I know everyone is talking about risk curators these days, so this is a great time to look at how it’s just a pretty underwhelming standalone business. And yes, that includes curator-as-platform like @aave.
Some numbers from @DefiLlama & reports:
Aave: $159m revenue/$39b TVL
SparkLend: $3.5m revenue/$5.8b TVL
Compound: $1.2m revenue/$2.6b TVL
Steakhouse: $1.6m revenue/$1.7b TVL
Gauntlet: $0.6m revenue/$1.6b TVL
MEV Capital: $2m revenue/$1.5b TVL
K3 Capital: $1.3m revenue/$0.82b TVL
Re7: $3.7m revenue/$0.74b TVL
Remember - this is revenue. All of these folks have overhead in at least the form of someone at a computer, and maybe skilled risk managers and developers.
These are just not very good return on assets.
For comparison, Bank of the Ozarks, a middling, unremarkable bank with the same asset base as Aave, had more revenue *in the last quarter* than the entire list of annualized numbers above. Their expected profit for the next 12 months is around $700m.
And remember that they have far more overhead in the form of paying taxes, compliance, and holding their own capital.
Which brings us to the next problem with this model - with the exception of Aave and @sparkdotfi, I couldn’t find much evidence the names above are holding any reserves for losses.
While a couple appear to be dogfooding, that’s not the same. It’s really strange to me that curators aren’t expected to hold first-loss capital. I think @eulerfinance and @MorphoLabs should build that in - a known address that holds curator junior capital so bad debt hits them first.
So we have a model that - even putting 100% of the risk on users and potentially zero on curators - just doesn’t pay very well. Index funds make more, and they’re passively managed!
This means you have to find another source of revenue. In the case of Spark, they eat their own dog food and make up the bulk of stablecoin deposits (and they still don’t put up impressive profit).
So… how do they justify the legal exposure and putting any hours into this? (I don’t know - if someone on this list wants to explain the business model, please do!)
My wild guess is most are getting offchain income in the form of grants and referral fees, or use the curation role as a kind of advertising so that salience bias means TradFi partners skip due diligence when choosing who to pay consulting fees to.
Some numbers from @DefiLlama & reports:
Aave: $159m revenue/$39b TVL
SparkLend: $3.5m revenue/$5.8b TVL
Compound: $1.2m revenue/$2.6b TVL
Steakhouse: $1.6m revenue/$1.7b TVL
Gauntlet: $0.6m revenue/$1.6b TVL
MEV Capital: $2m revenue/$1.5b TVL
K3 Capital: $1.3m revenue/$0.82b TVL
Re7: $3.7m revenue/$0.74b TVL
Remember - this is revenue. All of these folks have overhead in at least the form of someone at a computer, and maybe skilled risk managers and developers.
These are just not very good return on assets.
For comparison, Bank of the Ozarks, a middling, unremarkable bank with the same asset base as Aave, had more revenue *in the last quarter* than the entire list of annualized numbers above. Their expected profit for the next 12 months is around $700m.
And remember that they have far more overhead in the form of paying taxes, compliance, and holding their own capital.
Which brings us to the next problem with this model - with the exception of Aave and @sparkdotfi, I couldn’t find much evidence the names above are holding any reserves for losses.
While a couple appear to be dogfooding, that’s not the same. It’s really strange to me that curators aren’t expected to hold first-loss capital. I think @eulerfinance and @MorphoLabs should build that in - a known address that holds curator junior capital so bad debt hits them first.
So we have a model that - even putting 100% of the risk on users and potentially zero on curators - just doesn’t pay very well. Index funds make more, and they’re passively managed!
This means you have to find another source of revenue. In the case of Spark, they eat their own dog food and make up the bulk of stablecoin deposits (and they still don’t put up impressive profit).
So… how do they justify the legal exposure and putting any hours into this? (I don’t know - if someone on this list wants to explain the business model, please do!)
My wild guess is most are getting offchain income in the form of grants and referral fees, or use the curation role as a kind of advertising so that salience bias means TradFi partners skip due diligence when choosing who to pay consulting fees to.
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