Hi @scottnik8 thank you for your kind words I really appreciate it 
I do almost full time study in the field of DeFi and get my brain fried constantly ā¦ when this happens it means you need to press on it is like fitness but then for your brain 
Keep learning and lets all try to create a system where we can take back our own financial freedom!
Amazing man keep up the good work
Found an interesting article on Liquality
Theyāre kinda like Uniswap, but use atomic swaps to achieve cross chain direct peer-to-peer exchanges. Even better they drink their own kool-aid to monetize by participating in the network as a market maker instead of charging transaction fees.
I agree with Amadeo, this will not be a āone coin (or protocol) to rule them allā scenario. Interoperability is the name of the game. There will be many chains and protocols all working together, each specializing in itās own niche. But weāll need to be careful:
The analogy often used in DeFi is money legos, but maybe in some scenarios, what is being built is money Jenga
Original Post:
While I continue to look for new-ish building blocks in the DeFi space as per the assignment, how about older ones with interesting recent developments?
Looks like 99% of itās locked DAI was withdrawn a couple weeks ago- from 41k to just 200!. Did a search for news but didnāt really find anything negative. Anyone know what happened to them?
Hi @amadeobrands!
Love the course so far. Just wanted to correct a point I noticed in the Decentralized Synthetics - UMA, Synthetix, Maker DAO video.
You mention that in Synthetix you could be liquidated and lose all your collateral if you become undercollateralized, however, this is not the case as it is with MakerDAO and many other collateralization designs in DeFi.
If you become undercollateralized in Synthetix, you simply cannot reclaim your collateral or claim rewards for staking. Once you are above the collateralization ratio again, you will receive a penalty fee upon claiming fee rewards.
Iāve been undercollateralized in Synthetix before and did not lose my collateral as a result. This was a major concern for me prior to staking my SNX due to the higher volatility in synths.
Iām definitely enjoying the course. Iām excited to implement the insurance on my personal deFi positions, especially when the interest rates go back up. During this time of low interest rates Iāve been looking into the expanding DAI holdings into DGX (token backed by 1g of gold), because it can be quickly swapped on many decentralized exchanges such as Kyber, and even inside Myetherwalletās swap section.
xDAI is super interesting.
Aldo it does not really work well 
So room for a new commer ā¦
xDAI is basicly DAI with 0-Conf meaning that I can send you DAI and you will have it in your wallet in -1 sec ā¦ it runs via the PAO network ā¦ this consstruction is a bit like money Jenga 
but there are now many alternatives popping up.
I personally still have some xDAI
Let me show you.
It still seems to work.
And here I bridge back to xDAI https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6f3696974650a4e61d41dbf3f00e90b207091cc3233380f7e090dccab2d34ad8
Maybe I do something wrong but once I have my xDAI ā¦ then how can I explore this?
See here a full article: https://medium.com/gitcoin/ethereum-in-emerging-economies-b235f8dac2f2
How can I explore my xDAI balance on the POA network ??? https://blockscout.com/
Let me know and I will send you some xDAI
@Jshanks21 you are %100 right.
Thank you for correcting I will make a side note to this in the course notes.
I think the Synthetix system is amazing but I do question in a fall out like we saw at Maker how would that work? In my view you can get a situation where not only some vaults have issues but the whole system will collapse?
Very interesting experiments.
I have already learned so much new things about the defi world from this course and the forum comments!
Thanks alot!
The FSB, in no small terms, has recommended that central banks āBANā the use of stablecoins.
If you go and read between the lines, the FSBāS recommendations get really, really dark. Let me break it down for you.
Countries with membership in G20 will rarely ever employ the word āban.ā Itās just bad optics. So, instead, what we do in the free world is we regulate an industry we donāt likeā¦to death. Sure, semantically, itās not a ban, but it does the same thing. And thatās sort of what the FSB has effectively recommended.
For every centralized stablecoin, like Tether, for instance, they would need to apply for a license in every single country where they are doing business. The recommendations also indicate that these companies would also need to be open to the constant supervision of its operations.
Can anyone give me some more insight in this situation and what do you guyz think will pop from this?
Is this really a possibility?
Leave the link to fsb so you can check what iām rambling about.
Thanks and enjoy your day fellas 
@amadeobrands I completely agree. Very interesting.
In such a scenario, I would imagine the worst case for stakers is that they would be unable to reclaim their collateral or collect rewards until above the C-ratio. In an extreme case, this would require stakers to purchase more SNX to add to their supply or burn their previously minted sUSD to eliminate their ādebtā (could also purchase sUSD from the market to burn).
