mStable guide series. This is part of a series of “how to guides” that will cover the basic mStable product suite, before getting into more advanced topics.
EARN is mStable’s liquidity mining program where users can earn mStable’s governance token, Meta (MTA), in exchange for providing liquidity on various incentivized liquidity pools.
In this guide, we’ll breakdown a few ways to interact with the EARN pools and your options for earning MTA rewards.
Liquidity pools are pools of tokens stored in a smart contract, used to facilitate functions such as market making, liquidity provision, and borrowing/lending of tokens in a decentralized way.
A single liquidity pool can contain 2 or more tokens in it and creates a market where these tokens can be traded.
For example, mStable incentivizes the MTA/WETH liquidity pool on Uniswap to facilitate MTA liquidity with WETH (wrapped Ether) to allow for easy trading of MTA against WETH.
Finematics has a great introduction to liquidity pools that you can check out if you’d like to learn more.
In order to use EARN to receive MTA rewards, users currently need to go through the following steps:
- Provide liquidity to the underlying liquidity pool (Curve, Uniswap, or Balancer currently) and get LP tokens
- Contribute the underlying LP tokens using mStable’s EARN dashboard
Only once these LP tokens have been contributed through EARN will you start earning MTA rewards. Contributing to the liquidity pool alone without locking the LP token in mStable’s EARN contracts will mean you miss out on MTA rewards.
The first step is to connect your wallet with one of our many supported web3 wallet connectors.
mStable supports many popular connectors like Metamask, Fortmatic, WalletConnect, and WalletLink.
When you head over to the EARN tab for the first time, you will be presented with a simple introduction about Meta and its core functionalities. Read through this as you scroll across the interface, and then enter the EARN portal. Once there, you will be presented with a similar guide on how you can interact with the EARN pools.
Under Ecosystem pools, you’ll find a list of pools that are currently incentivized with MTA rewards.
The weekly rewards for each pool can be found in the last column on the right. For instance, in the above screenshot, you can see that we are currently incentivizing the USDC/mUSD 50/50 pool with 10K $MTA to liquidity providers providing liquidity in that particular pool every week.
These weekly rewards are subjected to review by governance and will eventually be programmatically emitted and altered subject to the voting decisions of Meta Governors.
There are currently several underlying protocols which have pools that can be contributed to in order to earn MTA rewards:
As stated before, Liquidity Providers need to contribute liquidity to one of these pools and stake their liquidity provider tokens in the smart contract to be eligible for MTA rewards.
Let’s take a look at each type of protocol in greater detail.
Uniswap is a decentralized protocol for automated liquidity provision on Ethereum. There is currently one liquidity pool eligible for MTA rewards — MTA/WETH50/50.
In order to contribute liquidity to the MTA/WETH 50/50 pool in Uniswap, you need to deposit an equivalent value of each underlying token (i.e. MTA and WETH) on Uniswap.
In return for contributing liquidity, you will receive the UNI-V2 LP tokens which track pro-rata your share of the total reserves in this pool and can be redeemed for the underlying assets at any time.
You then need to stake these LP tokens in EARN in the Deposit Stake section to begin accruing MTA rewards in real-time!
Balancer is a generalized automated market maker (AMM ) that is similar to Uniswap but with a customizable number of assets and weights within a pool.
There are currently several Balancer incentivized liquidity pools such as the WETH/mUSD 50/50 pool.
In order to contribute liquidity to the Balancer pool, you will need to head over to the liquidity pool page on Balancer.
Connect your wallet and click on Add liquidity, you’d be asked to set up a proxy contract to manage liquidity on Balancer — this will help you avoid token approvals on every new pool you interact with.
Once you’ve set it up, you can now add liquidity to the pool either using a single asset or multiple assets.
When contributing liquidity using a single asset, Balancer will automatically convert into the proportions of the pool, so it’s ideal to supply both sides of the pool.
Curve’s mUSD/3Pool is the latest addition to mStable’s incentivised EARN pool program. Currently, the mUSD/3POOL on Curve is incentivized for low-slippage stablecoin trades on Curve.
To contribute liquidity on Curve, you will need to head over to the Deposit tab on Curve and contribute liquidity using one of the supported stablecoins (mUSD, DAI, USDC, or USDT).
In return for contributing liquidity, you’ll receive musd3CRV tokens which represent your share of this liquidity pool. Remember to stake these tokens in EARN to qualify for MTA rewards.
Zapper.Fi allows users to execute all of these different steps in one easy to use place, making EARN pool contribution even easier.
If you head over to the Invest tab on Zapper, you can search for these incentivized liquidity pools where you can contribute liquidity directly from Zapper’s interface.
The folks at Zapper have also made it super easy to contribute liquidity to any of the EARN pools through their app with just a zap.
The zap automatically converts the input tokens and adds liquidity in the pool in the correct ratio within a single transaction.
You can then proceed to stake the LP tokens on the same page.
mUSD liquidity and MTA utility remain a key goal for mStable, and we want to incentivize the right behaviors and outcomes for the long-term growth of the protocol. We are also thinking about ways to create organic value accrual for MTA.
As the protocol’s demands change over time, we will continue to review these liquidity pools together with the community on a weekly basis.