Defi Farm #22 - September 25th Weekly Update

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the 22nd weekly edition! An incredible amount of news happened this past week. Let's dive in 🤿Over the past 7 days:SPY: -3.74%BTC: -6.1% ETH: -12.1% 

Major L1's:SOL: -3.6%AVAX: -5.82%Near: -15.8%Algo: +23.4%FTM: -11.1%

Algorand saw an impressive surge this week likely because of news surrounding a new FIFA partnership. (Algorand is also going to be a major sponsor during the 2022 World Cup.)Today I'll go over:- Interesting news from this week- Cool projects and protocols I came across this week- This week's interesting farm

More news this week so I'll skip a "sharing thoughts" section and get right into all that happened.

Interesting news and things from this week

Some cool stuff happened this past week. Here is just a small sampling.

Convex and ve-tokens (continued)2 weeks ago, I wrote a long edition about ve-token models. Since then, @OnlyJousting built a mini-site to calculate the "intrinsic value" of 1 $CVX (Convex) token based on the number of $CRV and $FXS locked in the protocol. This morning $CVX is trading at a 16% discount compared to the value of the assets locked per 1 $CVX. It's important to realize...owning $CVX or a $CVX-like asset doesn't necessarily give you ownership of the underlying assets. Rather, the $CVX token gives you voting and governance features of the underlying $CRV and $FXS. This is an important distinction and just something to keep in mind before you go and buy $CVX whenever it's "trading at a discount".

A newly proposed stablecoin billDraft legislation was introduced in the House this past week that suggested some limitations on stablecoins, especially algorithmic stablecoins. The bill talked a lot about stable coins that depend on the value of another virtual asset from the same creator to maintain its price and is marketed as having the ability to be converted, repurchased or otherwise redeemed for a fixed price. It's unclear how this proposed bill affects fully collateralized stablecoins such as Synthetix USD which is partially collateralized by the SYN token. It certainly raises a lot of questions for protocols such as FRAX, Aave (about to launch their own stablecoin), and Curve (also about to launch their own stablecoin). I'm not too worried about this bill, yet. It's a long process and if it proceeds further, I'm sure more clarification will come out.

Stripe enabled USDC paymentsWithin Stripe, companies can now pay out freelancers in USDC on Polygon. This means that instead of waiting for days for a freelancer in a foreign country to be paid in their native currencies, a freelancer can choose to get paid in USDC and receive payment in a few minutes. This is a pretty incredible paragraph from the Stripe announcement:"Speed is one advantage of crypto payouts. Reach is another. Millions of talented freelancers live in countries where it’s hard, if not impossible, to open a local bank account. For example, a majority of the people in Djibouti, El Salvador, and Bhutan don't have bank accounts. With Stripe, freelancers in those countries are now able to receive funds via USDC in minutes. With the addition of USDC, Stripe cross-border payouts extend to more than 4.4 billion people in more than 110 countries—a majority of the world’s population." 

Seed Club Cohort 5 AnnouncedSeed Club (kinda like a YCombinator for DAOs) announced their 5th cohort with some awesome participants. You can see a complete list of member DAOs here.

OpenSea supports ArbitrumOpenSea announced that it now supports Arbitrum NFTs.

CFCT files lawsuit against a DAOThe CFCT filed its first lawsuit against a DAO this past week. It will be interesting to see what, if any, precedent this case sets.

Sardine raised a $51.5 million Series B roundSardine helps neo banks and crypto apps offer fraud-proof ACH transfers.

Wintermute suffered a $160 million hackWintermute, a crypto market maker suffered a hack because of a Vanity address hack. The Empire podcast did a good job discussing what happened.

Interesting protocols/projects I found this week

0xSplits (link) - 0xSplits is a pretty cool open-source protocol that allows you to easily set up ways to split on-chain income. Set up a split wallet address, set how that income should be split, set a vesting schedule if you want, and publish the split.

Origami (link)- Origami is kinda like Stipe Atlas but for DAOs. Origami provides new DAO's with assistance during Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post-Launch. Origami can help with DAO charters, entity formation, DAO operation playbooks, and more.

Interesting Defi Farm of the Week

There are some good rates in the Algorand ecosystem. Right now on Tinyman (a DEX on Algorand), you can earn 34% APR for LP'ing in a USDC/Algo pool.

If you don't want exposure to $Algo but still want to farm, you can always borrow some Algo on Algofi, borrow some Algo at ~4.8% interest rate, pair it with USDC and farm with it. 

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

If you ever want to chat with me and nerd out about defi/web3, I made some time available on my calendar each week. Feel free to schedule some time!

-Andy