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 total value locked (TVL) hit a new all-time high of $39.91B last week, and with a TVL climb of ~$3.72B to $43.63B since then, that does mean we’re continuing to push steadily into record territory.
Zooming in, lending dapp and Dai backer Maker became the first DeFi project to hit the $7.39B TVL milestone. Following not far behind are Aave and Compound, with TVLs of $6.01B and $5.51B respectively. Rounding out DeFi’s top 6 right now are three of the space’s premier decentralized exchanges: Uniswap ($4.48B), Curve ($4.41B), and Sushiswap ($3.85B).
As for news, there were two main threads that got lots of airtime in the cryptoeconomy this week: BTC (+$57k) and ETH (+2k) hitting new all-time price highs, and the rise of the specter of Binance Smart Chain as an Ethereum competitor.
The price news is straightforward enough, right. Institutional and retail investors are flooding into crypto now like never before because things like DeFi are in the limelight for the first time and winning over new users.
Then there’s the EVM-based Binance Smart Chain, which apparently saw volume surge to its various Ethereum-forked DeFi dapps in recent days. The stated reasoning has been that an exodus of users have migrated away from Ethereum’s acutely high fees, and this has people like Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao hailing the shift as a turning point for BSC. On the flip side, it seems a considerable amount of the BSC volume lately has been faked, so the episode seems more like a narrative war for now.
Lastly, it was another week of strong performances for some of real DeFi’s top tokens. Assets with the best price gains on the week included DODO (+222%), BNT (+58%), REN (+42%), SFI (+42%), and COVER (+23%). The DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) had a +6% price increase with a 7-day move to $486.45.
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Farm up to 660% via DERI premining
Trading risk exposures through derivatives is a staple of mainstream finance. DeFi users have been clamoring for ways to similarly trade risk exposures, albeit in decentralized finance.
Here’s where Deri Protocol comes in
Deri is a decentralized protocol that lets DeFi users efficiently trade risk exposures, except without having to go through centralized trading desks at traditional firms. Instead, Deri’s liquidity pools are decentralized and permissionless and thus function as DeFi derivatives desks, i.e. traders’ counterparties.
This leads us to DERI. Since Deri Protocol is a new project, it’s set aside 20M of its 1B DERI governance tokens for a premining campaign. The idea? Users stake select assets in liquidity pools across 3 epochs (read: 3 weeks) in order to earn DERI rewards for helping to build up the young protocol’s liquidity.
The first premining epoch began on Feb. 9th, so we’re roughly halfway through the program right now but the staking yields here are really attractive regardless. For example, the DERI-USDT Sushiswap LP token pool is fetching 660% APY currently.
Pretty good, right? Well if this sounds like yield pastures after your own heart, you can follow these steps to join in. We’ll use the DERI-USDT SLP farm as an example because it’s offering the highest yield on Deri presently:
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You’ll need a 1:1 ratio of DERI to USDT to serve as a Sushiswap LP. You can pick up DERI on Sushiswap and USDT on just about any DEX, though Uniswap has the best USDT liquidity in DeFi at the moment.
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Once you’ve picked up equivalent portions of these tokens, head over to Sushiswap’s DERI-USDT pool page.
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Through the “+Liquidity” interface, approve and then confirm your pool deposits. You’ll receive DERI-USDT SLP tokens once this is completed.
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Take your newfound SLP tokens over to Deri Protocol’s premining dashboard, navigate to the DERI-USDT SLP pool, and press “Staking.”
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Approve the staking transaction and then confirm the staking deposit. Now you’ll start automatically accruing DERI premining rewards. Keep in mind: DERI rewards are released on Mondays at the start of an epoch.
Deri’s a promising project, but it’s also very new and small. Accordingly these farms are relatively riskier than many other opportunities currently available throughout DeFi, so you need to do your research and make sure you understand the present tradeoffs well before you dive into any. Farm safe, farm smart!
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Recap, Roadmap, and Looking Forward
TLDR: Alpha Homora creator’s Alpha Finance Labs details how the project and its community are moving forward in the wake of the recent Alpha Homora V2 attack. -
Yield Hacking for Fun and Profit
TLDR: Ribbon Finance reveals its new work around a range of crypto structure products that are focused on volatility, principal protection, and beyond. -
A Money God RAIses–RAI is live on the Ethereum Mainnet!
TLDR: Created by Reflexer Labs, RAI is a new stable asset that’s non-pegged and thus floating in value. The crypto offers a new kind of unit of account for Ethereum users. -
Vesper Launches!
TLDR: Vesper, a suite of yield-generating DeFi products, is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. The project’s beta users have been awarded VSP tokens accordingly. -
Introducing POOL
TLDR: No-loss Ethereum savings game PoolTogether unveils its POOL token, which will let the project’s community govern the protocol in decentralized fashion going forward. -
Introducing Continuous ESD
TLDR: Algorithmic stablecoin project ESD announces plans to pivot to a new V2 model that will function as a “two-token, protocol-owned collateral algorithmic stablecoin” system. -
How (and why!) to Use Omen Prediction Markets on xDai
TLDR: Gnosis, creators of the Omen predictions marketplace, outline how that marketplace is now live on the xDai sidechain and thus will offer improved performance.
Farm 42.5% APY on Stables or 18% on ETH with Rari Capital
With its TVL now over $15M, Rari Capital is a DeFi robo-advisor protocol on the rise. You put your money in, Rari gets to work putting your money to use on-chain, and you rake in passive yield accordingly.
What makes Rari so interesting, then, is that it gives users a variety of ways to earn yield and at varying levels of risk.
That said, if you prefer safer farms that are more conservative and low risk, Rari has two promising avenues for you to consider: the protocol’s Stable Pool and its ETH Pool.
The first pool is straightforward. You can deposit stablecoins like USDC, USDT, or mUSD. Rari then sweeps these tokens into USDC and rebalances the holdings through DeFi platforms like Aave, Compound, and dYdX.
This pool is generating 42.5% APY currently, so if you’re interested in joining prepare an allocation of stablecoins to deposit and then head over to the Stable Pool dashboard. Confirm your deposit, and then you’ll be raking in yield.
As for Rari’s ETH Pool, it’s fetching 18% APY right now. The process of joining this pool is similar to the Stable Pool, except you’ll deposit ETH in as opposed to stablecoins. The advantage of this pool is that you can keep exposure to the upside of ETH while still safely farming some attractive yield through your holdings.
These farms are simple and certainly on the safer side of things, but you’ll still want to do your own research and understand fully how they work. There are no guarantees in DeFi, so it’s always best to be cautious and on your toes!
With so many interactions, a farmer could have easily missed an airdrop. But fear not, this week’s Plow of the Week, Claimable, allows you to paste your address to find out if you’ve missed any. Bonus: it also works for POAP!
DeFi continues to grow to new heights, and as that happens more and more projects like Binance Smart Chain are trying to grab bigger pieces of the pie. But make no mistake: Ethereum is the king of DeFi, and it will continue to be because it offers what BSC and others can’t: a decentralized, permissionless, and borderless alternative financial system.
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!