GM, this is your Daily Bolt briefing.
In this edition, we’re keeping you posted on two of the primary natives circulating in DeFi:
Hear Raft Finance’s latest updates and plans from the LST lending protocol’s recent AMA.
Gain some insight on the state of adoption on Starknet, from team members at JediSwap and zkLend.
Stay sharp in the markets ⬇️
1/ Raft Twitter Spaces - Raft AMA Session
Preview: The Raft team answers different questions from the community. Click here to listen to the full episode (42 mins).
Read our Note (10 mins) and save 32 mins.
Here are some key takeaways:
Raft is an immutable and decentralized lending protocol where users can take out USD-denominated loans against their staked ETH.
David Garai explains that Raft is a DeFi protocol that allows the generation of a stablecoin, R, through capital-efficient, interest-bearing collateral. Users can use tokens like stETH (and soon, other forms of tokens) on Raft to generate the R, a USD stablecoin, by locking into Raft's contracts and paying a one-time fee. He highlights that Raft is designed to help users easily and efficiently leverage their collateral, such as stETH.
Q: What is the current development status of Raft and what are Raft's main goals in 2023 and 2024?
David Garai explains that Raft is already deployed with $55 million TVL (DeFiLlama Raft TVL). They're currently working on adding other types of collateral and launching governance. Raft’s goals for 2024 depend on how the sector evolves.
Q: Who are Raft's strategic partners and investors? What benefits do the Raft users and Raft get from those relationships/partners?
David Garai directs listeners to Raft's website Raft.fi for a full list of VCs. He highlights the advantage of having three market makers (Lemniscap, Wintermute, Jump Crypto) as investors, which will be useful in building liquidity on various platforms.
Q: How is the Raft team going to act in the bear market and some critical situations like a black swan event?
David Garai responds that the question probably relates to the selection of the correct protocol, collateralization requirements, and other fees to ensure the protocol's solvency during intense market fluctuations.
He mentions that the liquidation fees on Raft are very high, providing a strong incentive for people to liquidate any position that falls below the 120% collateralization requirement. With all the liquidation being instant and all the rewards going to the liquidators, they ensure that Raft remains solvent and R remains backed by at least $1 of stETH at all times.
Q: What is the plan for cross-chain usage of $R?
Richard answers that as part of Raft’s mission to make $R the stablecoin of choice within the decentralized ecosystem, they're exploring and assessing the risks of bringing their asset onto other chains.
Q: What measures does the Raft team take to comply and prevent legal risks for its holders?
Dhruv highlights the importance of users being aware of their local laws and regulations, adding that as a decentralized stablecoin currently backed by $stETH, they don't face the centralization risks typically associated with fiat-backed stablecoins.
2/ Blockbytes - The Future of DeFi on Starknet! zkLend and JediSwap AMA
Preview: Stephen and Sunand introduce Sommelier, and discuss the state of Liquid Staking Tokens, Lido’s share across the ecosystem. Click here to listen to the full episode (58 mins).
Read our Note (7 mins) and save 51 mins.
Here are some key takeaways:
Jane shares that zkLend is striving to offer a straightforward, secure, and efficient money market for user liquidity needs on top of zk-Rollup networks. They have two products: zkLend (Artemis), a DeFi permissionless protocol for all users, and zkLend Institutional (Apollo), catering to institutions with access to capital in an under-collateralized manner.
Rohit is a builder who joined the crypto world in 2017. He's now working on JediSwap, a community that wants to make Web3, especially DeFi, available to everyone worldwide. JediSwap is an AMM on Starknet, chosen for its improved user experience, lower transaction fees, and easier onboarding to Web3.
Corval talks about Starknet, which is a decentralized system that works as an extra layer on Ethereum. He mentions that Starknet currently faces issues like expensive fees and slower processing than other systems, and asks Rohit why they picked Starknet for Jediswap.
Rohit explains their initial start on Ethereum to make DeFi applications more accessible but found the gas fees too high for small transactions. They then moved to Polygon which resolved cost issues but led to centralization problems. After exploring rollup ecosystems and starting with Arbitrum, they were attracted to ZK-rollups and chose Starknet due to Starknet team's reputation and their approach that allows for building a variety of applications, not just limited to EVM.
Jane breaks down her challenges in Starknet’s adoption into three parts:
She first mentions the scalability issue, saying that it's difficult for Starknet to scale effectively at this point in time due to high transaction times and low TPS (Transactions Per Second). She mentions issues with Starknet's gas fees being inherently tied to Layer-1 gas fees.
Jane talks about the theoretical foundation of Starknet, saying that the team is very theoretical, and they have a deep understanding of the theoretical aspects of scalability, provers, and sequencers. She suggests that the team struggles with the practical implementation of these theories.
Jane identifies the lack of an ecosystem in Starknet. She points out that there isn't enough variety in use cases or applications to attract users to the protocol.
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