1,000 new $DOT after the redenomination. And to protect users in anticipation of this, users will not be able to withdraw new $DOT until after the redenomination.
In the meantime, bear in mind that some exchanges e.g. OKEx, MXC etc. offer trading pairs in OLD $DOT, whereas others e.g. Binance and Kraken offer trading pairs in NEW $DOT. So don’t be that guy we’ve seen on Twitter who paid $50 for new $DOT, which should only be worth $3. $DOT holders and traders should check with the exchange they are trading on to see what their policies are for $DOT.
Upcoming events
“End of this week”: SKALE Labs will announce their postponed auction time and date.
21st Aug 2020 at approx. 13:15 (UTC): $DOT redenomination day. Polkadot will change the denomination of the $DOT token such that the old $DOT will be divided into 100 new $DOT.
21st Aug 2020 at 16:00 (UTC): VIMworld early access public launch. VIMworld will also be having a sale on its VIMs.
22nd August 2020 at 16:20 (UTC): Deadline for migration to YAM 2.0.
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