👩🌾️ Farm triple-digit APYs with Hundred Finance & get solid safety yields via Curve’s mUSD pool!
Also, learn about the bitcoin price hitting new ATHs & 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.
📈 DeFi TVL hits $100B! — At the start of 2021, we predicted in this column that the TVL of Ethereum DeFi would reach $100B by the end of the year. Well, that prediction panned out this week as the ecosystem’s TVL climbed as high as $101.87B on Wednesday. For further perspective, that’s a 5x from the ~$20B TVL we had at this point last year. Not too bad, eh? Worth a Bloomberg mention, too 👨🌾️🚜
🟠 BTC hits new ATH at $66k — On Wednesday, the price of bitcoin reached a new all-time high just over $66k USD. That surge to new heights came one day after trading began for the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, the first bitcoin futures product approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
As such, interest in bitcoin and the cryptoeconomy in general is near ATHs, too. That’s led to acute buy pressure on other major cryptocurrencies like ETH, which days ago traded over $4k for the first time since May, when ETH peaked out at $~4.4k. Can we trade on to even greater heights in Q4 2021? Only time will tell, but it wouldn’t be shocking considering the recent surge of mainstream attention brought on by the ProShares ETF, NFTs, etc.
😱 Facebook taps Paxos stablecoin — Novi, the digital wallet subsidiary of Facebook, announced this week its first pilot won’t involve Facebook’s Diem stablecoin. Instead, the program will rely on Paxos Dollar (USDP) during its initial test rollouts in the U.S. and Guatemala. Is this a taste of what’s to come for big stablecoins? We’ll just have to wait and see!
💸 This week’s best-performing assets — Since last weekend, we’ve seen notable runs from the following top DeFi tokens:
📈 ROOK (+74%)
📈 RUNE(+40.4%)
📈 GRT (+26.4%)
📈 CVX (+20.1%)
👛 The $DPI pulse — The DeFi Pulse Index ($DPI) is presently trading at $342.08, just barely down by 3.63% 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 triple-digit APRs with Hundred Finance!
Powered by Chainlink oracles, Hundred Finance is a fork of Compound deployed on the Arbitrum One optimistic rollup (learn more about rollups in our Beginner’s Guide to Ethereum Scaling Solutions!).
Accordingly, Hundred is a money market and facilitates lending and borrowing like Compound. Unlike Compound currently, though, Hundred can offer users the ultra cheap and ultra fast transactions of the Arbitrum L2.
With demand to use Ethereum as high as it is lately, gas prices can be painful. So if you’re trying to lend or borrow in DeFi but can’t be bothered with acutely high ETH gas fees, Hundred’s certainly an interesting community-first project to watch.
Three ways to yield farm HND
HND is the native token of Hundred Finance, and there are three distinct HND yield avenues on Arbitrum worth your consideration currently. They are as follows:
Hundred’s USDC and USDT supply markets — ~36% APR and ~32% APR respectively
WETH/HND LP staking on the DODO exchange — 229% APR
DODO WETH/HND ArbJar on Pickle Finance — 532% APY
Be sure to check out our Alpha Tractor on Hundred Finance from last week to get the full scoop on this young protocol and its farms. However, just remember: this is a DeFi x L2 project so you should consider it doubly risky just because this space is so early. Tread cautiously and only deposit money you can afford to lose.
Polygon Double-Spend Bug Fix Bounty
TLDR: A whitehat developer receives a $2M bounty for uncovering a double-spend bug that could have affected the Polygon Plasma Bridge.New Approaches to DeFi Liquidity
TLDR: Fei Protocol surveys new approaches to DeFi liquidity by examining the upstart Tokemak, Olympus Pro, and Fei x Ondo liquidity systems.Sushiswap increased liquidity mining efficiency 5x
TLDR: The Gauntlet Platform team details how its Incentive Optimization solution was able to help the Sushiswap team boost daily volume and the efficiency of the Onsen program.The Kwenta Testnet Futures Trading Competition is Live
TLDR: Synthetix and Kwenta team up to launch a testnet futures competition with a prize pool of $50k.DefiDollar <> Hubble token swap
TLDR: DefiDollar outlines plans to phase out the DFD token from circulation via an upcoming token swap.FATF has finalized its crypto guidance
TLDR: FATF, the international anti-money laundering watchdog, is set to release its official recommendations on cryptocurrencies next week.
