Curve’s Stablecoin Trades Within 0.5% Range For First Month

MakerDAO Mulls Proposal To Boost DAI Savings Rate

 Up to 24% APY on Stablecoins, 20-50% APY on ETH and BTC

DeFi Alpha is a weekly newsletter published for our premium subscribers every Friday, contributed by Defiant Advisor and DeFi investor at 

. It aims to educate traders, investors, and newcomers about investment opportunities in decentralized finance, as well as provide primers and guides about its emerging platforms.

Two years ago, DeFi investors could easily name every yield farming opportunity without much effort. It was a simpler time, when only a handful of teams had launched with any liquidity to trade, lend, borrow, provide liquidity, or even demonstrate new primitives such as no-loss savings by PoolTogether.

But times have changed! Before the current bear market took hold, DeFi liquidity had grown to hundreds of billions of dollars across Ethereum with new burgeoning DeFi economies taking shape on EVM-compatible chains such as Polygon and Avalanche and non-EVM chains such as Cosmos and Solana. Any given day, a new DeFi or NFT project is launched.

So, after writing and creating countless DeFi guides and tutorials since 2019, we at The Defiant agreed it’s time we publish a more detailed weekly guide on all you need to know to keep up with new opportunities.

Any information covered in DeFi Alpha should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions. Any mention of a token or protocol should not be considered a recommendation or endorsement.

 is the most comprehensive dashboard for Liquity protocol with unique automated liquidation protection features. Now, with full support for the newly launched 

Each week we will provide options to earn yield on ETH, WBTC, stablecoins, and other major tokens.

 – 50.9% APY with pETH/ETH Curve LP staked in Convex via Concentrator 

This yield is accrued in aCRV + trading fees compounded in the LP.

Then, one must stake/deposit the Curve LP under the 

 – 20.39% projected vAPR with the Curve pBTC+sbtcCrv LP staked in Convex

This yield is accrued in CRV, CVX, and trading fees.

To participate, one must first deposit pBTC, renBTC, sBTC and/or WBTC into this 

 – 7.53% APR with AVAX in Vesper Grow Pools 

This yield is issued in 8.14% AVAX + 1.38% VSP.

To participate, one must deposit into the AVAX pool 

There is a 0.6% fee on withdrawal from Vesper Grow pools and a 15% platform fee on yield generated by the deposited assets.

 – 7.41% APY lending stSOL on Tulip Protocol 

This yield is backed by 0.81% APY paid by borrowers on Tulip + 6.6% APY in staking rewards thanks to Lido.

To participate, one must deposit stSOL in the 

To obtain stSOL, one can trade on a Solana DEX or mint it 

 – 12% APY with 50/50 MaticX-WMATIC LP on MeshSwap 

The yield is backed by validator rewards using the MaticX liquid staking derivative + MeshSwap trading fees + MESH rewards + SD rewards.

 – 20% APR staking ATOM with Keplr Wallet on Cosmos Hub 

rank by APR, choose a validator, and click 

Then, I specify how many ATOMs and follow the prompts to 

 – 4.7% APY staking sFTMx liquid staking derivative by Stader

The yield is issued in FTM rewards, as sFTMX is earning FTM via validator rewards to support Fantom’s PoS network.

To participate, one must deposit FTM to receive sFTMX 

 – 9.66% APY staking with HBARX liquid staking derivative by Stader

The yield is issued in HBAR rewards, as HBARX is earning validator rewards.

To participate, one must deposit HBAR to receive HBARX 

Be aware 16.8% APY of the yield backed by SPOOL rewards.

To participate, one must deposit into the 

Please be aware we intentionally do not report the highest yield rates because often, those yields are less sustainable and in some instances, artificially elevated due to less participation

The DeFi Alpha call is held every Monday at 2pm ET in Discord.

check out the recording of this week’s call

https://thedefiant.io/defi-alpha-call-26-recap

Unlocking the power of your DeFi portfolio

We all know that managing a DeFi portfolio can be a significant challenge.

Especially during times of market turbulence, keeping your portfolio efficiently balanced can turn into a full-time job. Crypto is a 24/7 market that requires 24/7 monitoring of positions in order to be a competitive investor in the market.

Until now, the tooling needed to monitor your portfolio and ensure that your positions are allocated efficiently has been kept private. Mainly being used by institutional investors who can sit back and relax while their portfolios are maintained for them.

 is bringing professional DeFi tooling and automated liquidity management to every DeFi user. Through Mero, users can easily automate their liquidity to react to market conditions and ensure that it is always allocated where it should be.

The Defiant readers have the opportunity to become an early LP on Mero before its suite of portfolio automation products is released. Start earning yield using 

Increase Your ETH Staking Yield by Arbitraging the Discount on Liquid Staking Derivatives

Given the devastating state of crypto markets with this week’s FTX meltdown, we wanted to cover a less risky beginner lesson in DeFi.

