The Defiant

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⍺ DeFi Alpha: Decentralized On-Chain Sports Betting with Overtime

  • Yields: Up to 31% APR on Stablecoins, 11-20% on ETH and BTC

  • Starter Tutorial: Decentralized On-Chain Sports Betting with Overtime

  • Degen Tutorial: Earn 13% APR On Stablecoins With MAI On Optimism

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

Motivation

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 and old yield earning opportunities. 

This is DeFi Alpha by The Defiant.

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.

🙌 Together with: 

  • Oasis.app allows you to borrow Dai against your favorite crypto assets, Multiply your exposure and Earn, all in the most trusted way.

📈 Yield Alpha

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

  • ETH – Earn 11.19% projected vAPR with the Curve alETH LP staked in Convex

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

    • To participate, one must first deposit ETH or alETH into this Curve alETH LP and then stake the LP here in Convex.

  • WBTC – Earn 20.73% projected vAPR with the Curve pBTC 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 Curve factory pool and then stake the LP here in Convex.

  • AVAX – Lend AVAX to the sAVAX/AVAX pool on Platypus via Vector at 12.7% APR 

    • This yield is issued in VTX, PTP, QI, and AVAX.

    • To participate, one must deposit into the AVAX Stake option here on Vector.

  • SOL – Lend stSOL to leveraged farmers on Tulip Protocol at 4.95% APY + 10% APR from the underlying SOL liquid staking rewards issued to stSOL holders

    • This yield is backed by interest paid by borrowers on Tulip + staking rewards.

    • To participate, one must deposit stSOL in the Tulip lending tab.

    • To obtain stSOL, one can trade on a Solana DEX or mint it here on Lido.

  • MATIC – stake MATIC with MaticX and LP MaticX-MATIC on Balancer for a net 21% APY

    • The yield is backed by validator rewards using the MaticX liquid staking derivative + trading fees on Balancer + BAL rewards + SD rewards.

    • To participate on Polygon, I use the Stader MaticX dApp to mint MaticX.

    • Then, I deposit into the 50/50 MaticX-MATIC pool on Balancer and stake the LP.

  • ATOM – mint pATOM and stake the pATOMs on Ethereum to earn more pATOMs on pSTAKE at a rate of 13.5% APR

    • The yield earned is issued and claimable in pATOM.

    • To participate, one must first mint a 1:1 representation of ATOM as pATOM on Ethereum by using the pSTAKE dApp under Stake

    • Then, deposit/stake pATOMs to get stkATOMs and earn 13.5% APR 

  • FTM – stake with sFTMx by Stader, earning 13% APY

    • 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 here on Stader.

  • HBAR – stake with the first HBAR liquid staking derivative by Stader, earning 36.9% APY

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

    • To participate, deposit HBAR to receive HBARX here on Stader.

    • Caution: This is in beta and withdrawals will not be possible until July 2022 or later.

  • Stablecoins – Earn 31.27% APR with the Curve PUSd LP staked in Concentrator

    • This yield is accrued in mostly aCRV + Curve trading fees.

    • To participate, one must first deposit PUSd, DAI, USDC, and/or USDT into this Curve pusd LP and then stake the LP here in Concentrator -> Original Vaults -> pusd.

🪂 Airdrop Alpha

In each DeFi Alpha guide, we update a list of the most obvious DeFi protocols that have yet to announce and/or launch a token.

Arbitrum Odyssey

Layer-2 rollup Arbitrum kicked off a two-month-long program on June 21.

Participants will be able to claim NFTs based on completing various tasks over the summer.

Week 1 was Bridge Week and we walked you through it in a previous issue of DeFi Alpha.

Participants can now claim their Week 1 NFTs.

Week 2 involved the GMX derivatives protocol but was paused after heavy traffic on Arbitrum caused gas fees to spike.

https://twitter.com/arbitrum/status/1542159105946787840

We’ll be watching for the Odyssey to resume.

Hop Airdrop

$HOP went live on June 9. Claim here.

