Defi Farm #10 - June 25th Weekly Update

Hi everyone,

There's been a lot of news (good + bad) this week! Let's dive in 🤿Over the past 7 days:SPY: +6.73%BTC: +4.7% ETH: +12.6%

Today I'll go over the following:- Harmony Bridge exploit- Solana building for web3 adoption- Interesting news from this week- Cool projects and protocols I came across this week- A new defi farming strategy of the week

Harmony Bridge Exploit

On Thursday, the Harmony Bridge was exploited and drained of nearly $100 million. The bridge was a 2 of 5 multisig wallet. The hacker compromised 2 of the 5 addresses and was able to confirm transactions. Mudit Gupta (CISO of Polygon) has a pretty good thread on what probably happened.

Here you can see where the hacker has moved the funds as of Friday morning.

After the exploit was announced there was a rush of liquidity trying to leave the chain via other bridges (mainly Synapse). No one wanted to be left with any ETH-based assets on the Harmony chain that weren't backed by anything. I know a few people who took a 60% hit trying to get out of USDC on Harmony into USDC on another chain.

We'll see how this all shakes out. (It might take a few weeks.) This is what technology like Layer Zero and Stargate are trying to solve. Custodial bridges have risks of exploits like this. If the custodian gets drained, the assets on the chain aren't backed by anything. This hack is very similar to the Wormhole hack where Jump had to backstop the stolen ETH with their own ETH.

Solana continuing to build for web3 real-world integration

This week Solana announced the launch of a "web3 phone" called Saga.

While the phone is kinda cool and something simple the press can talk about. I think a lot of people "missed the forest for the trees" here.What Solana also announced along with their phone was SMS - Solana Mobile Stack. At a high level - SMS is a crypto layer built on Andriod to make mobile web3 UX seamless (it's the opposite of that right now.)For those who are more technical - SMS includes:- Seed Vault built into the secure hardware- Platform-wide transaction signing- Solana Pay for Android- A decentralized dApp store- A full mobile stack SDKThis Twitter thread does a better job than I could explain while this could be more important than the hardware phone.

I think some people often give the Solana ecosystem a difficult time because "it's always down" or "it's all just a VC pump and dump" or "hahaha VC chain broke again". (Myself included sometimes). Some of it is fair criticism but it's hard to argue that any other ecosystem is working harder to bring crypto adoption mainstream.With a Solana Phone, a mobile dApp store + SDK, and Solana Pay...you can start to see a potential iteration of the future where a sizable portion of the population interacts with and relies on crypto on a daily basis.

If you click on a single link in this newsletter - it should be to watch the video below. Watch this insanely cool demo of Solana Pay and a Cafe using an NFT for a discount....all handled by a Solana Pay POS (point of sale) integration.

Interesting news and things from this week

• Kinda cool physical NFT minting experience created by Doodles for NFT NYC

• Shopify announced token-gated e-commerce

• Eminem & Snoop Dogg partner on a new song featuring their BAYC avatars. (It's Eminem and Snoop Dogg, so obviously NSFW.)

• Avalanche announced their own native wallet called Core

• This week is the start of Bridge Week for Arbitrum. Doing certain actions will award NFTs that will determine how much of the Arbitrum token you get airdropped.

• FRAXBP proposal is live for Curve. This is an advanced++ topic....but this would change the base pool for stable swaps from 3pool (DAI, USDC, USDT) to Frax/USDC for any new factory pools added. Potentially a BIG deal.

• Uniswap announced the acquisition of Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator

• A new 6-megawatt BTC mining facility went live in Colorado

Interesting protocols/projects I found this week

Mazury (link) - trying to build a web3 talent search platform using on-chain badges, referrals, and search.

Coinbooks (link) - accounting software for companies that have crypto+NFTs on their balance sheet, connects directly with QuickBooks

Interesting Farm of the week

Trisolaris is the main DEX on Aurora (an L2 on the Near blockchain). Trisolaris has some decent APR's on stable coin pools right now. nUSD is a product of Synapse protocol and is a cross-chain bridge asset and is fully backed by other stable coins.

This past week Avalanche announced support for a native bitcoin bridge (not just a wrapped version). They're currently trying to drive liquidity for it and providing a lot of rewards for Trader Joe LPs. Right now you can get paid a total of 59% for depositing BTC.b/AVAX.

If you don't want to risk BTC or AVAX exposure for that yield, you could.

1. Despoit USDC onto Aave as collateral.2. Borrow 50% wBTC.e and 50% AVAX3. Swap wBTC.e for BTC.b on Platypus4. Deposit your AVAX and BTC.b intro the Trader Joe farm.With this, just be careful of your health factor on Aave.

If you're free this Thursday evening, you should come hang out at this event I'm hosting. There are 20 really awesome crypto builders + investors already signed up.Finally, since this is now an actual newsletter, I guess I'll start to try growing it. If you know anyone who would be interested in this - feel free to send the subscribe page to them.

That's all I have for this week! Stay safe out there and as always, stay yielding!

Very best,Andy