👨🌾️ Farm +220% APR via Thales & check out DODO’s USDC-USDT pool!
Also, read about the proposed RGT & TRIBE merger + 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 faces acute dip — The total value locked (TVL) in Ethereum DeFi remains over $100B, though the sum dipped from ~$112B to ~$103B since this point last week. Are new ATHs just around the corner, or will downward market chop define the near future? Anything seems possible at this point!
🤯 Fei <> Rari token merge proposed — Rari Capital, an open interest rate protocol, is currently the 14th-largest dapp. Fei Protocol is the team behind FEI, the 8th-largest stablecoin. Now the projects’ governance tokens, RGT and TRIBE, may be on the verge of merging!
That’s per Rari’s and Fei’s teams, who this week proposed that TRIBE absorb the RGT token and that Rari become an independent contributor to, and within, the Tribe ecosystem.
The big idea here? To “connect the modern day bank to the modern day USD” to create a new kind of DeFi juggernaut! Indeed, the space has never seen a merger on this scale before, so if it advances we may see other protocols try similar melds in an attempt to keep up!
💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen runs from the following top DeFi tokens:
📈 IDEX (+55%)
📈 WNXM (+18.9%)
📈 LDO (+11.8%)
📈 KEEP (+5.5%)
👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $343.68, down 12.25% on the week.
🪐 Coming Soon: Vesper Orbit - Nov 23th
Vesper Finance is launching a yield optimizer app for emerging tokens, and $DPI is among the first assets the system will support! Starting Tuesday, Nov. 23, users can deposit and start earning through Vesper Orbit’s official online app, orbit.vesper.finance.
🌾 Farm +227% with the Thales pool on DODO!
Thales is a permissionless binary options protocol built on Ethereum (with plans to deploy on the Optimism L2 soon, too).
If you need a refresher, binary options are “yes or no” instruments. Either your bet (e.g. on the ETH price) pans out and you win a predetermined amount of profit, or your bet fails and you lose all you paid to buy the option in the first place.
In other words, binary options turn hedging and speculating into a very straightforward affair. You know what you stand to win/lose at all times. And Thales is looking to make these exotic options easy to use for DeFi traders.
📌 Don’t miss DeFi Pulse’s previous Thales guide:
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A quick guide to THALES farming
Back in September, the Thales team activated a liquidity mining campaign for the THALES-WETH pool on the DODO exchange.
This incentivization program will be active for the next few months and is currently offering +185% APR via THALES token rewards and 42% APR via DODO token rewards.
To join these yield pastures, you would first need to supply liquidity to the incentivized THALES-WETH pool and then stake your ensuing LP tokens through the DODO Earn dashboard. Here’s what that process would look like:
To start, make sure you have some THALES and WETH for supplying.
Next, head over to DODO’s THALES-WETH pool and connect your wallet. To do this first agree to Thales’s terms, choose the Ethereum network, and then select your wallet provider.
Now input the amount of tokens you want to supply. Complete the approval transaction(s) as needed, and then follow-up with the final deposit transaction.
With that you’ll receive DODO liquidity provider (DLP) tokens. Navigate to the DODO Earn mining dashboard and scroll down and click on the Thales pool option.
If this is your first time staking on DODO, you’ll need to fire off another approval transaction. Then input the amount of DLP you want to stake and press “Stake.” After completing the staking transaction, you’ll be earning THALES and DODO rewards!
Note: you can unwind your staking and LP positions through DODO Earn whenever you want.
This yield farming opportunity poses non-trivial risks with regard to impermanent loss (IL). Be cautious if you attempt to try it, and never deposit more money into a DeFi protocol than you can afford to lose!
Introducing SDL
TLDR: The decentralized exchange Saddle Finance unveils SDL, the new native token of the Saddle DAO.Introducing the PSP token
TLDR: In a bid to make Paraswap “more efficient and decentralized,” the Paraswap DEX rolls out its governance PSP token.Coinbase is looking at support for DeFi apps
TLDR: Coinbase’s CFO Alesia Haas says the powerhouse crypto exchange is exploring the possibility of letting its users directly interact with third-party DeFi apps.Ethereum Layer 2 developer StarkWare raises $50M
TLDR: The Zk rollup specialists at StarkWare raise a Series C funding round that values the company at $2B.Introducing Aave Arc
TLDR: The Aave community introduces the first Aave Arc market for Fireblocks.Paradigm’s New Venture Fund
TLDR: VC firm Paradigm unveils a new $2.5B fund, a sum that makes this the largest crypto fund seen to date.
