What's Driving Token Prices? January 25, 2023

MKR (2.7%) - Decentralized stablecoin issuer MakerDao voted to invest $100M of USDC (or ~3% of PSM or Price Stability Mechanism reserves) into a Yearn vault that earns 2% yield. (Yearn is a yield aggregator that automates the DeFi yield investment process.) This is part of Maker’s plan to generate revenue on its stablecoin assets which previously sat idle on-chain. So far, they have deployed $1.6B in assets to Coinbase and $150M to BlockTower and Centrifuge to manage “real world assets” or non-blockchain related assets, usually U.S. Treasuries.
UNI/BNB (+6.4%/+4.9%) - Uniswap passed a “temperature check” vote to deploy Uniswap on BNB Chain. A full vote will likely follow shortly and would be a net benefit for both BNB and UNI parties as it brings more "blue-chip" DeFi to BNB Chain and opens up new users for Uniswap. Currently, BNB Chain mostly utilizes Pancakeswap, which saw $2.56B of trading volume in the last 30 days versus Uniswap which did $24.92B.
JOE (+12%) - Last week decentralized exchange Trader Joe announced it would revamp its tokenomics to incorporate its recent move to BNB Chain. The changes include bridging sJOE (staked JOE) to BNB Chain and Arbitrum, new utility for veJOE (vote escrowed JOE), and deprecating rJOE, which was part of the IDO platform. The end result is that JOE becomes a multichain asset.
OSMO (+24%) - A proposal is currently out on the Cosmos DEX, Osmosis, to enforce automatic staking of OSMO LP rewards, which would subject liquidity providers to a 14 day withdrawal period. OSMO issuance is heavy and selling pressure from LP rewards has dragged the token price down. The hope is that a 14 day prohibited staking period would discourage LPs from selling the token and stabilize the price of OSMO.

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