👩‍🌾 Farm +300% APR on USDC with Bumper & up to 45% in Vesper Finance’s new pools! – by William M. Peaster and Apostolos Provatidis

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’s growth streak is continuing in style, as the total value locked (TVL) in the ecosystem swelled +$7B this week to reach over $82.5B once again!

If we see another +$7B influx over the coming week, then DeFi’s TVL will have returned to its record high of ~$90B — a milestone first reached back in May 2021. 

So while it may have seemed like NFTs dominated crypto’s airwaves in recent days, it’s worth noting DeFi’s strength is also currently robust and near all-time highs. No surprise there, growth’s reflexive atop Ethereum: DeFi feeds into NFTs, NFTs feed into DeFi, and round and round we grow!  

As for major DeFi news, two of the biggest headlines this week included: 

• “The biggest-ever cryptocurrency heist” — Poly Network, a cross-chain DeFi platform, was hacked via an unusual cryptography  exploit for +$600M worth of crypto on Tuesday. It appears the culprit’s identity was quickly discerned by centralized crypto exchanges, and the attacker eventually returned all the stolen funds. The big takeaway? Making DeFi projects truly antifragile is incredibly important, as their fragility can be incredibly consequential.

• “The first-ever full-blown [DeFi] merger” — Polygon, which is looking to build out a suite of Ethereum scaling solutions, just acquired zk-rollups scaling project Hermez Network for $250M. The unprecedented merger will notably meld the projects’ respective MATIC and HEZ tokens. Expect to see many further mergers and acquisitions in DeFi as big money and big ideas keep colliding. 

Lastly, per usual let’s check out the best-performing DeFi tokens since our previous issue of the Farmer. In that span, we saw strong runs from QUICK (+142%), DDX (+131%), BADGER (+77%), HEGIC (+74%), and FARM (+72%). Additionally, the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) rose 16% to reach $416.61 on the week! 

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

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Earn 322% APR on USDC via Bumper!

Bumper is a decentralized price protection protocol. 

That may sound complicated at first, but the gist of Bumper is straightforward: the protocol connects Takers, i.e. people who pay premiums to protect their ETH from price crashes, and Makers, i.e. people who supply underpinning liquidity in stablecoins in exchange for earning premiums + token rewards. 

Accordingly, Takers transfer risk to Makers and Makers are thus compensated for this service. For a better understanding of how this system works under the hood, consider diving into Bumper’s flashpaper. 

Farming BUMP with USDC

Bumper is officially launching its BUMP governance token in Nov. 2021. In the meantime, the project’s offering a liquidity mining program where you can earn BUMP early at an attractive rate if you’re willing to lock up your deposited funds until Oct. 14th! 

If that’s a tradeoff you can stomach, then the name of the game is acquiring USDC to become a Maker, i.e. a liquidity provider. 

Once that’s done, you’d head over to Bumper’s Deposit dashboard and click on one of the two provided “Deposit” buttons. Then simply input how much USDC you’d like to supply, choose if you want to opt part of your deposit into the BUMP presale, press “Next,” and confirm the transaction. 

Voila! That’s all it takes to farm BUMP. Just remember there is that aforementioned deposit lock-up period until October, so if you join in you won’t have access to your supplied funds for weeks. However, +300% APR on stables is pretty compelling, so it’s certainly a yield farm worth considering right now! 

Bumper has been audited and built by a public team, but you are the ultimate defender of your funds. Do your own research, be smart, and only ever invest with sums of money you can readily afford to lose.

Earn up to 45% via Vesper’s new Growth Pools

These days there’s no shortage of DeFi projects that cater to advanced and risk-tolerant users. Yet there’s a rising class of platforms taking the opposite approach, i.e. catering to investors who like their DeFi yields safe and simple to access. 

Vesper Finance, a suite platform of “easy-to-use DeFi products,” is a platform firmly in that latter camp. Vesper’s flagship offerings right now are its Growth Pools, which offer yields through automated DeFi vault strategies + emissions of VSP, Vesper’s native token. 

This week we’re pointing your attention to Vesper’s two newest offerings, the freshly launched USDT and UNI Growth Pools. Both of these opportunities are offering annualized earning rates over 39% at the moment!

If you’re keen on harvesting these conservative DeFi pastures, first acquire some USDT and/or UNI and head over to the Vesper App page. Select your pool of choice, input how many tokens you’d like to deposit, and you’ll be farming once your supply transaction completes!

Vesper has been audited multiple times and is run by a public team. However, there are no ultimate guarantees in DeFi. Always do your own research, and never invest more money into any project than you can afford to lose.

Do you want to dive more into Yield Farming opportunities? Become a premium subscriber and get access to:

• Alpha Tractor Series: giving you intel into the freshest yield for the most honest farmers only.

• The Protocol Express: a weekly recap of APYs and new pools on major protocols and a highlight of an emerging opportunity.

• Access to the Alpha Tractor Premium Discord channel.

Are you doing any yield farming via borrowing on Aave’s Polygon deployment? Then consider checking out Cono Finance, a liquidation protection solution created by the Gelato Network team for easily safeguarding collateral. 

At the start of 2021, we forecasted that DeFi’s TVL would reach at least $100B by year’s end 💯 

Now that DeFi’s TVL is back within striking distance of its reigning ~$90B high, we’re feeling as good as ever about our prediction, especially with a handful of months still left in the year! 

More importantly, we’re feeling great about how validating that milestone will be for DeFi. So sit back, keep farming, and enjoy the show — the harvesting’s just gettin’ good 👩‍🌾️

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!