Test Your DeFi Summer 2020 Knowledge - Answers & Fun Facts

Thanks for taking the Test Your DeFi Summer 2020 Knowledge quiz! 🧠💎


Here are the correct answers along with a bit of history behind each one. So whether you nailed them all or learned something new, you’ll walk away with a few more Ethereum trivia points (and hopefully some Etherscan Points too).


1. Which protocol's rebase function mistakenly omitted a division of 10^18, causing a massive over-mint of governance tokens into the treasury?

Yam Finance
Source: https://medium.com/yam-finance/save-yam-245598d81cec

Yam Finance’s smart contract had a critical bug in its rebase function. The code mistakenly calculated the total supply without dividing by the constant BASE (10¹⁸), causing exponential over-minting of YAM tokens with each rebase event.

The bug caused each rebase to flood the treasury with tokens, breaking governance since no proposal could reach quorum. As a result, about $750K of Curve tokens were permanently locked.


2. Which DeFi project had its governance token contract deployed early by someone outside the team?

Curve Finance

In August 2020, an anonymous developer front‑ran the Curve team by deploying the CRV governance token contract before the team intended to launch them. Although unintended, the team later verified and accepted the deployment, making it the official deployment.


3. What did Compound do that became one of the most memorable catalysts of DeFi Summer 2020?

✅ Introduced $COMP rewards for liquidity providers

Compound introduced the COMP token rewards in June 2020, rewarding both borrowers and lenders for using the protocol. This triggered the yield farming boom, drawing in massive liquidity and multiplying engagement across DeFi.


4. As of now, roughly how many UNI tokens remain in the Uniswap Token Distributor contract deployed on September 16, 2020?

✅ 12 million
Source: https://etherscan.io/address/0x090d4613473dee047c3f2706764f49e0821d256e#asset-tokens

On Etherscan's token holder chart, the "Uniswap: Token Distributor" address shows a remaining balance of about 12,709,863 UNI, which is approximately 1.27% of the total 1 billion UNI supply.


5. What was the approximate total value locked (TVL) in DeFi by the end of 2020?

✅ $15 billion
Source: https://defillama.com/

By the end of 2020, DeFi had surged to a significant milestone—with total value locked (TVL) hovering around $15 billion, marking a major moment of growth and traction for the sector.

Teck Yuan Lee
Teck Yuan Lee
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