🌊 DeFi Pulse Power Tool: B.Protocol’s Liquity Hub 🌊
B.Protocol is a backstop liquidity protocol, democratizing liquidations to unlock better capital efficiency in DeFi. What this means is the project pools users’ funds for the purpose of liquidating under-collateralized loans across DeFi.
This pooling lets anyone easily earn from DeFi liquidations, which used to be possible only for experts. In the process, B.Protocol’s liquidity serves as a committed safety net for DeFi lending protocols that unlocks serious capital efficiency. It allows DeFi users to borrow with up to 95% collateral factors on any asset!
So now that you know the basics of B.Protocol, consider checking out the project’s new optimized frontend for the Liquity Stability Pool 🏊 which offers a passive (!) ~25% APY on LUSD.
Liquity offers interest-free borrows against ETH, and it covers liquidations of undercollateralized loans with the LUSD pooled in the protocol’s Stability Pool. B.Protocol’s new integration takes any liquidated ETH, converts it back to LUSD, and then automatically deposits that LUSD back into the Stability Pool. This process supports Liquity while locking in passive profits and saving on gas costs for depositors!
Interested in this yield farm? Just note that it provides LQTY rewards from Liquity and BPRO, the governance token of B.Protocol. You can also consider depositing LUSD into B.Protocol’s integrations with Instadapp and Pickle Finance to earn additional INST and PICKLE rewards, respectively!
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 up to ~20% with DODO’s USDT-USDC pool!
If it’s conservative gains on stables that you’re after, DODO’s USDT-USDC LP staking farm is certainly an interesting option right now.
First off, you can participate in this farm on Ethereum or Arbitrum. The yields are slightly better on mainnet at the moment, but you can flick over to the L2 opportunity by using your wallet to connect to Arbitrum while you’re on the DODO exchange.
Another compelling part about this farm is you can serve as a single-sided LP to the underlying pool, i.e. you can simply deposit just USDT or just USDC. It’s up to you!
That said, once you’ve made your deposit(s) you can make your way over to the DODO Earn mining dashboard. Here you’ll have the option to stake USDT LP tokens or USDC LP tokens. With that completed, you’ll start earning DODO.
DODO has been audited, but you should always yield farm responsibly in any case. Never deposit more money than you can afford to lose!
Aave votes on extending stkAAVE incentives for another 90 days.
Compound passes risk parameter updates for MKR, LINK, SUSHI, and YFI.
Maker approves various parameter changes and the return of unused budget to the Surplus Buffer.
💪 DeFi Pulse Power Tool: Yield Farming and fixed-rate lending/borrowing on Notional Finance 💪
Notional is a fixed rated protocol that serves both lenders *and* borrowers. Thinking about diversifying into some stables and doing some yield farming? Or even running a more conservative strategy with fixed lending/borrowing rates? Notional Finance is the place to go!
Head over to Notional to start taking advantage of DeFi fixed rates today!
Disclosure: This section is part of our paid promotional Partners Program; We’ve partnered with Notional Finance to help educate and inform the community about it. As always, we’re committed to providing the entire community with quality, objective information, and any opinions we express are our own.
The first-ever NFT marketplace aggregator Genie is now available for public use.
NFT platform Rarible is considering the creation of a Rarible DAO Accelerator group.
NFT lending protocol JPEG’d enters into a partnership with Abracadabra.money.
Aavegotchi is considering the creation of POAP badges for its Snapshot voters.
Impermanent Loss is an inescapable reality for many yield farmers. If you want to understand your IL profile better, consider plugging your address into il.wtf. This helpful site shows you how much IL you’ve faced across all the liquidity pools you’ve deposited to!
Are big token mergers going to become more common? 🤔
I suppose it’s too early to tell since the dust hasn’t settled from the Fei <> Rari discussions yet.
Assuming that deal goes through, I do think one of the implications is that other DeFi projects are going to be influenced to take a closer look at potential mergers.
The grand question, then, is who’s next? That remains to be seen, but the upper echelon DeFi could look quite different this time next year if more token melds are on the way.
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!