Spencer Noon, an investor in Variant, a first-check cryptocurrency venture capital fund, has released their latest Network report, which covers stablecoins and Instadapp.
Spencer Noon notes in their weekly update that The Graph recently launched 43 RFPs for different ecosystem initiatives. You may submit an application today in order to potentially receive a grant. As noted in the report, the Aave community has allocated $1 million per quarter to Aave Grants DAO. The program currently live to applicants.
In other DeFi news, Yield Protocol is currently hiring for a Go To Market Lead. Projects in the crypto space are also hiring for engineering, community, product, and design roles.
Analysts working with Spencer Noon noted that the stablecoin market cap recently surpassed $111 billion, as it now “makes up 7.7% of the total crypto market cap.” YTD stablecoin market cap growth “is 3.7x, far outpacing the total YTD crypto market cap growth of 1.9x,” the report noted.
As mentioned in the update:
“Breaking that down further, USDT continues to dominate with $62.9B outstanding supply (58.56% market share), while USDC ($25.3B, 23.62%) is not far behind. Algo-stables are also now a sizable category, comprising of ~8% of the total stablecoin market cap. This has been driven by promising new projects like TerraUSD, Fei, Liquity and Frax, all of whom have experienced explosive growth this year.”
Spencer Noon also noted that their team has observed a key trend where cryptocurrency investors tend “to flood into stables in the aftermath of market crashes.” As explained in the report, the digital assets market activity is driven by the “massive crash in May,” which led to the combined market share of USDC and USDT “reaching 7% as a percentage of total crypto market cap, up from 3%.” As confirmed in the update, this was “an all time high, surpassing peaks post-Mar ‘20 and post-DeFi summer.”
The report pointed out that Ethereum has the “largest piece of the stablecoin pie, with $73.4 billion of the $111 billion outstanding supply issued on its blockchain.”
When analyzing key trends and data in terms of protocols, we can see that for lending/borrowing, Aave v2 TVL has $6.73B worth of stablecoins, meanwhile, for decentralized or non-custodial exchanges (DEXes), Curve.fi is now a stablecoin DEX “capturing $3B in stables.”
Going to on comment on yield aggregators, the report from Spencer Noon noted that Yearn has $1.13B of stables currently on its platform. DeFi project Instadapp is now ranked #3 in terms of total value locked or TVL at $6.51B.
The report added:
“Instadapp now has over $6.5B in assets under management and is currently ranked as the 3rd largest dapp by TVL. Instadapp has facilitated more than $12B in flashloan volume; this includes its use in Multi-Protocol Refinancing, Leveraging, Collateral and Debt Swaps. A smaller portion of this volume was 30m of combined assets and liabilities migrating across chain from AAVE v2 to AAVE-Polygon.”
The report also mentioned that Instadapp recently launched its own protocol governance token, called $INST. As a requirement to receive it, users “needed to upgrade their accounts to the latest version,” the report added while noting that in only two weeks, more than 30% of all TVL on Instadapp has “migrated to the upgraded accounts.”
