The market dip has hit DeFi tokens particularly hard. @cryptopigmedia noted that the biggest loser to date is Curve Finance, whose CRV token has dropped 93% since its peak.
“DeFi darling” Yearn Finance hasn’t faired much better, with the YFI token losing 61% from its $44,183 high.
Defi Death Mission pic.twitter.com/UvGP8OcLqu
— Cryptopig 🐷 (Gem hunter & trader) (@cryptopigmedia) October 4, 2020
Despite that, and the subsequent fall in yields, Nicolás Arqueros, CTO at EMURGO, believes this is a temporary setback. Drawing on the example of the tech bubble at the turn of the century, he sees DeFi recovering.
“most of the technologies, sometimes they can start like… they can be too hot and turn into a bubble. But, for example, we have the bubble in the 2000s with all the tech companies, and we saw that Amazon was a bubble at that point. Yes, at that point it was a bubble, but now the value and the price in the stock market even higher.”
With that in mind, EMURGO is continuing unphased in its development of DeFi on the Cardano chain.
Cardano Looking to Improve on Ethereum
Ethereum, as the biggest provider of DeFi services, is the platform every blockchain wants to emulate.
But Arqueros states that EMURGO has examined what Ethereum does and built a smart contract framework which he believes is superior.
UTXOs refers to a transaction output that can be used as input in a new transaction. Under this model, the UTXO defines where each blockchain transaction starts and finishes. This contrasts with the account/balance model employed by Ethereum.
Arqueros expands on how the UTXO model will run on Cardano by saying:
“we’re avoiding most of the unncessary operations on the chain. For example, you no longer have to interact with that many smart contracts. Instead what you can do is verify that information was signed by some specific private key after the usage of its public key.”
He also mentions that scalability is much easier to achieve on Cardano, due to the parallel UTXO architecture employed. The upshot of this is cheaper and faster transactions.
“UTXO is like a better way to play nice with other technologies that we see as required for a blockchain to scale up.”
Not only that, but during the interview, Arqueros also spoke of cheaper on-ramping into stablecoins, developing a network of oracle providers, and perhaps most pertinently, encouraging decentralized exchanges.
“[on decentralized exchanges] definately we want to have a few on Cardano, and we multiple organizations working on multiple proposals… you can expect to see most of the same applications that you see on Ethereum and other blockchains.”
Given the frustrations of using the Ethereum blockchain, some projects are looking to port over to Cardano. SingularityNET was the first big name to action a move away from Ethereum.
But the question is, will developments at Cardano see a mass exodus from Ethereum?
Arqueros said that Cardano has been in contact with a number of developers looking to port over. However, he remained tight-lipped on specific names.
Cardano ADA daily chart YTD with volume. (Source: tradingview.com)