👩‍🌾️ Harvest Sushi’s largest 2x rewards farm and get smart with BarnBridge’s SMART Alpha 🧠 – by Apostolos Provatidis and William M. Peaster

Welcome to DeFi Pulse Farmer – your guide to staying up on the latest and best trends in yield farming and beyond.

In this newsletter, we break down top stories, developments, and trends from the past week in tandem with two key farming opportunities to keep an eye on.

If you want to access the full DeFi Pulse Farmer experience to receive emerging Yield Farming opportunities sent to you throughout the week as part of our Alpha Tractor Series, or the DeFi Pulse Farmer Protocol Express, which consists of a weekly recap of APYs and new pools on major protocols and a highlight of an emerging opportunity, subscribe today.

📉 DeFi TVL shaves off +$10B — After setting a new all-time high of $99.25B earlier this week, the DeFi ecosystem’s total value locked (TVL) has since acutely slumped to $87B. That’s a big swing in seven days, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Plus, $87B is still high and indicative of lots of product-market fit around DeFi, so chins up ladies and gentlemen! 🏋‍♀️

🚨 Big news: Coinbase tattles on SEC weirdness — Coinbase is America’s powerhouse crypto exchange. Now the company’s apparently getting the run-around treatment from America’s powerhouse financial watchdog, the SEC. 

This week Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed his company had reached out to the Commission over the company’s upcoming Lend program, which seeks to offer USDC depositors 4% APY. Then reportedly the SEC started playing hardball … 

The kicker is that the Commission won’t explain its rationale, so limbo ensues. The good news is that if anyone in crypto can go toe to toe with the SEC, it’s Coinbase. And if this dust-up does evolve into a court case, a judge may end up offering legal clarity against the positions the SEC was maintaining in the first place! So there’s certainly plenty of intrigue to track here going forward. 

💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen notable runs from the following top DeFi tokens:

• 📈 IDEX (+500.2%)

• 📈 CVX (+76.5%)

• 📈 OHM (+32.1%)

• 📈 KP3R (+11.9%)

• 📈 HEGIC (+6.3%)

👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $339.86, marking a 19.48% decline on the week. That’s unsurprising considering the ecosystem’s TVL acutely dropped by over $10B in the same span. 

Thank you to our sponsor DEXTF, an asset management protocol that makes managing and investing assets easier.

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🌾 Yield farm +87.5% APR via Sushiswap’s ALCX-WETH pool!

The most interesting “2x rewards” farm in DeFi right now is Sushiswap’s ALCX-WETH liquidity pool, which is offering depositors 87.6% APR presently via $ALCX and $SUSHI rewards 👀  

Keep in mind:

• ⚗️ $ALCX is the governance token of Alchemix, which offers Maker Vault-like products that automatically repay their debts over time through good ol’ fashioned yield farming. 

• 🍣 $SUSHI is the native token of Sushiswap, stakeable for a cut of the DEX’s protocol fees on an ongoing basis. 

If you’re interested, joining this 2x rewards farm is a straightforward affair. You can follow these steps:

• Deposit ALCX and WETH tokens into the Sushiswap liquidity pool. 

• With your liquidity provider (LP) tokens secured, navigate over to Sushiswap’s 2x Reward Farms dashboard and click on the ALCX-WETH pool. 

• At this point you’ll be greeted with a small staking interface.

• Fire off an “Approve” transaction to let Sushiswap interact with your funds. Once that’s done, choose what proportion of your LP tokens you want to stake (you can press “Max” here) and complete a final deposit transaction. 

• Voila! You can claim your token rewards and unstake through this same dashboard and interface whenever you please!

This ALCX/WETH farm has proven solid on Sushi for months now, but just make sure to use good sense, do your own research, and never yield farm with more money than you can afford to lose.

• Project Shutdown: Cover & Ruler
  TLDR: Cover, an insurance protocol, and Ruler, a debt market protocol, announce plans to permanently shutter following an abrupt departure of the core developers. 

• $HEZ and $MATIC Token Merger
  TLDR: Following Polygon’s acquisition of zk-rollup scaling solution Hermez Network, the projects conduct a token merger with $MATIC “effectively absorbing” $HEZ. 

• Ribbon Finance Hits $1B Options Volume
  TLDR: Crypto-structured products protocol Ribbon Finance reaches $1 billion worth of options trading volume. 

• Thales tokenomics: introducing THALES token
  TLDR: Binary options protocol Thales, a Synthetix spinoff, unveils the tokenomics plans for its upcoming THALES governance token. 

• Safety Model Outage
  TLDR: Decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX publishes an incident report on a bug that “caused the exchange rate of $DYDX to $stkDYDX to change from one to zero.”

• Decentralized Exchanges May Eventually Trade Everything
  TLDR: IOSG Ventures argues that DEXes may eventually facilitate trading around everything from “stock market derivatives, agricultural markets e.g. wheat, live cattle derivatives, energy derivatives e.g. crude oil, to metals e.g. gold, copper.”

• Blockchain Bridges: Building Networks of Cryptonetworks
  TLDR: 1kx research partner Dmitriy Berenzon publishes an insightful primer on the current state of the rapidly growing blockchain bridge ecosystem:  

🚜 Farm smart by pre-depositing into BarnBridge’s SMART Alpha

Back in July we wrote a Conservative Farmer on SMART Yield, one of the flagship products of tokenized risk protocol BarnBridge. Today we turn your attention back to BarnBridge as the project’s launching its next major product, SMART Alpha, on September 13th.  

What’s this Alpha alpha, you ask? 

Per the builders, SMART Alpha is a system of specialized single-asset pools that let DeFi users “calibrate their exposure to price movements in an underlying digital asset.” The following pools are currently supported:

Zooming in, these pools are then responsible for “regularly redistributing” funds between junior and senior tranche token holders. The BarnBridge team recently explained:

“When price goes up, seniors give up some of their assets to the juniors, and vice versa. Put another way, junior users are buying asset price risk off of senior users, guaranteeing them price protection up to a certain threshold in exchange for greater upside potential.‌”

If you’re interested in harvesting these new SMART pastures, note that pre-deposits are currently being accepted for the four inaugural SMART Alpha pools. Before diving in, get fully up to speed by checking out BarnBridge’s introduction and announcement posts. 

BarnBridge is a reputable project whose infrastructure has held up well in DeFi so far. Regardless, SMART Alpha is a new release and should be treated as an experiment initially to be safe. Never invest more money than you can afford to lose into any DeFi project. 

Arbitrum, a promising layer-two scaling solution for Ethereum, recently activated its mainnet for public use. Accordingly, it’s a great time to enjoy some fast and inexpensive L2 trades, but you’ll want to keep your wits about you. For that look no further than Arbiscan, a new block explorer custom-tailored for Arbitrum users!

Bullish or bearish right now? 🤔

Bullish, no doubt about it. 

Don’t let a little downward chop cloud your judgment, markets go up and down. Yet what we’ve already builtin DeFi and what we’re continuing to build marks an incredible David vs. Goliath story that’s going to impact countless aspects of human life over the next century and then some. 

That’s our big bull case, at least. And of course we are within a great continuum of possibilities, so continued extravagant success from here is far from guaranteed. 

But now that we’ve tasted a $100B TVL, there’s no going back. We now can feel and sense what it will take to get to $1T and beyond. To that end, we’ve never liked our chances more, whatever the odds are today! 🔃

All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We’re not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn’t possibly account for anyone’s specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!