If you followed the guide posted in previous issues of DeFi Alpha, you should be eligible.

Optimism Airdrop

Congratulations if you followed our guide betting on a hunch that Optimism would release a token!

$OP is Live! Claim guide here.

  • Arch Finance – a protocol for comprehensive indices that provide access to differentiated sources of market risk.

  • Concentrator – Congrats if you used Concentrator! They’re currently running an Initial Farming Offering (IFO) and are expected to distribute CTR tokens to early users of Concentrator.

  • DeFi Saver –  a one-stop dashboard for creating, managing and tracking DeFi positions across Aave, Compound, Maker, Liquity, and Reflexer

  • Francium – leveraged yield farming similar to Alpha Homora but on Solana, one can choose to simply lend single assets or hold leveraged LPs to potentially earn an airdrop here

  • Jupiter – The leading DEX aggregator by trading volume on Solana

  • LI.FI – A cross-chain bridge and DEX aggregator protocol

  • Liquality – A cross-chain, non-custodial browser extension wallet, similar to MetaMask but with more integrations for swapping cross-chain.

  • Magic Eden – The leading NFT marketplace by trading volume on Solana

  • Nested – a crypto social trading platform built on Ethereum and other chains

  • Opyn – one of the OG decentralized options protocols on Ethereum, with major investors that signal a token has to be in their future. Buy/sell puts or call options to earn a possible future airdrop.

  • Polymarket – one of the strongest players in the DeFi prediction market vertical, bet on an outcome related to crypto, politics, sports and more or add liquidity

  • Polynomial – A newer DeFi derivatives vault creator, built on Optimism

  • Sense Protocol – A decentralized fixed-income protocol on Ethereum, allowing users to manage risk through fixed rates and future yield trading on existing yield bearing-assets

  • Set Protocol – one of the earliest DeFi protocols yet to launch a token for DeFi asset management, popular for TokenSets and known for powering IndexCoop indexes

  • Socket (formerly Movr) – their bridge aggregator Bungee moves assets between chains, finding the cheapest, fastest route

  • Volmex – Volmex is a tokenized volatility protocol, similar to the VIX but ETHV

  • Wormhole – a cross-chain messaging protocol known for bridging between Solana, Terra, Polygon, BSC, Avalanche, Fantom, and Oasis

  • Yield Protocol – a newer protocol for fixed-term, fixed-rate lending in DeFi, backed by Paradigm, one might earn a future airdrop by lending DAI or USDC 

  • Zapper – participate in Zapper trading, lending, providing liquidity, or yield farming; given the Zapper Quests and NFT Rewards program, it can be surmised that if Zapper ever releases a token, this is one way they might do a retro airdrop

  • Zerion – same can be said speculated about Zerion; if they ever release a token, they’re likely to reward those who interacted with their smart contracts swapping, lending, providing liquidity, or borrowing

  • ZigZag – a DEX on zkSync that’s recently announced an upcoming airdrop.

  • zkSync is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable scalable low-cost payments. Bridge some assets and do some swaps for a potential airdrop. Guide here.

👨‍🎓 Defiant Starter Tutorial

An Introduction to Decentralized On-Chain Sports Betting with Overtime

Just a week ago, the newest consumer-facing product in DeFi for on-chain sports betting launched on Optimism!

Overtime is a fully on-chain sports AMM (automated market-maker) using Chainlink sports data feeds to obtain odds (before games begin) and final results (once games end). The Overtime platform is deployed on the Ethereum L2 Optimism, to enable low transaction fees and near-instant confirmations. Overtime plans to integrate with 16 different major sports leagues, beginning with Major League Soccer (MLS) and Major League Baseball (MLB). The team behind Overtime has a long history of contributing to Synthetix, and built Overtime using the parimutuel markets protocol Thales.

To appreciate the innovation behind Overtime, you have to understand the history of challenges with centralized sports betting platforms.

First, most platforms require a user registration, where they gather lots of data and personal information, stored on centralized servers prone to being hacked. With Overtime, you’re using a permissionless, decentralized platform that requires no sign-up and hence collects no personal information.