With the increased risk of insolvency among crypto borrowers and the contagion that may spread to different parts of the crypto markets, it’s a very appropriate time to think adversarially about how to avoid any DeFi that might suffer systemically from the markets unwinding. One such yield with less counterparty risk is holding an ETH liquid staking derivative.

While the best way to stake ETH is to run your own validator, LSDs allow anyone to earn ETH staking yield by simply holding a token, while contributing to the Proof-of-Stake consensus on Ethereum.

LSDs do not require the minimum 32 ETH to run a validator, which means anyone can stake ETH with as little as they want. This is very aligned with one of the core tenets of DeFi to be easily accessible to any wallet regardless of how little value they hold.

Second, the tokenization of staked ETH gives stakers more economic freedom to use the value of their staked ETH in other DeFi, such as liquidity provisions on Curve or as collateral to borrow against on Aave or Euler.

There are a number of risks to consider with liquid staked ETH. First, whether you hold an LSD or run your own ETH validator, you’re exposed to technical risk in the Beacon Chain, which could unknowingly have an error in its code prior to withdrawals being enabled in the next 6-9 months in the Beacon Chain. However, that risk is extraordinarily low at this point in the development of Ethereum 2.0.

A second major consideration is price risk–meaning the price of a staked derivative of ETH could go up or down depending on how the market values it. Leading up to The Merge in September, the discount for stETH by Lido rapidly closed back to 1:1 with ETH, compared to a 6-7% discount during the 3AC meltdown in June. Whether you hold an LSD or run your own validator, there’s also risk of slashing, but that risk is minimized in the recruitment of reliable entities to run validators for LSD protocols like Lido, Rocketpool, Stakewise, Ankr, and soon Stader.

Lastly, it’s important to understand whether one is holding an LSD by a DAO-governed protocol where the protocol is designed to hold your ETH while running validators in return for a percentage of yield, vs a centralized entity like Coinbase, who provides an LSD called cbETH so that customers can earn with staked ETH, but where there is real counterparty risk in trusting Coinbase to return your ETH.

Today, I’ll show how I might choose to buy discounted liquid staked ETH, and earn more ETH based on i) the staking yield and ii) the price of the LSD increasing to be equal to 1 ETH once withdrawals are enabled for staked ETH in the Beacon Chain.

Before we get started, please be aware of these risks.

Smart contract risk in any LSD governed by a protocol, including cbETH by Coinbase

Front-end spoof attack on any frontend website for minting an LSD or buying it off the market for a discount

Exploits in the economic design of any protocol

 which is a helpful free website tracking the market price and estimated staking yield of different ETH liquid staking derivatives.

Even more helpful, they’ve calculated the total yield earned based on the LSD discount + the annualized staking yield rate, with whatever timeframe you want to assume must pass before staked ETH withdrawals are enabled on the Beacon Chain (what we’ll assume will close the price gap between the LSD and ETH being 1:1).

If I adjust SimpleStakers.info so that “staked ETH will unlock in 6 months,” the 1% discount on Lido’s stETH, which is trading at ~0.99 ETH as of this writing, with a reported staking yield of 6.75% APY, will net out 9.25% APY.

Just for this example, I’m going to opt for stETH by Lido because I prefer to not have counterparty risk exposed to a centralized entity like Coinbase (my personal preference), and I like the ability to borrow against stETH on Aave or Euler.

Although rETH by Rocketpool has a higher estimated yield of 9.4% APY and promises comparably less risk of fewer entities holding more power in their DAO, I cannot borrow against rETH on Aave yet.

, connect my Ethereum wallet, and specify buying stETH by Lido with my ETH (if CoWSwap, it’ll require WETH).

Using the Shardeum Testnet for a Potential Airdrop

Shardeum is an upcoming Layer 1 blockchain that raised $18M in seed funding last month. It was co-founded by Nischal Shetty, a co-founder of WazirX, the largest crypto exchange in India.

It’s EVM-compatible, meaning smart contracts that work on Ethereum can be easily ported over, and promises ‘infinite scaling’ through the use of 

In this tutorial, we’re going to test some dapps on Shardeum’s Liberty alphanet, which could make us 

Step 1: Add the Shardeum Liberty 1.6 network to Metamask

Settings > Network > Add a Network > Add a Network Manually

Yields: Up to 24% APY on Stablecoins, 20-50% APY on ETH and BTC



DeFi Alpha is a weekly newsletter published for our premium subscribers every Friday, contributed by Defiant Advisor and DeFi investor at 4RC, DeFi Dad, and our Degen in Chief yyctrader. It...

⍺ DeFi Alpha: Using the Shardeum Testnet for a Potential $SHM Airdrop