Bi-Weekly State of the UNION — January 15th

Published in

UNN Finance Updates & Ideas

2 min readJan 15, 2021

Welcome readers to issue 3 of State of the UNION, where we share a 365-degree recap of the UNION ecosystem over the past two weeks.

Community Communication

As can be seen from our AMAs, our weekly product report, and this State of the UNION, the communication from UNION continues to increase.

On that vein, we are excited to announce that Mark Wang (TG: @markwng) has joined UNION as Ecosystem Lead. In this role, he will serve as a powerful supplement to our community admins, providing answers to the many questions from our growing community.

Partnerships

Partnerships are key to enabling adoption in any industry, and doubly so in rapidly evolving DeFi.

1. On January 7th, we announced a partnership with Kleros to bring robust third-party claims processing platform for the UNION ecosystem. More info here.

2. We followed quickly on January 13th with Bonded Finance, a lending platform with a keen eye to extract capital efficiency for DeFi and looking to offer their users protection and collateral optimization with UNION. More info here.

These are the first of many as the UNION value-propositions begin to be truly understood.

Product

On the topic of value-propositions: we shared progress on our first product, collateral optimization (C-OP), which utilizes decentralized American put options to lower the amount of collateral locked for borrowers in lending platforms.

You read that right. We are building decentralized option primitives, which have risk and financial applications far beyond DeFi Protection, to increase capital efficiency. More info here.

We made a small update to our Geyser to show the total value locked (TVL) in Geyser, which has consistently hovered around the 70~80% of total liquidity provided in Uniswap. Most impressive but not surprising given the juicy ~190% APY rewards.