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) is currently hovering around $54.22B, so down a bit — but not much — from the space’s new all-time high of $62B that was first reached last week. So while many top DeFi tokens faced acute selloffs over the past 48 hours, it’s nothing they can’t rebound from, especially as the ecosystem’s TVL remains nearly as high as it’s ever been.
As for the individual TVLs of top DeFi projects, all have declined some this week, with the main recent changes being 1) Maker once more overtaking Compound as the largest DeFi dapp, and 2) Uniswap acutely overtaking Aave as DeFi’s third-largest dapp. The current standings and the project’s weekly performances look like so:
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Maker ($9.63B 📉 $8.78B)
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Compound ($11.2B 📉 $8.40B)
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Uniswap ($6.30B 📉 $5.96B)
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Aave ($6.41B 📉 $5.65B)
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Curve ($5.61B 📉 $5.27B)
We also had no shortage of compelling ecosystem developments in recent days, some of which included:
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The tentative scheduling of Ethereum’s London upgrade for July 14th — The upgrade includes EIP-1559, which will bring deflationary fee burns to Ethereum. With this system live DeFi’s growth could lead to tons of deflationary pressure on ETH, so it’s something many people around Ethereum and DeFi are watching closely.
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Large mainstream payments app Venmo added support for BTC, ETH, and beyond — After Square and PayPal, Venmo is just the latest major fintech app to add direct support for crypto. It all brings us that much closer to having these popular apps eventually rollout direct integrations with DeFi
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MakerDAO just allowed a real-world asset to back a DAI loan for the first time — loan company New Silver just minted +35k DAI using real estate as collateral. Love it or hate it, it’s the first of many more confluences among real-world assets and DeFi in the years ahead.
To round things out, let’s quickly catch up with the best-performing DeFi tokens from this down week. In that span, we saw decent runs from WNXM (+24%), LQTY (+18.3%), and MKR (+11%), while most everything else was in the red. As for the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI), it rose 1% in kind to hit $419.62.
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Farm Over 200,000% APY via $OHM Staking
OlympusDAO is at the forefront of experimenting with algorithmic money. Specifically known as an algorithmic money protocol, Olympus manages its native token, $OHM, through DAO-governed policies.
In contrast to many algorithmic token projects we’ve seen to date, $OHM isn’t pegged to any external asset but is rather supported by the Olympus treasury, which manages token reserves, e.g. DAI and beyond, to ensure $OHM always has a foundation.
In this sense, $OHM is striving to become both a medium of exchange (MoE) and a unit of account (UoA). Toward this end, OlympusDAO buys and burns $OHM whenever the token sinks below the floor value of its treasury, and then via inflation creates $OHM and sells it whenever it’s above-said floor value.
Of course, Olympus is quite a new project so it still has a lot ahead of it. But eventually, the plan is that the Olympus treasury will be portioned out through DeFi in order to fetch yields, and most of these ensuing profits are being earmarked for $OHM stakers.
So that’s the 101 on how Olympus works, but how are the project’s yield pastures faring right now? High risk and high return, to say the least.
What we mean is that $OHM staking via OlympusDAO is generating stakers an astonishing 200,000% APY at the moment. This depends on how the $OHM price performs, as the token’s currently trading around $1,400 and the rewards are flowing. Yet if the $OHM price starts to crater, so too will the APY of $OHM staking. (To get a different sense of how much you can earn, normalize your $OHM staking APY to APR using bloomburger.finance).
If this sounds like a farm you’re interested in just keep in mind that it’s risky, so you don’t want to bet too many chips on it, as it were. To join, you can follow these steps:
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Acquire $OHM.
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Navigate to Olympus’s staking dashboard and connect your wallet.
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Input how much $OHM you’d like to stake, approve the Olympus smart contract, and then stake your desired amount of $OHM.
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You can monitor your rewards or unstake & claim them through the same staking dashboard whenever you please.
Olympus is interesting, but there’s no question it’s risky. If you participate in this farm, do so only after you’ve researched it thoroughly and only deposit money you can afford to lose. There’s a non-trivial chance you can lose a lot of money if things go awry with this farm!
Stack Yield on Stables By Lending + Staking Through SushiSwap’s Kashi
Kashi is a lending and margin trading protocol built atop SushiSwap’s BentoBox system that is centered around “lending, borrowing, and collateralizing” DeFi assets.
That said, this BentoBox + Kashi combo is offering stablecoin depositors some really interesting yield avenues right now.
That’s because users participating in this opportunity rack up yield from three different sources: first from depositing a stablecoin into the BentoBox’s yield strategies, second from lending that same stablecoin via Kashi for intere st, and lastly from staking your ensuing “km” tokens (e.g. kmpUSDC) through SushiSwap’s yield dashboard.
If these farms are up your alley, then navigate over to the Kashi lending hub, select your stable of choice, approve the contract, and then make your deposit.
Take your newly minted kmTokens over to SushiSwap’s yield dashboard, find your chosen pair, approve the contract, and then deposit them in. Now you’ll be earning $SUSHI rewards on top of your Kashi yields!
Kashi’s various yield opportunities are certainly interesting, but they can also be confusing to the uninitiated. Accordingly, never deposit more money than you can afford to lose into any DeFi project, no matter how reputable or compelling they are.
Today’s Plow of the Week goes to DeFi Saver once again. Such as other great tools, DeFi Saver continues to add cool new features. Check out their new Recipe Creator feature today, and combine any number of actions from different protocols, including flash loans and swaps!
Reports of DeFi’s death have been greatly exaggerated. We’re at a $55B TVL, people! It even seems silly to defend DeFi when the ecosystem’s metrics and fundamentals have never been as primed as they are now. The numbers speak for themselves. But let others who don’t know any better do what they will. Us farmers will keep farming in the meantime!
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!