DeFi Pulse Farmer #13
Catch up on a new week in DeFi as we recap DeFi's TVL, Harvest, the Farm of the Week, the Conservative Farmer, and more!
Welcome to the thirteenth edition of 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, subscribe today.
Looking to catch up? We’ve got you covered!
The DeFi ecosystem recoiled this week, with the sector’s total value locked (TVL) declining from $12.24B to $11.26 B over the last 7 days. The acute drawdown comes after DeFi hit a new TVL all-time high of $12.32B last week, so a bit of a pullback seems natural here.
Of course, the big story in the space this week was the Harvest Finance attack. An economic flaw in the yield aggregator’s design allowed a bad actor to launch an advanced flash loan-powered blitz that drained ~$25 million worth of tokens from the project at the time of the assault. Expect to see DeFi protocols hardening against flash loans across the board, accordingly.
Notably, Uniswap remains comfortably atop DeFi as its largest protocol and has been steady in recent days, its current $2.77B TVL being just a hair higher than it was at this point last week. Zooming out, Uniswap’s central position in DeFi as the space’s preferred trading protocol makes it primed to be the top dapp for the foreseeable future.
As for other top projects, lending protocol Maker ($1.96B TVL) and tokenized bitcoin token WBTC ($1.58B TVL) continue to round out DeFi’s top 3 dapps for the third week in a row. Following these projects currently are lending protocols Compound ($1.04B) and Aave ($969M).
Regarding DeFi tokens, most of the market is down, and projects like UNI (-21%), BAL (-20%), and NXM (-25%) took a bath this week, while CRV was one of the few exceptions, and is up 12.3% to $0.42.
Farm 47% APY from Staking in Barnbridge’s Stable Pool
There’s a new project turning heads around DeFi, and it’s Barnbridge.
The ecosystem’s inaugural tokenized risk protocol, Barnbridge, is going for gold when it comes to making DeFi more efficient by letting traders take out advanced, customizable derivatives so they can hedge on prices and DeFi yields like never before.
That kind of offering is seriously needed in DeFi right now, so the project has attracted a lot of attention in short order. For evidence of that, look no further than the Farm of the Week, Barnbridge’s Stable Pool, which currently boasts a whopping TVL of $509M. That makes it the third-largest farm in DeFi presently behind only Uniswap’s ETH/WBTC ($735M) and ETH/USDC ($578M) pools. Wow! Let’s take a look at farming BOND, Barnbridge’s governance token, then.
Stake Top Stablecoins to Earn $BOND
The Barnbridge protocol is currently facilitating a two-pronged liquidity mining program, with one half of the campaign focused on yield farming BOND through the Stable Pool (which will be allocated 8% of the 10M total BOND supply) and the other half focused on incentivizing liquidity in Uniswap’s USDC/BOND pool (which will be allocated 2M BOND).
Source: Barnbridge Pools
Farming $BOND through the Stable Pool works like so:
Pick your asset of choice (DAI, sUSD, USDC, or any combo thereof).
Enable your tokens for deposit at the Stable Pool page.
Stake your tokens.
Harvest your BOND rewards once per epoch (i.e. once weekly).
And that’s it! If you follow these steps you’ll be farming BOND until the Stable Pool’s BOND allocation runs out, or you can withdraw your underlying stablecoins whenever you like. If you’re interested in this farm, you can pick up DAI, sUSD, or USDC on Uniswap at any time.
Remember, for as interesting as Barnbrige may be all projects in DeFi carry with them certain kinds of risk. Barnbridge is no exception. Do your own research, make sure you’re comfortable with your farms on multiple levels, and never plow with more money than you can afford to lose!
Note: USDC/BOND Uniswap LPs are currently earning an eye-popping 1,321% APY as the BOND liquidity mining campaign is being used to bootstrap Barnbridge’s liquidity. However, we feature the more conservative Stable Pool because BOND currently has a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $1.44B, and the IL risks are not insignificant here.