Now the way the debt is distributed throughout the system is where it would be interesting to see things unfold. As I understand it, every staker shares a percentage of the total debt in the system. Their percentage is set when they mint sUSD, by staking SNX. When the value of sUSD increases or decreases relative to other synths, your debt is a constant percentage.
In the example they describe below, this suggests your debt increases relative to the value of assets compared to sUSD. To be honest, I donāt have a comprehensive understanding of this in action as itās an unfamiliar dynamic to me, and I havenāt spent too much time studying it yet.
However, if my understanding is correct, a fall out could actually be a great deal for a staker to either buy more SNX to mint sUSD in order to lock in a debt percentage while the sUSD value is low compared to other synths. Assuming prices recover and more stakers return, I believe you could unstake your SNX by burning less sUSD resulting in some profit.
Alternatively, this may seem like a good time to simply unstake altogether as your debt amount would seem less than the original amount you took on when minting sUSD. However, I believe this would result in a loss even though it seems like āless debt to pay offā.
A whole separate factor to consider is the role synths could play when we see the FSB recommendations enforced. Unsure how things will unfold, but a derivative, or synth, may not face the same immediate regulation. Perhaps a convertible sDAI could be used?
Love to hear your thoughts! As you mention in the course, still a lot to learn and I may be overlooking some aspects of the system.
See here my comments on this āStabel coin banā I think it is not as extreme as you think you just wane see what happens and pumping in some fear into the market.
What I do not understand in most of these projects including maker DAO ā¦ is that for all these scenarios they must have done back-testing ā¦ I wanna see all those models and potential scenarios modeled out and in data ā¦
Why are projects not doing back testing?
I know it is hard but with those budgets if you hire lets say to senior data wizards you can get it done in 1-2 months.
What is happening in the defi insurance? I do not really understand why defi interest rates are so low now. I understand that using opyn to insure my staking now would mean 0 interest rate, luckily canāt go negative. Nexusmutual.io is gone 404, exit scammed?
G morning Guyz. Interesting perspective Amadeo, and I must say I thought about it too.
Nevertheless it kinda scares me. Also what China is doing lately, without letting any press know about it, scares me as well. They are becoming the states 2.0, building military bases all over. (when they said they wouldnāt do it) that president is getting between my tooth.
I really do not want a totalitarianism and think we must now, more than ever, educate more and more people about the possibilities and what self sovereignty can bring for the good in humankind. For that, eternal grateful for your work Amadeo
Now, back to defi course!! 
Have a great day all of you
VouchForMe is a very interesting platform for decentralised insurance. Great way to reduce premiums
I think algorand has a great vision and great technology. Weāll see where it goes.
When I saw Ivanās video about that article I was looking forward to your thoughts on it. Weāre certainly in the āfight youā stage now. This just emphasizes the necessity for true decentralization- for development of the code, for governance, for consensus, for security, for everything. Then banning becomes impractical, if not impossible to implement in practice. Regulators could make it even more painful and difficult to move between crypto and fiat, but I think in the long run this just slows the adoption curve and forces more innovation and greater decentralization.
If you want to put on the tinfoil hat for a moment, regulators and governments actively attempting to subvert crypto may find it has the opposite effect they intend. Telling people not to do something might make them want to do it more. Imposing draconian regulations might help crypto become even more independent and disconnected from the existing financial systems. We could see crypto go full privacy mode and cut out the current system entirely. Financial revolt?
Anyway, at this point itās just a recommendation. Could be a long time before any real action takes place. I think theyāre mainly afraid of Facebook and Libra, the other stablecoins are just caught in the crossfire. Centralized stablecoins may experience some heat from this, particularly Tether. The folks at Coinbase are pretty buddy buddy with the regulators so USDC might fare better.
Thatās a good point! Iād assume most projects donāt expect users to understand or delve into the back-testing if they performed any and made it available. Which is really poor reasoning since weāre clearly not in a euphoric bull market environment. So the people still here probably would value such transparency and data to be made available.
If theyāre not doing back-testing, they absolutely should be given whatās at stakeā¦
It only takes one reputable project to do it, followed by one popular Medium/RSA/CoinDesk article commenting on it to set the standard for other projects.
Great course lookin forward to learning more. I had a question but I saw someone with a similar question which you had already answered. Greetz
Lets keep asking for these metric ā¦
The issue is that back testing is a very complex topic not understood well enough ā¦ even in traditional markets.
Iām not a big data scientist but I think you could even say maybe it is to hard to model?
With all the on chain data and models you can run on a test block-chain network I find this unlikely.
