Blockchain Bites: Crypto's Top Universities, Bitcoin's New Addresses, MetaMask's Token Swaps

Stablecoin use on DeFi applications has exploded in 2020.Approximately $20 billion of crypto dollars are floating around, and a few billion of these have found their way into the ether by way of yield farming and lending.

Even Ethereum's flagship DeFi application, MakerDAO, is flooded with USDC, making the stablecoin the largest collateral for Maker's DAI stablecoin.

That's how deep crypto dollars go into DeFi's liquidity.

As crypto dollars liquidity floods DeFi markets, will these tokens, which are centrally issued, threaten these application's presumed decentralization? With bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX facing legal actions from U.S. regulators, questions have floated whether exchanges like Uniswap should worry about being targeted next.

At CoinDesk's virtual invest: ethereum economy program on Oct. 14, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire and Aave Finance founder Stani Kulechov will discuss how integral stablecoins have become for DeFi in their talk "Stablecoins, Hyper-Collateralization and the DeFi Economy."

MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen and Near protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin will discuss DeFi's impact on Ethereum in their talk "The Fees are Too Damn High: DeFi Pushes Ethereum To its Limit."

Frontends: Winning the Race for the DeFi UserThe emergence of new infrastructure such as automated market makers, portfolio managers and aggregation tools has kick-started an arms race for end users.

"I'm not a whale in the crypto world but I'm one of the top users of the DeFi protocol I use," he said.

DeFi infrastructureThe DeFi mentality emphasizes open-source access to tools, services with low barriers to entry and distributed teams.

ConsenSys' head of product for Infura, Michael Godsey, said his team handled the "Increased usage" from the food-themed yield farming spike, watching closely to understand "These new usage patterns." Such DeFi experiments provide inspiration and research data for Ethereum startups, not chagrin.