DeFi Pulse Farmer #41 – DeFi Pulse Farmer

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.

Since this point last week, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi has risen +$5B to its current position over $82.7B — just below the new all-time high of $86.71B that was set this Tuesday, i.e. the peak seen on the very right of the TVL graph below. 

The march to $100B and beyond is advancing at an impressive pace, then. Some said it would never be possible, but now it’s all but a certainty. 

And we can’t get too cocky yet, sure, but a world where DeFi manages trillions of dollars worth of value has never seemed so viable. We’ve certainly already taken the first major steps in that direction, and onward and upward I say. Empowering the finances of people across the globe is what’s at stake, so the journey’s certainly worth it!

As for the TVLs of top DeFi projects, it’s been another bloom week (with the exception of Compound, which went slightly down). The growth in that span looked like so:

• Maker ($13.41B 📈 $14.38B)

• Aave ($10.98B 📈 $11.75B) 

• Compound ($10.67B 📉 $10.58B)

• Curve ($7.50B 📈 $7.93B)

• Uniswap ($7.65B 📈 $7.88B)

Then we’ve also seen a handful of major headlines in recent days. Some of the biggest news drivers included:

• Aave is building a permissioned lending pool for institutions — Can you hear that? It’s the sound of a small herd of institutions rushing over to try out an enterprise lending pool that Aave’s building with in-built AML and KYC restrictions. This kind of “guard railing” may make a lot more companies comfortable with diving directly into DeFi, so this thread’s certainly one to keep a close eye on going forward. 

• DeFi Pulse (through Pulse Inc) and Index Coop launched BTC 2x-FLI. The new index tokenizes a collateralized debt position in a single ERC-20 token on Set Protocol and allows Bitcoin bulls to gain 2x long exposure to WBTC price.

• Ethereum is now halfway to the flippening — ETH’s market cap is now over 50% of the market cap of BTC, in no small part because ETH is the reserve currency of DeFi, and DeFi is booming. And as DeFi continues to grow, which it will, ETH’s chances of flippening increase all the while. 

Lastly, let’s do our usual run-through of the best-performing DeFi tokens during the week. In that span, we saw notable buy pressure around YFI (+32.9%), AAVE (+27.5%), and QUICK (+24%), ETH2X-FLI (+18.7%), and PERP (+10%). The DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) also climbed 39.58% to hit $598.94. 

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

Accumulate and bundle yield generating assets with your favorite longs on DEXTF today.

Earn 3-Digit APRs via Synthetix Staking around sUSD/Stocks Pools

This week we’ve got some compelling Synthetix yield pastures for your consideration, as the OG farming fields are still here, going strong, and now they’re lined with modern crops!

Indeed, as DeFi’s reigning synthetic assets protocol, Synthetix has solidified its position by expanding its tokenized stock offerings to include some of the most highly-sought stocks in the world, e.g. sAAPL, sAMZN, sFB, sGOOG, sNFLX, and sMSFT.

Being able to buy and trade these tokenized assets permissionlessly and around the clock is powerful by itself. What’s even cooler is that in DeFi, you can provide liquidity around these tokens on Balancer, stake your LP tokens on Synthetix, and then farm some pretty attractive APRs as denominated in SNX rewards and Balancer trading fees. 

For many of us, there’s nothing like farming blue-chip DeFi tokens, so if you’re interested in these farms the process of joining is straightforward. First things first, you’ll want to start by picking up some sUSD, the native stablecoin of Synthetix. That’s because you’ll need sUSD to 1) buy your desired synthetic on the Kwenta exchange, and 2) to supply liquidity to your chosen synthetic’s Balancer pool.

Once you’ve prepped your tokens and are ready to proceed, you can follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Synthetix Staking dashboard and click on your pool of choice. 

2. Scroll over and click on the “Add liquidity on Balancer here” button. 

3. You’ll be taken to a Balancer pool, e.g. the 80/20 sUSD/sAAPL pool. Press the “Add liquidity” button, input your desired amount of liquidity, and confirm the deposit transaction. 

