👨🌾️ Farm +100% APR via Tracer staking & peep Balancer’s Polygon pastures!
Also, read about the Badger front-end attack + more DeFi governance updates!
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 volatility returns — After dropping to $90B last weekend, the total value locked (TVL) in Ethereum DeFi surged as high as $105.5B this week before dropping to ~$97.6B today. The big move up and then down has everyone wondering: what’s next? We’ll have to wait and see for now.
🔪 BadgerDAO attack is big news — This week attackers hit bitcoin-centric yield protocol BadgerDAO with a “front-end” maneuver that nefariously netted $120M from its users.
In other words, BadgerDAO’s smart contracts weren’t exploited in this incident. Instead an attacker or group was able to compromise the Badger website, apparently via an API key, and then the intruding force was able to start intercepting users’ transactions.
Worse yet, centralized crypto lending company Celsius Network appears to have lost ~$50M of its own users’ funds by getting caught up in the hack. That said, there’s no question this episode will serve as a stark reminder for the entire ecosystem that DeFi front-ends are, in fact, a distinct attack vector.
💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen runs from the following top DeFi tokens:
📈 LUNA (+52%)
📈 MATIC (+19.2%)
📈 STX (+15.8%)
📈 LEO (+13%)
👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $255.47, down 23.88% on the week.
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 up to +100% APR via Tracer Pool Token staking!
Tracer is a derivatives protocol on Arbitrum that facilitates creating and trading leveraged tokens.
At the heart of the protocol are its “Factories.” These specialized DeFi mechanisms are financial contract generators that store templates. These templates can then be deployed as “Tracers,” i.e. market instances.
Notably, the project’s first Factory is its Perpetual Pools architecture. The system lets users easily create x3 long or x3 short tokens, and more leverage options coming in the future.
These leverage tokens are unique, in that they don’t expire and can’t be liquidated. Accordingly, these assets are ideal for traders who want to access leverage albeit in passive, straightforward fashion.
📌 Don’t miss DeFi Pulse’s previous Tracer guide:
A quick guide to staking for TCR
Right now, the Tracer project is running a liquidity mining campaign for its TCR token.
To join this program and start farming TCR, you have to mint leveraged tokens from the Perpetual Pools system and then stake these tokens through Tracer.
Some of these staking opportunities are yielding over 120% APR at the moment, so if you’re interested in these DeFi pastures you can follow these steps to join:
Go to the Perpetual Pools page.
Connect your wallet and make sure you’re on Arbitrum.
Pick your market and choose long/short + your desired leverage level.
Choose the amount of USDC you want to deposit (1k USDC min. for mints/burns).
Click “Unlock” to approve Tracer and then complete the mint transaction.
Navigate to the Staking page and select your market.
Finish up by inputting how many tokens you want to stake (Press “Max” to choose all of them) and complete the deposit transaction.
At that point you’d be farming TCR! You could then unwind your position through these same interfaces whenever you please.
Tracer has been audited, but it’s also a young project on the Arbitrum L2. Treat it as a risky experiment when it comes to putting your crypto into it, and never yield farm with money that you can’t afford to lose.
Tornado.Cash Deployment on Arbitrum
TLDR: The Tornado privacy project proposes deploying on the Arbitrum L2 to access the Ethereum rollup’s fast and inexpensive transactions.StarkNet Alpha, Now on Mainnet
TLDR: Speaking of L2s, the StarkNet project just launched an Alpha version of its promising scaling solution.Introducing Bancor 3
TLDR: The Bancor DEX unveils its V3 system, which brings with it a host of impressive optimizations.Realigning Incentives
TLDR: The Tracer project introduces the Convertible Allocation Mechanism, a model that allows holders of vested tokens to access future governance rights.Lyra Community Rewards
TLDR: Derivatives project Lyra announces a distribution of 13.25M LYRA to its early community members.ParaSwap Safety Module
TLDR: The ParaSwap DEX proposes adding a community liquidity component to its Safety Module system.
🌊 DeFi Pulse Power Tool: B.Protocol’s Hundred Finance Integration🌊
In our previous column we explored the B.Protocol Backstop system and how it strengthens DeFi while letting anyone easily earn from liquidations. This week we’re zooming in at the Backstop’s arrival on L2 via Hundred Finance’s new integration with B.Protocol!
