CoinDesk Live: Inside the Ethereum Economy

Oct 6, 2020 at 15:40 UTCUpdated Oct 6, 2020 at 16:39 UTC

(Michaela/Unsplash, modified by CoinDesk)

CoinDesk Live: Inside the Ethereum Economy

Ethereum’s highly anticipated 2.0 upgrade is poised to bring the network ever closer to fulfilling its original vision to be a “world computer” that plays host to a parallel, decentralized financial system.

At invest: ethereum economy on Oct. 14, we will address the ramifications for investors as decentralized finance takes the crypto world by storm.

In a run-up to the event, our two-part CoinDesk Live: Inside the Ethereum Economy virtual miniseries on Oct. 8 and Oct. 12 introduces trending narratives we will break down at the main event: Why all the hype behind yield farming and food-inspired tokens? Should investors take them seriously or are they a fading trend?

DeGeneration: How Ethereum Is Making Finance Weird

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has made a pivot to what might be called Weird DeFi: a set of difficult-to-parse projects whose larger value to the ecosystem is suspect at best and whose community is at least 20% driven by inside jokes.

This created a new way to make money in crypto called yield farming. Then Yearn.Finance came along and dropped a smart-contract-governed robo-adviser for yield atop a lot of these projects, one that put users in control.

Imaginations then caught fire, leading to the oddly food-inspired birth of Weird DeFi, with its YAM, Spaghetti, Tendies and a side of Sushi.

CoinDesk senior business reporter Brady Dale hosts Priyanka Desai of Open Law and Mason Nystrom of Messari to assess the newest crazes sweeping the DeFi landscape.

Bitcoin’s $1 Billion Crop: Why Hodlers Are Harvesting Yield on Ethereum

For decentralized finance (DeFi), as in the heady days of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom of 2017, the numbers are only trending up, with some $2 billion in crypto assets locked into the market.

Crypto users are putting more value to work in DeFi applications, driven largely by the introduction of a whole new yield-generating pasture, Compound’s COMP governance token. Governance tokens are presenting fresh ways for DeFi founders to entice assets onto their platforms.

Whether it’s wBTC, renBTC or tBTC, tokenized bitcoin is the hottest thing on Ethereum right now. A phenomenon that hardly existed at the beginning of this year has pushed the total value locked in bitcoin past $1.3 billion.

CoinDesk markets reporter Zack Voell discusses the yield farming phenomenon with Matt Luongo of Thesis, Jeff Garzik of Bloq, Loong Wang of Ren Project and Kiarash Mosayeri of BitGo.