Top of mind at Shipyard

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The exploits have been coming thick and fast recently. Within the past month we’ve seen Compound lose $147 million, Cream Finance lose $130 million, and Indexed Finance lose $16 million.

We can’t help but notice that the postmortems, while informative, address the specific bugs and vulnerabilities rather than explore the flawed development processes that allowed these bugs and vulnerabilities to enter production.

We are all for experimentation, but we can’t let that become an excuse to avoid the elephant in the room - traditional approaches to software development like agile and waterfall don’t work in the immutable and adversarial blockchain environment. If we keep treating exploits like failed experiments rather than process problems, we risk meeting Einstein’s definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Insofar as we see the same types of exploits over and over again, it’s a sign we developers may be acting insane. Instead, crypto needs a new development paradigm. Here’s our deep-dive into why this is the problem we all need to solve.

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DEX headlines that caught our attention

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• 0x’s API is now live on Fantom.
• SlingShot Finance releases Trollbox in a bid to socialize crypto trading.
• Curve Finance launches Avalanche (AVAX).
• Harmony Protocol (ONE) releases its mainnet, with state sharding & instant finality.
• SushiSwap takes DeFi mobile in partnership with Celo’s DeFi for the People initiative.
• Shell Protocol unveils Proteus, the new AMM engine powering Shell Protocol v2
• Kyber Network launches a new swap feature for KyberDMM
• Balancer Labs releases its long-awaited Balancer-Gnosis-Protocol.
• Uniswap Protocol passed $500B  in total trading volume since its November 2018 launch.
• WOO Network launches WOOFi Swap on Binance Smart Chain.

What we're reading‍

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Decentralized exchanges with specialized designs are beginning to catch on, with the Integral exchange taking the opposite approach to Clipper and catering to DeFi whales.

SushiSwap recently increased liquidity mining efficiency 5x and added $300M daily volume with the help of Gauntlet optimizations to its rewards strategy. Protocols are starting to take a hard look at token excesses in a sign of maturity for liquidity mining programs.

a16z recently published A Legal Framework for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, which takes a look at the legal issues facing DAOs and proposes using Unincorporated Nonprofit Associations (UNA) as an entity structure as a solution in the US.

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Clipper project updates

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• What to expect from Clipper’s upcoming integration with Polygon.
• Some updates on Clipper’s recent integration with 0x.
• A full debrief of Clipper’ first community liquidity program launch.
• An early look at Clipper’s new ambassador program.

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Enjoy your DeFi journey,

The Shipyard Team

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