Here’s what you need to know:
A fork of Compound, Hundred Finance is a lending protocol deployed on Arbitrum. Liquidations make the project go ‘round, which is where the B.Protocol integration comes in.
Now users can deploy their USDC or USDT to the Hundred Finance Backstop pool to earn HND rewards and help keep the project solvent through liquidations. It’s a DeFi win-win situation!
For anyone interested, note that Backstop deposits are made via the “Supply Markets” interface on the Hundred Finance app. Look for markets that have the B.Protocol logo and then go to the “Backstop” tab. Also, check that your wallet is connected to Arbitrum to ensure you’re seeing the right markets!
Disclosure: This section is part of our paid promotional Partners Program; We’ve partnered with B.Protocol to help educate and inform the community about this new Backstop DeFi primitive. As always, we’re committed to providing the entire community with quality, objective information, and any opinions we express are our own.
🚜 Farm Balancer’s Polygon pastures for +70% APR!
Balancer is one of the most flexible DEXes in DeFi, but equally as interesting right now are the exchange’s juicy yields on Polygon
For instance, the project’s WMATIC-WETH-BAL-USDC pool on Polygon (as depicted above) is yielding LPs over 71.5% APR currently. Not bad!
That’s not all, though. Some other pools also worth watching at the moment include:
USDC-WETH 50/50 (36% APR)
WBTC-WETH-USDC (29% APR)
WETH-BAL-AAVE-LINK-USDC (38% APR)
Just make sure you’ve got your wallet set up with the Polygon network and some liquidity ready before attempting to proceed!
Balancer is a proven project that’s been audited and battle-tested. However, always yield farm responsibly and never deposit more money than you can afford to lose!
Uniswap approves a consensus check regarding deploying Uniswap V3 on Polygon.
Compound votes on updating the risk parameters of COMP, UNI, and WBTC.
Curve votes to transition to its own crypto swaps instead of synth swaps for fee conversions.
Aave votes on extending additional voting powers to stkAbpt tokens.
Sushiswap is gauging interest in a community-enabled analytics program.
Budweiser changes its Twitter name to beer.eth (ENS names are NFTs) and releases an NFT project.
Did you know? You can see Premia positions as NFTs on OpenSea.
🔆 DeFi Pulse Pro Tip: How to bond + stake on Solace 🔆
Solace is a decentralized coverage protocol that makes it easy for DeFi LPs to insure their positions against smart contract exploits.
Earlier this week, we demonstrated how simple it is to buy such coverage in our write-up How to protect your crypto with Solace. We’ll follow that up now with an explainer on how to bond and stake your $SOLACE!
First off, note that capital providers fund Solace’s Underwriting Pool in exchange for discounted/vested $SOLACE and access to earning policy sales/staking rewards.
For bonding, you would thus start by heading over to solace.fi/bond and picking an asset you want to supply. Assets supported currently include ETH, DAI, USDC, SCP, and SOLACE-USDC SLP tokens.
Next, you’d press “Bond,” approve Solace to spend your funds, input how much crypto you want to deposit, and complete the transaction. Done! Then, to actually access your governance rights + ongoing protocol earnings, you need to stake your $SOLACE.
To do so, you’d head to solace.fi/stake, input how much $SOLACE you want to stake, and then press “Stake” and complete the deposit. After that’s done, you’ll have finished the bonding/staking process. It’s that straightforward!
Disclosure: This post is part of our paid promotional DeFi Pulse Drop series; We’ve partnered with Solace to help educate and inform the community about their decentralized coverage services. As always, we’re committed to providing the entire community with quality, objective information, and any opinions we express are our own.
DeFi Safety PQRs are “process quality reviews,” i.e. independently-produced security scores for top DeFi projects. In other words, the higher a project’s score the more closely it adheres to best-practices. These PQRs and their associated reports are fantastic resources if you want to study how safe a protocol is!
What are some good gift ideas for DeFi users this holiday season? 🤔
Resources that can help people “level up” their DeFi activities are certainly possibilities.
For example, covering the costs of a Nansen or TokenTax subscription are options here. Both services accept crypto payments, which is a big plus.
Another low-hanging fruit to consider? Shopping for the merch of top DeFi projects. At the very least, a cool shirt would make for a good “stocking stuffer.”
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!