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 climbs $3B! — Since last weekend, the DeFi ecosystem’s total value locked (TVL) climbed from $87B to $90B. This acute rise once again puts DeFi within clear striking distance of its newest all-time TVL high, $98.28B, which the space notably achieved last week 🎯
Are new milestones just around the corner, then? Well, what happens in the short-term is anyone’s guess, yet with DeFi’s TVL at +$90B there’s cause for optimism. That’s because that figure isn’t just arbitrary — it suggests a certain strength and certain possibilities of momentum that are, frankly, relatively new for our space.
🍣 SushiSwap in the news — Popular DeFi exchange SushiSwap (formerly known as SushiSwap) had a bit of a busy week, to say the least!
Things took a turn for the worse on Thursday when a SushiSwap contractor used injected code to maliciously divert nearly 900 ETH from the project’s Miso token launchpad to their personal wallet.
Sushi’s team quickly identified the culprit, who promptly returned the funds. Phew. The episode came to a fortunate conclusion, then, but for DeFi projects the snafu is a stark reminder to keep an eye out for blackhats within their ranks 🕵♀️
Additionally, SushiSwap also made headlines yesterday when news broke that Maki, the exchange’s anonymous leader, would be stepping down from his leadership position at the DEX project. Maki is seemingly universally respected in DeFi and has big shoes to fill, so everyone’s wishing him well and is excited to see what he does from here 🥂
💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen notable runs from the following top DeFi tokens:
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📈 REN (+31.6%)
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📈 OHM (+30.4%)
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📈 CRV (+30.2%)
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📈 SUSHI (+20.4%)
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📈 DYDX (+15.7%)
👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $376.15, up 11.39% on the week!
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🌾 Yield farm +1,000% APR via Impermax on Arbitrum!
Liquidity provider tokens are ubiquitous across DeFi now. Yet in earlier times, all you could really do with your LP tokens was hold ‘em.
DeFi has matured considerably since those days, though, and now we have better understandings and better systems in place to make assets productive in unprecedented ways. LP tokens are no exception here!
Toward that end, one newer project doing interesting work right now is Impermax Finance — a lending protocol designed explicitly to help users leverage their LP tokens!
We’ve covered Impermax as an Alpha Tractor and Farm of the Week before, but those write-ups focused on the project’s L1 Ethereum possibilities. We’re highlighting the lending protocol anew now that it’s live on Arbitrum and offering compelling early L2 yield farms.
Farming $IMX on Arbitrum
To farm Impermax’s native $IMX token on Arbitrum, you have to borrow tokens through one of the protocol’s incentivized lending pools on Arbitrum.
Out of the gate, then, make sure you’ve added the Arbitrum network to your MetaMask wallet and that you’ve migrated over any tokens you need to the L2 using the Arbitrum Token Bridge (check out this bridging tutorial if you need any help here).
Once you’ve got everything prepped, you can follow these general steps:
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Identify which Impermax market you want to deposit into. Currently supported markets include SushiSwap’s WBTC/ETH, ETH/IMX, ETH/USDC, ETH/USDT, ETH/SUSHI, and ETH/NYAN trading pairs on Arbitrum.
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Deposit into your SushiSwap pool of choice, then navigate to Impermax’s Arbitrum markets with your new SLP tokens in tow.
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Select your desired market, press “Deposit”, and select the amount of LP tokens you want to supply as collateral.
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After your deposit transaction confirms, you can either use the leverage function or choose which of your supplied tokens you want to borrow (e.g. WBTC, ETH, or both for users of the WBTC/ETH market), and how many you want to borrow.
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After your borrow transaction confirms, you’ll automatically start accruing $IMX rewards on L2! Track and withdraw your tokens through this same interface whenever you please.
For a better understanding of the risks associated with Impermax, check out the “Risks of Using Impermax Finance” guide. Also make sure you generally understand how Arbitrum works before attempting to farm these new DeFi yield pastures, and never deposit more money than you can afford to lose.
Lastly, some of Impermax’s Arbitrum metrics may currently be inaccurate in the project’s UI. For accurate numbers, check out this resource: yield.impermax.finance/arbitrum/impermax.
Do you want to learn more about Arbitrum? Check our recent DeFi Pulse Academy post: What is Arbitrum? Everything you need to know about the Ethereum scaling solution
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Introducing the Auto Router
TLDR: Uniswap’s builders unveil the Auto Router, a new tool designed to find the best possible prices for Uniswap app traders. -
Arbitrum One Outage Report
TLDR: Offchain Labs, the creators of Arbitrum, detail how the Arbitrum Sequencer went offline for ~45 minutes this week. -
mStable Staking Migration Guide
TLDR: Stablecoin protocol mStable publishes a guide explaining how users can migrate to the project’s new and improved V2 system. -
EY and Polygon to Co-develop Polygon Nightfall
TLDR: “Big Four” firm EY is teaming up with scaling suite project Polygon on Polygon Nightfall, a privacy-centric L2 combining elements from both Optimistic and ZK Rollups. -
YAM Minting Incident Post-Mortem
TLDR: Yam Finance addresses how a recent community on-chain governance proposal accidentally minted 20B new YAM tokens. -
Introducing Sherlock
TLDR: The Sherlock team officially introduces the Sherlock Protocol, an upstart risk management platform built on Ethereum. -
Spruce Begins Work on Sign-in with Ethereum
TLDR: The Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum Name Service accept the Spruce team’s proposal to develop “Sign-in with Ethereum” standards so users can truly own web accounts.
🚜 Farm +18% on Curve’s Arbitrum deployment!
Okay, so you’ve finally moved some funds over to Arbitrum and now have a borrow position open through Impermax.
Now what?
Maybe consider a little yin and yang action by pairing your Impermax farming with comparatively conservative Curve liquidity pools, three of which are currently live on Arbitrum!
If these pastures are of any interest to you, your options are as follows for now:
Not bad, right? The most lucrative possibility is the Tricrypto pool (roughly equal parts USDT, WBTC, and WETH), which is offering up to 18.3% in boosted CRV rewards at the moment.
You’d start with these farms the same way as I described for Impermax above, i.e. first make sure you have Abritrum added to your MetaMask and some funds bridged over. With that done make your deposits as you please, and then you’ll be farming L2 style!
Curve’s smart contracts are well audited, but the entire L2 ecosystem is one big experiment right now. That said, never invest money into that ecosystem that you can’t afford to lose.
Do you want to dive more into Yield Farming opportunities? Become a premium subscriber and get access to:
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Alpha Tractor Series: giving you intel into the freshest yield for the most honest farmers only.
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The Protocol Express: a weekly recap of APYs and new pools on major protocols and a highlight of an emerging opportunity.
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Access to the Alpha Tractor Premium Discord channel.
NFT Watcher
Interested in tracking inflow and outflow activities across Ethereum’s top L2 bridges? Look no further than this new Ethereum Bridges Dune Analytics dashboard by Elias Simos!
Are L2s like Arbitrum the future? 🤔
Yes! Yet things will evolve a lot further from here, so stay excited. Here’s what I mean.
In three weeks since launching, Arbitrum’s TVL has swelled to nearly ~$3B. That’s just a taste of the incredible demand that’s pent up for super fast, super cheap Ethereum-based transactions, but it’s also just the start of the action, too.
L2s have only started hitting the fore for the first time this year, after all! So going forward expect to see a few things:
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The arrival of even more advanced L2s;
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“L3” solutions like Hop Protocol and Connext’s Vector making it increasingly easy to move crypto across all sorts of chains;
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and Ethereum’s eventual implementation of sharding making L2s even more efficient!
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!