Archives for September 28, 2020

Daily transactions on the Ethereum network have oscillated considerably over the last few years. February 2018 was the last time that Ethereum was posting numbers of over one million transactions every 24 hours. Despite its variability, Ethereum’s network has maintained an impressive level of activity consistently for the last few years, firmly entrenching the digital currency as Bitcoin’s trusty sidekick. However, in the past few months, Ethereum transactions have skyrocketed thanks to decentralized finance (DeFi) yield farming. So much so that the number of transactions performed daily on the network has rivaled that of its 2018 performance, boasting over 1.2 million Ethereum transactions per day. Ladies and gentlemen, we have again reached phase Ethereum 1 million!

Yield farming is the latest craze in crypto and is the key reason behind the DeFi explosion going on right now, So what exactly is it? Well, yield farming entails lending crypto to earn more crypto. It is a break from the past where to make money in crypto, you either had to HODL or trade on price movements speculation. Essentially, a yield farmer will look for DeFi pools that offer the highest lending rates and lend with the aim of maximizing their crypto holding as much as possible.

As DeFi is on the rise, the demands to integrate Bitcoin and Ethereum into this ecosystem have been growing. These major cryptocurrencies would bring large liquidity and momentum into DeFi. However, decentralized finance is based on the Ethereum platform, and most of the DeFi assets are ERC20 tokens — which BTC and ETH are not compatible with.

Wrapped tokens solve this problem by bringing major cryptocurrencies to the Ethereum network. Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), Wrapped Ethereum (wETH), and dozens of other wrapped tokens allow for operations with tokenized BTC and ETH on Ethereum. These tokens are backed by the underlying cryptos’ price which makes them their complete ERC-20 doubles.