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Howdy farmers!
This week, we’ve got a special free edition of the Protocol Express for you thanks to our current DeFi Pulse Drop partners, Notional Finance. The protocol’s newly-launched V2 system is aiming to become the best fixed-rate lending platform in DeFi and TradFi, and to kick that journey off the project’s running a front-loaded NOTE liquidity mining campaign.
Today, we’ll outline how to LP for that campaign to help bootstrap Notional and thus earn NOTE rewards for your service. After that, we’ll finish up per usual with a recap of some of DeFi’s top yield farms at the moment!
Let’s dive in, shall we?
This Week’s Protocol Express Highlight: Notional Finance
“Notional’s functionality is simple, but powerful. We are proud to deliver this product to the DeFi community and look forward to what secure, liquid, and efficient fixed-rate lending will unlock.” — Notional’s builders
There’s a specter looming over decentralized, and it’s the specter of variable-rate lending.
Indeed, until recently DeFi has been totally dominated by volatile interest rates. We’ve done the best with what we’ve had so far, but such volatility is awful for long-term lending and has kept many mainstream players on the sidelines. Over 90% of debt in TradFi is issued at fixed rates, after all!
This is where the Notional Finance V2 system comes in. The optimized protocol offers fixed interest rates, and it does so to lenders and borrowers at a time when other projects only support fixed-rate lending.
A beginner’s guide to Notional Finance V2
Notional Finance V2 centers around fCash.
fCash is a new type of DeFi primitive that represents who owes what and when within the Notional system. They’re created in pairs of assets and liabilities, and, per Notional’s docs, they track claims “on a positive or negative cash flow at a specific point in the future.” Zooming out, then, these assets give DeFi users a novel way to “move value back and forth through time.”
Next up, another foundational element of Notional is its native liquidity pools. Each of these pools are split between an fCash denomination and a settlement currency, e.g. fDAI and Compound’s interest-bearing cDAI. As such, liquidity providers (LPs) are responsible for funding these pools, through which Notional’s borrowers and lenders transact through.
All that said, the Notional V2 fixed-rate services are now live on Ethereum as of November 1st. And because keeping its liquidity pools well capitalized is of critical importance for supporting borrowers and lenders, Notional’s running a liquidity mining campaign that will reward 20M of the planned 100M NOTE supply over the next year to LPs who help bootstrap the protocol in its earliest days.
📌 Key resources:
How to LP to earn NOTE
Right now, Notional has liquidity pools for the DAI and USDC stablecoins, which are allocated 9M NOTE each in first-year rewards, as well as for ETH and WBTC, which will see 1M NOTE each over the next year.
If you’re keen on trying out these NOTE yield farms, you would follow these steps to become a Notional LP:
Navigate to the Notional Finance app and enter the Provide Liquidity dashboard.
Choose your market, e.g. ETH, and then set your parameters like your maturity date and the amount of liquidity you want to deposit.
With your info prepped, Notional will inform you of how many nTokens you’re set to receive. nTokens are Notional’s LP tokens, and they earn NOTE incentives plus “cToken supply rates, trading fees, and fCash interest.”
If everything looks good, select the “Enable” button and fire off an approval transaction. Then press “Submit” to finalize your deposit, after which you’ll receive nTokens and will automatically start yield farming NOTE!
Notional Finance V2 has been audited multiple times, but tread cautiously just to be safe while the system remains young. Never deposit more money into a protocol than you can afford to lose!
Disclosure: This post is part of our paid promotional DeFi Pulse Drop series; We’ve partnered with Notional Finance to help educate and inform the community about fixed-rate borrowing and lending. As always, we’re committed to providing the entire community with quality, objective information, and any opinions we express are our own.
The Balancer Bulletin
Source: balancer.fi
How about some L2 Balancer farms for your consideration this week? Balancer’s Arbitrum BAL/WETH 60/40 pool is generating ~29% APR at the moment, while the dapp’s Arbitrum WBTC/WETH/USDC pool is currently earning depositors ~33% APR.
The Current Curve
Source: Curve
Another Arbitrum farm worth watching is Curve’s tricrypto pool (USDT/WBTC/WETH), which is doing good volume and yielding up to 24.5% APY via CRV rewards presently.
The Yearn Star
Source: beta.yearn.finance/#/vaults
Back on Ethereum Yearn’s Curve stETH Vault and Yearn’s USDC Vault are generating ~3% APY and +9% APY, respectively.
The Sushi Signal
Source: Sushi.com
Also on Ethereum: both the USDC/WETH and USDT/WETH pools on Sushiswap are generating +20% APRs at the moment.
Remember to do your own due diligence before jumping into new projects. Impermanent loss and smart contract risks can never be fully ruled out. Always farm responsibly!
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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. YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO CAUTIOUS IN DEFI. NEVER DEPOSIT MORE MONEY THAN YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE.