Since Compound launched liquidity mining in June, billions of dollars in tokens have been distributed to liquidity providers across various DeFi protocols.
Simply put, yield farming offers investors a novel method for acquiring tokens.
A how to + best practices below.
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Unlike ICOs, where investors exchange capital in return for new tokens, yield farming allows investors to acquire tokens by supplying a protocol with capital.
That capital is then put towards a productive use such as lending or liquidity provisioning.
Yield farmers are free to withdraw their capital whenever they choose.
They only pay an opportunity cost for having their capital locked into the protocol.
In this regard, investors are able to acquire new tokens effectively for free. (more on the risks later).
Farming comes in all shapes and sizes, but one of the most simple examples of how farming works is Swerve - a new Curve fork.
Swerve offers the opportunity to farm SWRV tokens with stablecoins, allowing farmers to avoid the price risk from farming with volatile cryptoassets.
The high level process is simple.
Deposit your stablecoins into Swerve to receive SWUSD LP tokens (a receipt for depositing your stablecoins), then stake these tokens in a special Swerve contract (called the liquidity gauge) to earn , Swerve’s governance token.
Swerve currently offers a 338.72% APY for this activity.
If that all sounds like gibberish, check out our new "how-to" guide where we explain each of these steps in detail.
Furthermore, we provide a detailed look at the risks and opportunities when farming.
The most reliable thesis for compounding capital this cycle has been to own fast-growing projects that people actually use.
Everything else is a game of musical chairs, with the dominant narrative changing every couple months, and Burj Khalifa charts that rarely bounce back.
This supposed shift to fundamentals everyone is talking about isn’t coming… it’s already here, but it can only be observed over the course of many quarters and years in the assets that actually compound.
The fast-growing part is key here.
Plenty of value traps in the cryptoeconomy or projects whose fundamentals are solid but don’t support the valuations.
Often times the strongest fundamental names tap into speculative activity for growth which many write off as “not real”
Have fallen prey to some of these situations before as we all have.
Takes introspection to realize you’re being too prescriptive about what should be driving growth rather than accepting what is.
Regardless of whether the Trump coin is real or not, at $9 billion in 3 hours, it is already the largest onchain wealth creation event in the history crypto.
Goes without saying what this means for Solana if real
Will say though, I have mixed feelings about this.
Simultaneously a potential mass onboarding event and a huge risk that it makes the entire industry look like a scam.
Solana’s growing ecosystem of assets, applications, businesses, and users is becoming a compounding superstructure, positioning Solana to be a secular winner of the cryptoeconomy.
This is becoming evident in the data which shows Solana rivaling Ethereum in value creation.
Will infrastructure multiples compress over time and app multiples rise?
We at Syncracy believe that apps capturing a greater share of the global blockchain fee pool and outearning most infrastructure is likely an inflection point for the reckoning that’s to come.
Over the past year Syncracy accumulated a large position in MKR.
We believe Maker could command a $40+ billion valuation this cycle given its vital role in financing Ethereum’s economy — a multi-billion dollar fee opportunity.
Our thesis on Maker in the Endgame Era.
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Maker is the leading decentralized bank in the cryptoeconomy.
At ~2x 2025E revenue, we believe Maker is one of the best risk / reward opportunities today given its industry leading earnings, best-in-class unit economics, and growing market dominance.
Maker is a leviathan amongst the leaders, capturing nearly 40% of all DeFi profits on Ethereum.
Its competitive advantage is centered around its currency Dai —the most widely used decentralized stablecoin in the industry with its deep liquidity, integrations, and track record.