Farmers can enhance this week’s farms with our sponsor Alpha Finance, which is focused on building out an ecosystem of cross-chain innovative and user-friendly DeFi products.
Just head to their latest product Alpha Homora, which allows yield farmers to take a leveraged position on their farms and ETH lenders to earn a higher interest on ETH lending!
Harvest Flashloan Economic Attack Post-Mortem
TLDR: Harvest Finance details how an engineering error in its protocol was exploited through a flash loan attack this week.Introducing Augur: Chad Edition
TLDR: Augur introduces AugurETH, a parallel deployment of Augur that allows for new collateral types and order books.Why crypto is hard
TLDR: Synthetix founder Kain Warwick explains how designing cryptosystems is a non-linear process and builders shouldn’t expect to take predefined paths.Keep3r Network v1 October Update
TLDR: Andre Cronje updates the community on the newly launched Keep3r Network, which helps DeFi apps automatically facilitate keeper gigs.The State of Ethereum 2020
TLDR: Digital asset research firm Delphi Digital releases its annual Ethereum ecosystem report, which details the network’s advances over the last year.Alpha Finance Lab partners with SCB*
TLDR: Alpha Finance Lab partners with SCB 10X, the venture wing of Thailand’s Siam Bank, one of the largest commercial banks in Thailand.Balancer’s DeFi Protocol is bringing Programmable Liquidity to NEAR
TLDR: Balancer partners with NEAR’s builders to bring the Balancer protocol to the NEAR blockchain.
*This link is sponsored by today’s sponsor: Alpha Finance.
Farm 69% APY on Rari Capital’s ETH Pool
Rari Capital, a robo-advisor for DeFi which optimizes for the highest possible yields and recently introduced their V2, is currently offering up to 69% APY on their ETH pool. While maintaining exposure to the price of ETH, farmers are earning yield through various means like:
Earning yield from liquidations (facilitated by KeeperDAO)
Lending ETH on Compound
Lending ETH on Aave
Lending ETH on dYdX
The ETH pool is currently providing 0.56% APY from yields and an extra 69% from rewards in RGT, Rari’s governance token. You can find out more about RGT’s tokenomics here.
Source: rari.capital
Alpha Tractor subscribers can also check more on Rari Capital in our Alpha Tractor series.
How to provide liquidity to Rari’s ETH Pool
Providing liquidity on Rari’s pools is super simple. Farmers need to make sure they have ETH in their wallets. If they don’t, they can head to Uniswap or Balancer to swap other tokens for ETH.
Farmers have to head to Rari’s portal and connect their wallets.
Source: rari.capital
Click on the ETH pool, select the amount of ETH they want to supply, click on confirm, and accept the transaction.
And that’s it! Farmers will start accruing APY from yields plus RGT rewards.
In order to claim their RGT rewards, farmers have to click on the “Claim RGT” button on the right-hand top of the page.
Note: please keep in mind that claiming RGT has a transfer fee in place in order to avoid quick farm-and-dump plays. The transfer fee starts at 33% and steadily drops to 0% on the 60th day to influence stakeholders to hold the token rather than immediately sell it off. At the moment, this fee is set at 26.95%.
Maker issues warning on securing protocol against flash loans.
yEarn discusses a new CRV vault strategy that could benefit all vaults using Curve.
Yam Finance proposes to purchase $250k worth of ETH and compensate project contributors.
Aave begins the process of transferring the protocol’s admin key over to Aave Governance.
This week’s plow of the week goes to Dune Analytics, which provides free DeFi analytics. In their latest upgrade, Dune eliminated the need to sign up for an account to access their different dashboards. Make sure to check them out if you’re looking for granular DeFi metrics.
Another week goes by and, whether the market is still down, most teams in the DeFi space continue to grow, build, and ship. Remember, there are many more indicators to look at to understand the growth of the space.
Have a great weekend, everyone, and, if you celebrate Halloween, happy Halloween!
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!