DeFi Pulse Farmer #47

DeFi Pulse released DeFi Pulse Farmer #47, top stories, developments, and trends from the past week in tandem with two key farming opportunities to keep an eye on.

This week, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi dropped below $50B for the first time since late May 2021. At the time of writing, the ecosystem’s TVL was hovering right around the ~$48B mark.

At this point, uncertainty is reigning. Many people still think the rest of 2021 will foster a bullish uptrend for crypto and DeFi, yet the recent market chop has more folks feeling bearish sentiments than we’ve seen for a while. In the meantime, the verdict’s still out, so bulls, bears, and those in between will just have to keep watching closely to see which way the market breaks next.

As for big recent news, the story of the week was easily the launch of the London upgrade on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet. London notably contains EIP-1559, which will improve the UX around paying Ethereum gas fees and will burn a small amount of ETH via every Ethereum transaction. This burning dynamic has Ethereans excited, as it means all DeFi and NFT activity will start burning ETH, thus putting positive upward pressure on the ETH price.

Over 88.5k ETH have already been burned in the last few days since London hit Ropsten while stress testing the network. London is slated to activate on the Ethereum mainnet next month, so we’re in store for some fireworks quite soon.

Zooming out, let’s finish up per usual by looking at the best-performing DeFi tokens from this past week. That said, the only DeFi token that is up over the past 7 days is ALCX (+1%). Everything else was acutely in the red. In the same span, the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) understandably dropped ~24% to hit $218.67.

🔹Earn up to 272% via Pendle’s yield-bearing stables farms

Pendle Finance, one of our latest Alpha Tractor protocols, is a new on-chain yield asset aggregator. What’s that mean exactly?

Well, it’s just a formal way of saying that Pendle is a protocol for facilitating trading and hedging around your future DeFi yields. So let’s say you have a yield-bearing asset like Aave’s aUSDC, but you want to access your upcoming yields now.

With Pendle, you can enjoy such access. How? That’s because Pendle divides yield-bearing assets like aUSDC into their base asset, in this case, USDC, and the tokens’ future yields.

Pendle accomplishes this via two derivative tokens: Ownership Tokens (OT), which represent base assets, and Future Yield Tokens (YT), which represents those assets’ upcoming yields.

As such, to mint OT and YT users must first deposit yield-bearing tokens into Pendle. The only supported deposit tokens so far are Aave’s aUSDC and Compound’s cDAI, so keep that in mind. Thus users can immediately sell their minted YT to capitalize on future yields now, or they can deposit their YT into Pendle’s in-house AMM to earn trading fees and presently liquidity provider (LP) rewards via $PENDLE.

🔹Farming $PENDLE with YT

Looking for new DeFi yield pastures to farm this week?

One fresh opportunity is the aforementioned one, i.e. serving as an LP for either of Pendle’s existing YT/USDC pools. The two existing farms here are a YT-aUSDC/USDC pool and a YT-cDAI/USDC pool, which are fetching 241.5% APR and 274.25% APR respectively right now. Not bad for stables-centric farms, right!

If you’re interested in farming either of these pools, you can follow these steps:

• Go ahead and start off by securing USDC in your wallet of choice. You’ll need this USDC for LPing in either of these pools.
• Next, you’ll need some aUSDC or cDAI to deposit into Pendle. Go to Pendle’s minting interface, input your desired deposit amount, and confirm the mint.
• With your new YT and your USDC in hand, head over to Pendle’s Market page, pick your farm of choice and then click on the “three dots” button on the far right of that farm.
• Input the amount of YT and USDC you want to LP with, approve Pendle to spend your tokens, and then confirm your supply transaction. Once that’s done, you’ll be farming $PENDLE!
• Whatever you do, don’t forget that current YT tokens face expiry on Dec. 29th, 2022, so plan accordingly.

DeFi’s TVL may have whiffed under $50B for the first time in a while this week, but I think if you ask around, most DeFi diehards will tell you they’re not phased by this current chop. The mission and prospects remain unchanged and the fundamentals are better than ever, regardless of short-term market movements.

What is DeFi Pulse?

DeFi Pulse is a site where you can find the latest analytics and rankings of DeFi protocols. Their rankings track the total value locked into the smart contracts of popular DeFi applications and protocols. Additionally, they curate The DeFi List, a collection of the best resources in DeFi, and DeFi Pulse Farmer, a newsletter covering the latest news and opportunities in DeFi.

📰 INFO:

https://yieldfarmer.substack.com/p/defi-pulse-farmer-47-check-out-the