Defi Farm #28 - November 13th Weekly Update

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the 28th weekly edition....What a week....Let's dive into this mess 🤿 💩Over the past 7 days:SPY: +5.50% 🤯BTC: -22.3% ETH: -24.6%

7Major L1's:SOL: -61.7% 🤯AVAX: -33.1%Near: -41.1%Algo: -37.6%FTM: -37.1%Today I'll go over:- A few words and thoughts from this past week- Cool projects and protocols I came across this week- Defi Farms of the week

Decentralized Finance - a non-negotiable

This past week was a sad one for all of crypto. There have already been enough articles and tweet threads about what happened so I don't want to waste time rehashing it. Here are a few resources that you can consume if you want to know the deeper details of what went down.

So....where does this leave us?

It's hard to say, and anyone who has a strong opinion is lying.

What is vital to recognize is that FTX was a failure of a centralized corporation, not a failure of crypto. It was a collapse of a traditional finance company that didn't have proper risk management at best, stole funds at worst, and it happened to deal in crypto assets.

However - most individuals won't see that. This FTX saga will be another headline most read and think "yikes - crypto bad, crypto unsafe". It's going to take a long time for crypto to gain back the trust of individuals and probably that of regulators too.

The most important thing for everyone to take away from this week is that decentralized finance works. Just like it did during the turmoil with 3AC, Voyager, and Celsius. Through all the volatility, through all the onchain traffic, blue-chip defi protocols worked as intended, every time, without fail, and never withheld customer funds.

Uniswap, Maker, Aave, Curve, Frax, etc. are tools that are regulated by code, transparent, and open to everyone.

What's next?

First of all, if you don't have a Ledger and Metamask, set those up and get your coins off centralized exchanges. If you need help setting these up, I'm happy to walk you through it.

Assuming you've, hopefully, already done that - find ways to get involved. Join a few discords, participate in Defi governance, and help teams build if you can.

The potential to make financial access and inclusion an inalienable human right is too important to give up on after a few untrustworthy corporations do wrong.

Interesting protocols/projects I found this week

Stadium (link) - I'm not a gamer, but this seems pretty interesting. Stadium is building tech that integrates web3 and esports and will offer a way for players to form teams, compete with/against one another, and host tournaments. It's being built by BLVKHVND, the first web3 esports team.

Nansen Proof of Reserves (link) - Nansen launched a new feature this week with all the uncertainty and mistrust towards centralized exchanges. You can now view and track reserves of large exchanges. (These probably aren't 100% accurate but certainly helpful to start bringing transparency into the ecosystem.)

Defi Farm of the Week

I think the best opportunities for yield right now are in UniV3 concentrated liquidity positions across ETH mainnet, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimism.

Revert is an amazing tool that can help you find LP positions based on tokens that you want exposure to and allows you to view price ranges of positions that have remained in range for decent periods of time.

For example, look at this WETH/USDC position on polygon that's been earning a 307% APR paid out in WETH and USDC.

Before you rush to enter the same position, make sure you have a full understanding of how concentrated liquidity pools actually work (you can read past newsletters). Also, keep in mind that there was a lot of volatility this past week so APR's will be a bit inflated and what you'll actually experience will likely be lower.

I'd also encourage you to think about using these concentrated positions as tools to start to DCA into or out of positions and get paid in the process.

That's all I have for this week! Stay safe out there and as always, stay yielding (in a decentralized manner)!

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