Why AscendEX is bullish on DeFi

By: Anthony Mandelli

Recently, decentralized finance (DeFi) captured the collective attention of the crypto industry. During the “DeFi Summer,” the success of projects like Compound and Yearn.Finance kicked off obsessions with liquidity mining and yield farming and brought millions of dollars into the sector. Now DeFi Summer may be over, but at AscendEX we’ve seen compelling evidence that decentralized finance has true longevity built on its fundamental value for users and blockchain technology development.

Here are three reasons why we’re still excited about DeFi:

1. Successes of DeFi projects listed on AscendEX

Some of the most successful new listings in 2020 on the AscendEX platform were DeFi projects. AscendEX became one of the most sought-after platforms for DeFi teams, collaborating with some of the year’s hottest projects like xDAI’s STAKE, Orion Protocol, and Thorchain.

xDai STAKE

Listed on AscendEX on April 29th with an initial price of $0.55, STAKE is trading at ~$10.14 at the time of writing, nearly 20x ROI for traders who established positions early.

Total value locked (TVL) in xDai has seen a substantial increase from ~$137,000 at the end of August 2020, to over $4.2 million at the end of November.

90-day TVL chart from DeFi Pulse

Orion

Orion protocol was listed on AscendEX on July 16, 2020. Within two hours of launch, over 1.2 million ORN were traded and the token reached nearly 7x of its opening price of $0.10. After achieving an ATH of $6.99 in August, the height of DeFi Summer, ORN’s current price of $1.71 (at the time of writing) still represents 17x ROI for early investors.

Snapshot of ORN performance from launch to T+9 from AscendEX Pro

Thorchain

AscendEX listed THORChain (RUNE) on September 22nd, 2019. By December that year, the price of RUNE increased by roughly 900%, making it a standout project in an otherwise unexciting market. The current price of ~$0.91 per RUNE, as of November 21, 2020, represented an ROI of >90x since the project’s launch on AscendEX.

RUNE/USDT chart from launch through the end of 2019 from AscendEX Pro

2. Growth of users taking advantage of DeFi products

AscendEX Staking and Yield Farming were introduced to benefit both a project’s ecosystem and AscendEX traders. These products offer our users exposure to the higher returns with some of the crypto industry’s most sophisticated financial instruments, while at the same time allowing them to invest in the growth and governance of these protocols.

AscendEX Staking

On May 5th, AscendEX hosted a “pre-staking” program for xDai STAKE where participating users could earn an estimated 35.4% APR. After the launch of pre-staking, STAKE price saw gains of over 500% and over 450,000 tokens delegated, all within 72 hours of launch.

STAKE/USDT chart from AscendEX Pro

Orion Protocol introduced a pre-staking program for ORN, offering users an estimated 39% APR, to similar results:

ORN/USDT chart from AscendEX Pro

THORChain introduced RuneVault, a staking interface available to AscendEX users that allows RUNE holders to stake RUNE for weekly rewards. Within three months of launch, over 80% of the total supply of RUNE was staked with RuneVault.

AscendEX Yield Farming

In September 2020, AscendEX introduced the Yield Farming product. Yield farming is a process designed to maximize return on capital by leveraging different DeFi protocols for lending, borrowing, liquidity mining, or other derivatives. As one of the newest investment products on the platform, AscendEX Yield Farming was launched with CURVE/USDT liquidity mining and has expanded to include HARD/USDX and HARD/HARD.

Yield Farming is a technical, resource-intensive process. Intelligently identifying and acting on profitable yield farming opportunities requires extensive interactions with smart contracts, coding experience, and deep familiarity with blockchain infrastructure. Every action involved in yield farming as an individual (“approve”, “deposit”, “claim rewards”) involves gas fees paid on the relevant DeFi network, cutting into the user’s profits. To create the smoothest user experience possible, AscendEX seamlessly integrates with the DeFi backends to offer a simple, “one-click” interface and covers all of our users’ gas fees.

3. Investing in DeFi is investing in Crypto

While DeFi may have gone through a bubble, the strong projects and the solid token economic models that incentivize liquidity are here to stay.

Ultimately, DeFi and centralized finance (CeFi) need each other to coexist and thrive. While CeFi will resonate with sophisticated institutions and DeFi with tech-savvy crypto traders, DeFi needs the efficiency of centralized fiat on-ramps to maintain the influx of new capital just as much as centralized platforms can benefit from the rapid pace of innovation and exciting new primitives that come from DeFi projects.

AscendEX is working to bring value to the cryptocurrency industry through the strategic buildout of the kind of sophisticated financial products the experienced traders and institutions look for. This strategy is directly inspired by traditional equities markets where exchanges are designed as gatekeepers for the secondary trading markets and functioned to provide and maintain a fair and orderly marketplace for both institutional and retailer users.  AscendEX aims to have the robust trading infrastructure and comprehensive range of trading products in the secondary market to facilitate successful go-to-market strategies for new projects.

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Put your crypto to work! Visit AscendEX online to learn more about our staking, yield farming, and other innovative investment products that help our traders maximize return on their capital.