🥒 DeFi Pulse Power Tool: Pickle’s Ethereum Pastures 🥒
In last week’s column, we covered the next-gen Arbitrum Jars of Pickle Finance. Yet the project’s Ethereum yield farms are also seriously blooming lately, so this week we turn your attention to 5 compelling Pickle pastures on mainnet. These farms are as follows:
Remember, Pickle Finance is a yield aggregator whose Pickle Jars compound depositors’ returns via cross-protocol yield strategies. The idea is to automatically and passively reap interest from top DeFi opportunities.
Head over to the Pickle Jars to start yield farming on Ethereum, Arbitrum or Polygon today! More on their Polygon farms next week.
Disclosure: This section is part of our paid promotional Partners Program; We’ve partnered with Pickle Finance to help educate and inform the community about the yield aggregator. As always, we’re committed to providing the entire community with quality, objective information, and any opinions we express are our own.
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.
🚜 Farm up to ~87% APY in Curve’s mUSD pool!
Curve’s mUSD pool, which is composed of liquidity from mUSD & 3CRV tokens, is a low-risk yield farm with potentially high returns. Here’s what you need to know!
Right now, this liquidity pool is offering a 1.3% base APY. But not so fast, don’t turn away just yet: this pool’s also offering up to 86.67% APY in boosted CRV rewards, which is impressive returns for a stables farm.
To join in, make sure you have some mUSD or the stables of 3CRV first. Then head over to the mUSD pool and if you want to optimize your returns select the “Deposit and stake in gauge” option.
The underlying projects, mStable and Curve, have proven very reliable to date. So have their token projects, e.g. mUSD and 3CRV. But you should always approach any yield opportunity in DeFi as an experiment through which you can lose everything you put in. So, of course, never deposit more money than you can afford to lose no matter how solid the opportunity appears to be.
Sushiswap considers funding a new Community-Enabled Analytics (CEA) program.
Curve removes the CRV gauge from its original Tricrypto pool.
Ribbon Finance considers paying a bounty to the whistleblower of the Divergence incident.
Social media giant Reddit is apparently planning to build out an NFT platform.
Variant is launching Variant Fund II, a $110M fund to be focused on the creator economy.
Very Nifty, the team behind NFT20, is building the “Google of NFTs.”
NFT platform Fractional shifts to ERC-1155 tokens for fractionalizing NFTs.
NFTs will power open virtual worlds and help beat out closed VR, suggests Fred Ehrsam.
Still have knowledge gaps in DeFi that you want to bridge, or know someone who’s just getting started out with crypto? Check out the Guide to Decentralized Finance by Finematics. This excellent primer explains beginner, intermediate, and advanced DeFi topics in simple fashion.
$100B DeFi TVL … what’s next? 🤔
Why, +$1T of course! Seriously though, I do think notching this $100B TVL milestone (albeit ultimately arbitrary) does mark something of a momentum turning point for Ethereum DeFi.
Indeed, there’s huge demand for DeFi apps lately and that comes in no small part because we finally have dapps that, while still young, are robust, practical, and in many various ways superior to, or evolved beyond, their mainstream analogues.
Market-wise, that’s what’s majorly different between 2018 and 2022. Things washed up in 2018 because there was nothing for anyone to do with their crypto while the dapp ecosystem was still premature. As we head into 2022, we now have teeming DeFi and NFT sectors where crypto users have lots of productive options for their capital. Zooming in, this dynamic could prove to be a gamechanger going forward.
And if you’re as excited as us about the future of DeFi and crypto, make sure to share this content with your friends!
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!