Second, legacy platforms take custody of your funds and so you’re required to trust and rely upon another party to keep your funds safe. Like other DeFi applications, Overtime never takes custody of user funds because it relies on autonomous smart contracts in open source, forkable code.

Lastly, it’s common to experience unreliable waiting periods to pay out when one successfully predicts the outcome of a game, including denied withdrawals. Because Overtime never controls users’ funds, users can always depend on automated smart contracts to withdraw from a market and there’s no need to wait to claim winnings since Overtime is connected to an AMM. 

Today, I’ll briefly show how I can participate in Overtime to predict the outcome of an MLS or MLB game. Reminder, this is not an endorsement or recommendation to bet on any sports game!

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

  • Smart contract risk in Overtime on Optimism

  • Systemic risk in DeFi composability

  • Pegged assets such as sUSD can potentially depeg 

  • Market odds shift in real-time based on Chainlink oracles 

  • You can lose 100% of money betting on the wrong outcome of a game

Step 1: First, I go to the Overtime dApp and connect my Optimism wallet (ie MetaMask).

Step 2: I choose Soccer or Baseball and use other filters to browse games by date. Let’s assume I like the Chicago Cubs and want to bet on them winning their next game.

Step 3: I choose the Phillies-Cubs game on July 22nd and end up on this page. I can pay in sUSD, DAI, USDC, or USDT. I specify how much money to place on the Cubs, in this example it’s costing ~$0.47 per token so around $47 sUSD for 100 tokens. I know that if  the Cubs win, my tokens will be worth $1 and I’ll have made a profit of ~$0.53 per token. 

Step 4: I then follow the prompts to Approve and Buy tokens.

🦍 Defiant Degen Tutorial

Earn 13% APR On Stablecoins With Mai Finance On Optimism

This week, we’re going back to basics with a classic yield farm.

Mai Finance is a lending protocol on Polygon developed by QiDAO and issues the MAI stablecoin. MAI is overcollateralized and can be borrowed interest-free against a wide range of collateral assets. However, a repayment fee of 0.5% is applied when loans are repaid (deposit fee in the case of some yield-bearing assets).

MAI has been around for over a year and has held its peg to the US dollar reasonably well through the bear market. More details about its stabilization mechanism can be found in the documentation.

It’s now available on no less than 15 blockchains, with TVL deployed mainly on Polygon, Fantom, Moonriver and Avalanche.

Today, we’ll be farming QI tokens by adding liquidity to the MAI-3pool on the Optimism network. DeFi activity on Optimism could potentially qualify for the next phases of the OP airdrop.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Bridge assets to the Optimism network. You can deposit any combination of USDC, USDT and DAI into the Curve pool.

Transaction fees on Optimism are paid in ETH, so you’ll need to bridge some over. 0.05 ETH will last a while as transactions are far cheaper than on mainnet.

Across.to is a cross-chain bridge that recently launched a referral program. You can earn ACX tokens by using a referral code when using the bridge (you can refer yourself).

Step 2: Connect your Metamask wallet to the Optimism network using Chainlist or your preferred method.

Step 3: Add liquidity to the MAI-3pool on Curve Finance.

https://optimism.curve.fi/factory/4/deposit

Approve spending your assets and confirm the transaction to obtain liquidity provider (LP) tokens.

Step 4: Stake your Curve LP tokens on Mai Finance.

https://app.mai.finance/farm

That’s it! You’re now earning QI tokens which you can claim at any time.

The best liquidity for QI can be found on Polygon, so you will need to bridge your rewards over to trade the tokens, at least for now. Native liquidity on Optimism should be forthcoming.

The information contained in this newsletter is not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, financial advice. The authors are not financial advisors and the information contained here is not a substitute for financial advice from a professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation. We have done our best to ensure that the information provided is accurate but neither The Defiant nor any of its contributors shall be held liable or responsible for any errors or omissions or for any damage readers may suffer as a result of failing to seek financial advice from a professional.

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