4. Once the deposit is completed, you’ll receive Balancer Pool Tokens (BPT), i.e. Balancer’s LP tokens. Take these tokens back over to the Synthetix Staking dashboard, find your pool again, input the amount of BPT tokens you want to stake, and then press the “Stake” button. 

5. After this staking transaction is completed, you’ll be farming SNX! You can claim your rewards or unstake through this same dashboard whenever you want.

Synthetix and Balancer are proven protocols, so these yield pastures are certainly among the safer you’ll find in the DeFi ecosystem. Be smart, be safe, do your own research, and only farm if you farm responsibly. 

Farmers can enhance this week’s farms with our sponsor Alpha Finance. Its recently launched Alpha Homora V2 allows farmers to do leveraged yield farming on pools that are on Curve, Balancer, SushiSwap, and Uniswap. Farmers can also lend assets such as ETH, DAI, USDT & USDC.

In Alpha Homora V2 farmers can open leveraged yield farming positions for selected pools and, similar as in Alpha Homora V1, farmers don’t need to have equal value of both tokens to yield farm. Head over to Alpha Homora V2 and start farming or lending today!

• Meet Balancer V2
  TLDR: Balancer Labs announces that the optimized Balancer V2 AMM system is now live on mainnet. 

• Looking forward at Rari Capital
  TLDR: Yield aggregator project Rari Capital outlines how it plans to address the loss of 2,600 ETH stolen in an exploit conducted on May 8th. 

• The Maker Foundation Focuses on Its Dissolution
  TLDR: The Maker Foundation reveals that it’s targeting early Dec. 2021 for its dissolution date. 

• Wen Arbitrum?
  TLDR: The team behind Arbitrum, an Optimistic Rollup scaling protocol, sets late May 2021 as the tentative launch time for the Arbitrum mainnet. 

• Introducing UMA’s Optimistic Oracle
  TLDR: UMA Protocol reveals the Optimistic Oracle, an innovation that will allow all kinds of data to be brought on-chain. 

• SUSHI + MISO: The Perfect Combo
  TLDR: SushiSwap prepares ahead of the rollout of its token launchpad platform, MISO, which is slated for May 17th.

Earn up to 28% APY via New KeeperDAO Liquidity Pools

Game-theory protocol KeeperDAO is centered around “keeper strategies,” which entail large liquidity pools being put to use around activities like liquidations and rebalances in DeFi. 

The power of KeeperDAO, then, is its large liquidity pools can do more — and thus reap more benefits for all participants — than if these pools’ participants were all working alone and by themselves. Strength in numbers, right!

So KeeperDAO is quite interesting, and we’re zooming in now because the project just launched its ACT III liquidity pools this week. These pools have returns (as denominated in KeeperDAO’s native ROOK token) starting at 12% APY for the ETH pool and going up to 28% APY for the DAI pool currently. Other possibilities for your consideration include WETH, USDC, and renBTC pools. 

If these yields grab your attention, you’re in luck, because joining these pools is very easy. Ready your desired token, head over to KeeperDAO, click on your pool, and then on the ensuing page click on the “Deposit” button. Input the amount you want to supply, confirm the transaction, and then you’ll be farming ROOK in ACT III! You’ll receive kTokens that can be redeemed for your underlying liquidity whenever you want. 

These yield farms are nice and well audited, but never throw caution to the wind in DeFi. Only farm with portions of your stack, and never with more money than you can afford to lose. 

If you haven’t checked Crypto Fees already, you should. This Saturday’s Plow of the Week has launched a very cool new feature that we wanted to share. You can now filter by categories such as layer 1, lending or cross-chain, and by blockchain. Check it out!

It’s really happening: DeFi’s TVL is knocking on the door of $100B. I’d say that milestone could be reached within the next week or two at the rate things are going. Ultimately it is an arbitrary marker, I’ll cede that, but it’s what the moment represents and reaffirms for this ecosystem that’s why everyone is watching the metric so closely!

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!