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Last week, one of my posts was chosen to be one of five winners for the MEW compatible dApps contest hosted by @oracle-d and @stateofthedapps. The purpose of the contest was to use and review one of the dApps from this listing of MEW compatible dApps at State of the dApps.

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NOTE: This is the post that will be be upvoted as the reward for the two long-form reviews of Uniswap and Compound that are discussed below.

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I chose to feature two dApps that I had already reviewed about 6 months ago... but as we all know, 6 months in technology is quite a seriously long time. Well, even more so in crypto than it is even in the fast moving electronics and technology fields! My previous reviews for Uniswap and Compound had already been featured on the relevant pages for State of the Dapps, but I thought it would be nice to do an updated review for both DeFi platforms.

Both Uniswap and Compound are Ethereum based DeFi platforms that I use more often than others... and as such, all the incremental updates and major updates, I've taken in my stride and forgotten about. However, going back to read the original reviews that were now 6-8 months old... it is pretty interesting how both of them have developed in the intervening time.

My updated review for Uniswap was the one that won the placing... it is a review of an decentralised exchange (DEX) which utilises the Constant Product Market Maker Model to compensate for the inherent problems of low liquidity tokens (volatility and price shifts due to large orders relative to the order book) and also the problems that affect other DEX's (frontrunning due to the open and public nature of transactions). I've used Uniswap quite a number of times, for dApp utility tokens which often only had either a BTC pairing on centralised exchanges, low liquidity on DEXs or were offered at a steep price premium through the developer. Uniswap manages to solve these problems with an elegant solution... allowing a buyer or seller to have a single exchange transaction completed within the Ethereum confirmation time with a known price. In addition, it is a handy way to add liquidity to the token pools and take a little fee for the service!

My updated review for Compound was my other entry, which unfortunately didn't win a placing in the top 5. It covers the rollout of Compound 2.0 which introduces the concept of cTokens to represent the stake in the liquidity pools. This means that the cTokens could still be traded outside of Compound with the cTokens having the intrinsic value of the proportional ownership of the tokens in the liquidity pool. This means that lenders to the Compound protocol would still be able to access the value of the tokens that they had locked up with the liquidity pool, whilst gaining the compounding interest rate that accrued from the lending pool.

So, two reviews... of two different approaches to a decentralised financing (DeFi) ecosystem... both ways to also allow holders of tokens to provide liquidity to lending pools. It's pretty interesting times for this sort of decentralised lending and borrowing idea... one that I tried to explain to my wife, but she wasn't initially that comfortable with the idea that you would close and liquidate contracts on other individuals (not that this doesn't happen in the regular banking system... it is just shielded from us, where do you think the interest rate comes from?).

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