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.
After facing sideways and downward chop for much of this month, DeFi’s notably been on an acute uptrend as of Tuesday. This new climb has pushed the total value locked (TVL) in the ecosystem to ~$59B, or some $4B higher than it was at this point last week.
So everyone’s breathing, and yield farming, a little easier these past few days. Yet just because crypto markets and the top DeFi apps have seen a recent influx of activity doesn’t mean everything’s totally rosy in the space right now.
Indeed, this week Gary Gensler, the current Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), just put all of DeFi’s synthetic assets projects on notice in a big way.
The crux of the matter is that dapps like Synthetix offer users synthetic exposure to U.S. securities, e.g. sAAPL. In Chairman Gensler’s newest crypto remarks, he specifically noted that DeFi projects that offer these kinds of synths are “implicated by the securities laws and must work within our securities regime.”
The takeaway? The SEC maestro is suggesting enforcement is coming. Thus wherever you stand on the matter, it seems affected projects pretty much only have three options going forward:
-
Conform to U.S. federal security laws, and do so quickly.
-
Decentralize totally and ignore these laws, spurring enforcement actions around the periphery of dapps.
-
Do nothing and hope and pray the SEC never gets around to enforcement.
Showdowns are coming, then.
And since the SEC is one of the most powerful financial regulators in the world, these fights certainly aren’t ones for stakeholders to take lightly. DeFi’s now big enough that the world’s biggest financial watchdogs are starting to seriously recognize its power and potential, so whatever ends up happening, there’s certainly no going back from here.
Lastly, it’s time to recap this week’s best-performing DeFi tokens. We’ve just seen strong 7-day runs from CVX (+79%), HEGIC (+60%), SUSHI (+29%), and OHM (+9%) The DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) is up 0.67% to $284.19 in that same span.
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.
Farm NFTX V2 protocol fees via NFT liquidity staking!
So you want quick, floor-price liquidity on your NFT?
You’ve got two options: go to an NFT marketplace like OpenSea and list your NFT on the cheap (hoping someone nabs it rapidly), or you can go to NFTX V2 and see if there’s an associated NFT Vault for the project you’re looking for.
That’s because NFTX is an NFT liquidity protocol
Hitherto NFTs have been inherently illiquid, but NFTX helps bridge that liquidity divide by facilitating permissionless Vaults that contain floor-price assets from popular NFT series.
This dynamic allows:
-
NFT holders to earn yields by supplying NFTs to NFTX Vaults.
-
Investors to gain easy, fractional exposure to the Vaults’ underlying NFTs via their representative vTokens, which can be traded readily and around the clock on Sushi’s AMM.
-
Arbitrageurs to capitalize on inefficiencies in NFT markets, e.g. price discrepancies on CryptoPunks when comparing OpenSea and NFTX Vault prices.
Zapping into Vault Liquidity Staking
NFTX V2 just exited its beta, and thus the protocol has switched on the distribution of its Vault minting fees and so forth.
With revenues now unleashed, these protocol fees are finally accruing to users who:
-
Mint NFTs into NFTX Vaults.
-
Supply the ensuing vToken liquidity to Sushi.
-
Stake their Sushi liquidity provider (SLP) tokens back on NFTX.
To get started with one of these yield opportunities, then, you’ll need at least one NFT from a series that has an associated NFTX Vault, e.g. CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Meebits, etc.
Note: at this point it’s important you keep in mind that you only want to provide “floor-price,” i.e. non-rare NFTs, to NFTX Vaults. If you mint rare NFTs into these Vaults, you’ll be leaving money on the table.
The good news is that if/once you do have your NFT liquidity prepared, NFTX makes staking super simple courtesy of its new streamlined zap system. Within a single transaction, this system lets you “mint NFTs into a Vault without being charged minting fees, provide liquidity on Sushi, and stake your SLP position on NFTX.”
So if you are interested in earning yield by depositing NFTs to NFTX, zapping in is definitely the friendliest way to go! To do so, you can follow these steps:
-
Navigate to the NFTX V2 Vaults page and select your Vault of choice.
-
In the ensuing dashboard, click on the “Mint” tab and then select the NFT/NFTs you want to mint into the Vault. On the sidebar press “Mint & Stake” and then “Continue.”
-
The sidebar will bring up an interface where you can input how much liquidity you want to provide with your vToken and ETH on Sushi. Choose so, approve the contract with a transaction, and then press the “Mint & Stake” button.
-
Boom! That simple. Once that transaction is confirmed, you’ll be yield farming in the most stylish fashion … by providing NFT liquidity that is!
NFTX V2 has been audited and it’s now moved out of a beta state, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t still happen to the young, promising protocol. Just make sure that you do your own research too before depositing into any DeFi project and that you never deposit more money than you can afford to lose.
Farm via BarnBridge SMART Yield staking
BarnBridge is one of DeFi’s premier tokenized risk protocols, and among the project’s premier products is SMART Yield.
SMART Yield is a debt-based derivatives system that offers its users to capably surf DeFi interest rates via tranched yields. In other words, you can enjoy fixed-rate or variable returns on your stablecoins via SMART Yield via integrations with lending protocols Aave, Compound, and C.R.E.A.M. Finance.
The advantage of this system for yield farmers? You can rack up BarnBridge BOND rewards + protocol rewards (e.g. AAVE) + fees! So that’s a solid trifecta if we’ve ever seen one in DeFi.
If these sound like the yield pastures for you, head over to the SMART Yield dashboard and supply assets to the opportunity of your choice. Then take your ensuing LP tokens and stake them through the BarnBridge Pools page. At this point, you’ll start earning yields from up to three different avenues.
BarnBridge’s infrastructure is proven and reliable at this point, so these yield opportunities are far from sketchy. Even still, you should never farm with more money than you can afford to lose.
We’re incredibly excited to see different L2 solutions come to life and start providing new rails for DeFi! That’s why today’s Plow of the Week goes to the recently unveiled Optimistic Ethereum Etherscan explorer! Please go check it out and start tracking those L2 transactions in the good old-fashioned way!
DeFi’s seemingly back on the mend after a bit of a rough patch, and it feels like a lot of people are preparing for the next big ramp in the second half of 2021. The fact is, none of us know if that near-term run is really coming. But many of us have been saying since the start of the year that it feels like the end of 2021 is shaping up to have some fireworks. We’re about to find out, one way or another 😎
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!