👩‍🌾️ Farm Rubicon’s 3-digit APRs on Optimism & 🥞 Maple Finance’s sweet USDC yields

Also, learn about Compound’s recent bug & check out the stories of the week + the governance watcher!

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.

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📈 DeFi TVL gains $6B — Currently at $86B, DeFi’s total value locked (TVL) is on the climb again! That’s after slouching to $80B last Saturday and then as low as $77.5B earlier this week. 

Up, down, and ‘round we go, right. It’s impossible to know what happens next, but anecdotally speaking there was a wave of optimism on social media over the cryptoeconomy’s Q4 outlook in recent days. Perhaps the sentiment boost is helping the upside volatility here some? 🚜

Source: defipulse.com

🚗 DeFi driving the headlines — First, let’s talk Compound. The Compound community periodically has to approve and push out updates to the protocol. This week, though, they accidentally launched an upgrade containing a bug. The result? Compound may misreward up to 280k COMP tokens!

The bug can only be patched through governance, which is a 7-day process at a minimum. So while Compound works on a fix, the best the project can do is ask those who mistakenly received COMP to return the money to the protocol. Fortunately, some people are already doing so. 

Robert Leshner @rleshner

Thank you 0x2e4a for returning COMP to the community 🙏

Another major headline this week came via Société Générale – Forge, a subsidiary of France’s 3rd-largest bank. That’s because the SocGen Forge team made a MakerDAO governance proposal to, in short, refinance a security token through the Maker protocol.  

DCinvΞstor @iamDCinvestor

tradfi institutions started by experimenting on chain by creating some select and mostly isolated products, and now they’re experimenting in trying to leverage those products in DeFi, working through MakerDAO project governance mechanisms wow

Julien Bouteloup @bneiluj

Jesus! Societe Generale just made a (very long) proposal into MakerDAO 😳 [Security Tokens Refinancing] MIP6 Application for OFH Tokens "is intended to refinance a Covered Bond Token that has been issued last year on the Ethereum public blockchain." https://t.co/ugm5eb3OXH https://t.co/lVs34rwhoL

Is this what the future of France, I mean finance, looks like? Things are still very early, to be sure. Yet this news does seem like an exciting taste of the titanic financial shifts that could lie ahead. The DeFi dream just got a little bigger, in other words.  

💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen notable runs from the following top DeFi tokens:

• 📈 DYDX (+59.7%)

• 📈 RGT (+40%)

• 📈 UNI (+18.2%)

• 📈 PERP (+14.7%)

• 📈 REN (+12.5%)

👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $331.93, up 10.83% on the week! 

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🌾 Farm 3-digit APRs on Rubicon + potential retro rewards!

Rubicon is what’s known as an open order book DEX. This is because the Rubicon protocol takes the generic order book model and combines it with single-sided DeFi liquidity pools.

The result? A decentralized order book exchange where anyone can serve as a market maker rather than just the biggest and most powerful financial institutions! 

Best of all, Rubicon offers its users high throughput and low latency, i.e. really cheap and really fast transactions, courtesy of being deployed on the Optimistic Ethereum (OE) scaling solution.

So if it’s next-gen yield pastures you’re looking for, we say Rubicon is worth a glance. Keep in mind that the protocol has a small TVL right now so it’s arguably in “undiscovered” status, but hey it’s honest work!

How to earn on Rubicon

Rubicon hasn’t launched a native token yet, so there’s no liquidity mining program here to dive into for now. 

However, you can currently provide liquidity to Rubicon’s single-sided pools for triple-digit APRs. Plus it seems likely that the project will roll out its own governance token in the future, even if that’s not here just yet. 

If these sound like the yield farms for you, you can start by ensuring you have funds ready to use on Optimistic Ethereum. Check out the OE Gateway or the Hop bridge if you’re looking to migrate funds. 

With that completed, navigate over to the Rubicon Pools interface and select from the available options (ETH, WBTC, DAI, etc.). Deposit the token of choice, receive your associated bathTokens, and you’ll be earning yield (and maybe retro RUBI rewards) for your next-gen DeFi services!

Note: the typical withdrawal period for moving funds from Optimism to Ethereum is ~7 days presently. Additionally, there are zero guarantees that Rubicon LPs will be profitable. The experimental nature of these yield farms demand extra caution. Do your own research, and never deposit more money than you can afford to lose.

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Do you want to dive more into Yield Farming opportunities? Become a premium subscriber and get access to:

• Alpha Tractor Series: giving you intel into the freshest yield for the most honest farmers only.

• The Protocol Express: a weekly recap of APYs and new pools on major protocols and a highlight of an emerging opportunity.

• Access to the Alpha Tractor Premium Discord channel.

