Centre’s USDC has become the second largest stablecoin in DeFi. While it has maintained its 1:1 peg with the US dollar well, its “blacklist” functionality comes with a heavy tax on users, amounting to, by my estimate, an extra $3.6M spent in transaction fees in December 2021 alone.

The free-rider problem arises when a good or service has private costs and non-excludable public benefits. A classic example is a firework show. Fireworks can be enjoyed by anyone in a particular area regardless of whether they pay for it (it’s hard to stop people from looking at the sky if they don’t have a ticket).

In May of this year, Vitalik created a post on the Uniswap governance forum called, “UNI should become an oracle token.” He argues that there is a need for oracles to provide off-chain data, and that UNI is in a good position to provide an alternative to Chainlink for high-value, latency-tolerant use cases.

Disclaimer: this post and accompanying code is meant for educational purposes only. None of this is audited, and you should seek out audits before using contracts in production.

So you want to write a Dune query for some quick and dirty analysis, but the contract isn’t verified on Dune! \*starts sobbing uncontrollably 😭😭\*

Liquidity mining is the practice of distributing governance tokens to users that provide capital to a protocol. Announcing it in May 2020, the first protocol to put this into practice was Compound. Regarding the aim of liquidity mining, the post states: