Nexus Mutual Newsletter | 20 July 2022
This newsletter is brought together by the Nexus Communications team to bring you the latest news and updates from the Nexus Mutual community.
Week in Summary
Last week’s biggest cover buys were for Curve Protocol cover; the mutual’s Active Cover Amount stands at $239,375,042 | 156,291 ETH as of 20 July and the Nexus V2 development work is on track, with the engineering team working on minor audit findings. NestedFi, the social trading platform chose to protect their users with the Nexus Mutual Protocol Cover.
Recent Highlights
Nested Protecting their Users with Nexus Mutual
Nested is a social trading platform that is working to on onboarding more people into DeFi and the world of web3. Their team purchased Protocol Cover for their platform, and their coverage protects against events where a loss of funds is triggered from within the smart contract system that is caused by:
✅ Unintended use of code (e.g., hacks, exploits)
✅ Severe oracle failure/oracle price manipulation
✅ Economic design failure
✅ Governance attacks
Mutual members are helping another protocol team minimize their users’ exposure to risk, and our community is honored that NestedFi is protecting their users with Protocol Cover.
Learn more about Protocol Cover in the Nexus Docs.
Another Potential Hack Avoided
Through our matching bug bounty program with Immunefi, our community has incentivized another critical vulnerability disclosure in the Synthetix smart contract system. Whitehat thunderdeep14 received $100,000 USD from Synthetix and $50,000 from the mutual’s matching program for their critical vulnerability disclosure. Learn more about the vulnerability disclosure and the mutual’s matching bounty in the Nexus Docs.
Nexus Mutual is dedicated to protecting DeFi users against risk, both on off-chain and on-chain markets. Nexus Mutual’s Bug Bounty Matching Program on Immunefi is a free service offered by the mutual to better protect users of major DeFi protocols. Learn more about the program on Immunefi.
BraveNewDeFi Presents on Risk, Nexus Mutual, and the On-Chain Risk Marketplace at the IDX DeFi Summit
There’s significant institutional interest in DeFi, yet smart contract/technical risk and custody are the two largest barriers for entry for most.
Last week, Lee (a.k.a., BraveNewDeFi) joined the IDX team and the attendees of the DeFi Summit conference in Chicago at the CBOE to talk about smart contract, technical risk, Nexus Mutual’s community-driven model, and the on-chain risk marketplace coming with Nexus V2.
Lee’s presentation was well recieved, and he spoke with many attendees afterwards to learn more about their interest in and knowledge of DeFi, as well as inquiries about Nexus V2 and the risk marketplace. During the event, Lee spoke about the mutual’s view of risk, the current state of DeFi markets, and how Nexus Mutual allows people to hedge against risk on-chain.
Mutant Meetup Call | 19 July 2022
Nexus Mutual Discord, Community Calls Voice Channel
This week’s Mutant Meetup call started with Lee / BraveNewDeFi summarizing the last week at the mutual, including a brief reminder on some of the fundamental mechanisms underlying Nexus Mutual, like the Specific Risk Limit and the Global Capacity Limit that determine what capacity of coverage is available for individual projects. To learn more, Nexus Docs is the best place to start.
Hugh later shared that the Nexus v2 audits are progressing well and had produced findings that require minor development work. The team is working on increasing test coverage, and will accelerate front-end developments as next steps.
In addition, the smart contract change that had to be made so that for the mutual to invest with Maple Finance from the Community Fund will go into audit soon. Members may be on the lookout for on-chain governance activity within the two weeks.
The Tokenomics Working Group is making progress, modeling and simulating various scenarios with changed bonding curve designs. Next steps will include technical feasibility analysis.
Due to some technical issues, the recording will be delayed but will be available later this week. In lieu of the recording, members can review this week’s slides.
Governance Proposals
There are two proposals posted on the Nexus Mutual forum, and a summary of each is below.
Nexus Covered Vaults (Discovery Phase)
The BootNode team has requested a grant to to design an ERC-4626 compliant vault that takes an existing ERC-4626 compliant vault (e.g. Yearn) and purchases Nexus Mutual coverage on behalf of all users, with coverage effectively being paid from the yield. A bundled yield-bearing plus covered vault.
Funding request for phase 1: 32,000 USDC
Timeline for phase 1 of the project: 5 weeks
This proposal was posted on the forum on 14 July and will proceed to a Snapshot vote next week.
Reimburse Risk Assessors for Undue Loss from Claim 113
Robert from ArmorFi/Ease has updated his proposal to request reimbursement for Risk Assessors who staked against Rari Capital and had their NXM burned to facilitate a claim payout, where the total covered amount was paid (5m DAI) when the actual loss was ~$1.4m because partial claims are not possible in Nexus V1 at this time. Members can join the discussion on the forum.
Reimbursement request: 43,940 wNXM
This proposal will proceed to a Snapshot vote on Thursday (21 July).
Last Week in Review
Total Cover Sales
This week, the mutual had $7m USD worth of cover purchased, with $22.9k USD in premiums collected.
Active Cover | Week of 18 July 2022
Total active cover stands at $236.7m USD, with coverage by cover type as follows.
You can review total active cover and active cover by platform on the Nexus Tracker platform.
Up Next
Join us on next week’s Mutant Meetup call in Discord at 10am EST / 2pm UTC to stay up-to-date on all things Nexus Mutual.
Don’t forget to follow the Nexus Mutual Twitter account for regular updates and communication from the mutual. You can follow the Nexus Mutual Bot Twitter account to stay up to date on cover buys as they happen.
Have a great rest of the week 🐢
Resources
Nexus Mutual is fully transparent. You can verify the information within this newsletter and learn more about the mutual through the resources below.
Nexus Mutual’s community is most active on Discord. You may reach our team with any questions through LinkedIn and Discord as well as Telegram.