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• Gasless trading now in open beta
  TLDR: DEX aggregator Matcha launches an open beta for gasless trading, i.e. being able to trade without paying Ethereum gas fees. 

• Ethereum transaction fee post-mortem
  TLDR: DEX platform DeversiFi publishes a post-mortem explaining how a user accidentally made a USDT deposit with a 7,676 ETH transaction fee. 

• ERC-4337: account abstraction without Ethereum protocol changes
  TLDR: A group of Ethereum developers and researchers propose ERC-4337, which among other things would pave the way to wallet recovery functionalities. 

• Making digital currency interoperable
  TLDR: Payments giant VISA unveils the Universal Payment Channel, an L2 system for facilitating cross-chain interoperability.

• The interoperability trilemma
  TLDR: Connext explains how its new NXTP cross-chain hub protocol approaches the problem of interoperability.

• Get your paycheck deposited into Coinbase
  TLDR: Crypto exchange Coinbase launches support for U.S. customers to deposit their paychecks directly to Coinbase. 

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👨‍🏭️ Extra Tip: Earn up to 56% APR with Empty Set’s Liquidity Mining Program 👨‍🏭️

Empty Set, the protocol that manages the decentralized stablecoin DSU, just launched a Liquidity Mining Program!

In order to participate in Empty Set’s Liquidity Mining Program, you’ll have to:

1) Mint DSU at https://app.emptyset.finance/dollar or acquire ESS (Empty Set’s governance token);

2) Provide liquidity to any of the offered pairs;

3) Stake the LP token in Empty Set’ Liquidity Program portal to begin earning ESS.

app.emptyset.finance/dollar

By the time of this Newsletter, the APRs were really attractive as you can see above!

Want to dive deeper? Follow Empty Set on Twitter and join their Discord 🔥

Disclosure: This section is part of our paid promotional Partners Program; We’ve partnered with Empty Set to help educate and bootstrap DSU. As always, we’re committed to providing the entire community with quality, objective information, and any opinions we express are our own.

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🚜 Farm +26% APY lending USDC on Maple Finance!

Maple Finance is a new kind of DeFi lending protocol. That’s because Maple is a decentralized corporate credit market. 

What this means is that Maple helps institutions, e.g. crypto businesses, access uncollateralized loans from public lenders, i.e. DeFi liquidity providers. 

To catch up on the finer details of how the protocol works, be sure to check out our Maple Finance Protocol Express guide from last month. For our purposes here, we’re highlighting the project’s solid USDC yield options right now.

That said, if you’re keen to notch +26% APYs in either of Maple’s current pools, the idea is to deposit USDC and receive Maple liquidity tokens (MPT). You can then stake your MPT through the pool dashboard in order to earn lending yields + token rewards via MPL, Maple’s governance token!

Maple Finance has been audited, but all new DeFi projects should be treated as experiments that have multiple levels of risk. To farm responsibly, never deposit more money into a protocol than you can afford to lose!

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• The Aave community votes on a proposal to adjust 13 risk parameters across 9 Aave V2 assets. 

• The Aave community approves adding Fireblocks as a “whitelister” to the permissioned Aave Arc system.

• The Balancer community considers replacing liquidity mining tiers on Polygon with “Flexible BAL” system.

• The Compound community votes to temporarily disable COMP rewards.

• The Synthetix community approves the creation of a dynamic exchange fee.

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• The Index Community discusses the creation of an “NFT blue-chip index” dubbed JPG.

• The Graph Protocol integrates with Arweave, furthering NFT data storage prospects. 

• New NFT lending protocol JPEG’d collabs with Chainlink on an on-chain oracle for floor price CryptoPunks. 

• TikTok announces plans to launch NFT collections through Immutable X, an L2 scaling solution for NFTs. 

• Twitter is working on support for NFT profile picture verifications. 

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Do you have lots of family and friends asking you crypto, DeFi, and NFTs lately? There’s nothing like having a one-stop info hub to send them to. That’s why this week we’d like to turn your attention to Let’s Do DeFi, a DeFi educational center striving to explain complicated crypto stuff to everyday people!

polynya @epolynya

Tokens are critical for rollup projects. Interesting data point from dYdX. Daily volumes: - Token announced: shot up from $25M to $300M - Token released: $300M to $9B While the token is obviously in mania phase, and things will cool off - dYdX the protocol is here to stay.

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What’s the play for Q4 2021? 🤔

The L2 era has finally arrived, so start experimenting with as many L2s as you can.

This isn’t because you have to. It’s just that these are the earliest days of the L2 boom, so the experience you gather now can prove invaluable for keeping pace with rapid developments in the future. 

In the very least, you do your homework and become a wiser, more seasoned yield farmer for it. Yet you also have a solid chance of earning tasty fees and tokens rewards in L2 pastures, so that’s worth considering too!

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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!