👨🌾️ Farm ~130% APR with Vesta Finance staking | Earn via Hop x Gnosis!
Also, read about Bitfinex’s recovered funds + 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!
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📈 DeFi TVL climbs further — After rising from $77B to $83B the week prior, the total value locked (TVL) in Ethereum DeFi continued its upward trend by growing from $83B to $87B since last weekend. Could we reach +$100B again in the near future? I think there’s a good chance it happens sooner rather than later.
💰 Driving crypto news — Feds recover $3.6B from Bitfinex hackers
Sometimes life is stranger than fiction, and that dynamic played out in the cryptoeconomy this week. The catalyst? The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recovering billions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin that was linked to the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex.
The crazy part of the episode? The people arrested, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, are nothing like the “shadowy super coders” you think would have been involved in such a hack. And they lived in Manhattan, which isn’t exactly an ideal place to lay low if you’ve stolen a warchest of crypto!
Did an actual hacker sell the couple the bitcoin at a major discount, and they had no idea what they were getting into? That’s pure speculation, though Lichtenstein and Morgan’s seemingly mundane personal lives has made some folks wonder.
💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen runs from the following top DeFi tokens:
📈 KEEP (+60.7%)
📈 DYDX (+32.8%)
📈 LRC (+24.7%)
👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $190.11, up by 0.22% on the week.
Related resources:
🌾 Farm ~130% APR with Vesta Finance liquidity mining!
Vesta Finance is a decentralized borrowing protocol that launched this week on the Arbitrum layer-two (L2) scaling solution.
The project’s based on Liquity, which we’ve covered before. Yet instead of LUSD, Vesta Stable (VST) is the project’s stablecoin, and instead of the LQTY token Vesta’s fee-accrual asset is VSTA. The protocol’s unique model lets users borrow against collateral like ETH without having to pay any interest.
How to join this farm
Right now, Vesta Finance is conducting liquidity mining programs around its VSTA and VST tokens in order to bootstrap its young ecosystem.
For this Farm of the Week, then, we’re focusing on the more volatile but higher-yielding VSTA-ETH liquidity provider (LP) token staking opp, which is generating ~130% APR at the moment. Here’s how it works:
First, make sure you have Arbitrum added to your browser wallet; you can use Chainlist for this if you haven’t done so before.
Next you’d need to deposit into Balancer’s VSTA-ETH pool on Arbitrum to acquire LP tokens.
Balancer allows for single token deposits, so the bare minimum to get started with this farm is to bridge some ETH over to Arbitrum.
You could use the official Arbitrum Bridge or a fast bridge like Hop.
If you want to proceed then head to the VSTA-ETH pool, input your deposit size, and carry out the deposit transaction. After this completes you’ll receive your LP tokens.
To finish up you’d go to Vesta’s LP token staking dashboard and click on the VSTA-ETH option.
Input the amount of LP tokens you want to stake, press “Approve,” and complete the approval transaction. After this finish the final staking transaction and then you’ll start racking up VSTA rewards. You can track and claim these rewards or unstake through this same UI whenever you please.
Vesta has been audited and is getting more. However, this yield farm entails market risks, impermanent loss (IL) risks, smart contract risks, and more. Yields will drop fast if many people join in short order. Be shrewd and never deposit money into any project that you can’t afford to lose.
B.Protocol and Vesta integration is live
TLDR: B.Protocol, a backstop liquidity protocol, launches a stability pool interface for Vesta Finance.Polygon raises $450M to scale Ethereum
TLDR: Polygon, the “internet of blockchains” for Ethereum, raises $450M in an investment round led by Sequoia Capital India.Quantum Gravity Bridge
TLDR: Celestia Labs introduces Celestiums, a type of L2 scaling solution that uses Celestia instead of Ethereum as a data availability (DA) solution, and a related bridging project.Superfluid exploit post-mortem
TLDR: Decentralized money streaming app Superfluid outlines the details of its Feb. 8th attack incident.The Ocean
TLDR: The Shell Protocol team explains the details of its upcoming Shell v2 system.
🚜 Farm with ETH, DAI, or USDC via Hop & Gnosis!
Hop Exchange is one of DeFi’s most popular “fast bridges” right now.
In short, the protocol relies on liquidity pools to let users quickly move funds among its currently supported chains, which are Ethereum, Arbitrum, Gnosis Chain, Optimism, and Polygon.
Our interest here today? Well, last week Hop kicked off a cool collaboration with Gnosis Chain that will see GNO rewards distributed to LPs in Hop’s ETH, DAI, and USDC Gnosis pools.
Keen on this opp? You would need to:
Bridge ETH/USDC/DAI to Gnosis via Hop’s Send hub.
Add liquidity to your pool of choice via the Pools dashboard.
Stake your LP tokens through the Stake UI.
That’s it! You can later unstake and claim your rewards through this same UI as you please.
Hop has been audited. However, all DeFi yield farming comes with multiple levels of risk. Never deposit funds you can’t afford to lose! And keep in mind that these opps’ yields will be volatile if many people join or leave in short order.
Gnosis proposes spinning out Gnosis Safe into safeDAO with a SAFE governance token.
Ribbon Finance proposes Ribbonomics, which would transition RBN into veCRV-style tokenomics.
Uniswap votes on whether to deploy Uniswap V3 to the Harmony blockchain.
There’s lots of opportunity around NFTs right now, but it’s dizzying trying to keep up with everything happening around this 24/7 ecosystem. That’s where Watchtower comes in, a new app for easily discovering hot new NFT projects and tracking notable NFT traders and market events!
What’s the next big thing in DeFi? 🤔
There are some growing DeFi themes that yield farmers will want to watch closely in the months ahead. These are:
The arrival of major L2 tokens (think Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.)
L2 token liquidity mining programs
Bridge liquidity mining programs (e.g. Hop x Gnosis, Synapse, etc.)
Alt-L1 DeFi yield opps
Alt-L1 token airdrops
Then again, you don’t have to watch too closely because you've always got us to fall back on. These are precisely the sorts of opportunities we’re looking to curate and make sense of for you this year, so stay tuned!
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!