it's rare that I get excited about new DeFi projects

the big 0→1 moments in DeFi happen usually happen when a new yield source is unlocked

until now we had:

- staking yield
- lending yield
- basis trade yield

@infinifilabs is producing a new type of yield:

amplified yield how can yield be amplified in a way thats not a ponzu?

turns out it can be done by borrowing an old concept from tradfi called fractional reserve banking

modern banking relies heavily on fractional reserve systems, where banks hold only a portion of customer deposits as reserves and lend out the rest to generate returns

why we moved away from being an aggregator and turned @BungeeExchange into an open marketplace

and why this is the winning approach 👇 being an aggregator of DEX's, bridges and chains in 2025 is an impossible task

every integration takes time, costs human capital and annoyingly also increases the contract surface attack of your protocol

because you and other aggregators will fail at having *everything* aggregated you end up being wrapped by a meta-aggregator

Story time: How we disrupted our multi-billion dollar bridge aggregation protocol to build something much bigger and better.

The year is 2023. I had just joined Socket and believed we were sitting on a massive defensible business, ready to TGE any moment.

Bungee was the the no. 1 bridge aggregator, doing billions in volumes, integrated in virtually every major crypto wallet from @coinbase to Rainbow and Metamask.

Smooth sailing. Turns out I was wrong.

While we were clearly servicing a real need, we were missing an essential piece.

The foundation we were building on wasn’t scalable, nor did it ultimately provide users the UX we were striving for.

Let me explain 👇

Base's growth is absolutely unparalleled.

Has a chain ever risen to dominance within a year of launching?

Base is doing >1b in swap volume daily which puts it on top 3 ahead of most L1's like Sui etc. only surpassed by Ethereum and Solana.

Full overview 👇 DeFi TVL is climbing up steadily to over $3.2b with Uniswap, Aerodrome and Aave leading this ranking.

Most crypto assets suck. From the thousands that are listed on @coingecko there’s max 50 that I would invest in.

Close to none generate reliable cashflows & the few that do are highly correlated to the crypto market's overall success.

We need to connect crypto to the real world What the last few years of on-chain gambling have shown is that blockchains are incredibly powerful machines to track and exchange assets at global scale.

It’s hard to quantify these things but probably an order of magnitude more efficient than the patchwork of siloed databases

phishing sites are a massive problem in crypto

half a dozen users affected by fake hop sites everyday

we report them to google + eth-phishing-detect + warnings on discord

i'm absolutely gutted seeing these newcomers getting scammed like this

we need to do more as a space if it does happen to your user:

1) report to google:safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/r…

2) report to eth-phishing-detect (this will make wallets display warnings when they visit the phishing site):
github.com/MetaMask/eth-p…

I've started to go risk-on again and bought a couple of DeFi tokens recently.

Focus on projects that are undervalued, ship hardcore and showed resiliency and commitment during the downturn.

Here's the 3 tokens I picked 👇 1) $INST

Instadapp was one of the first DeFi products I used in 2018.

Two teen brothers from India disrupting finance without having to cut through endless red tape before.

One UI to access all major DeFi protocols.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1190821197937872896?s=20&t=ZWvMITKNAM8ktf1brBK_4w

tbh i’m losing a lot of respect for the accounts that bullposted throughout the past 2 years and are now coming out with the cynical takes

no it doesn’t make you look smart

yes there are things to criticise but where was your criticism before? i’m going to be here building for the next 10 years and do my part to make sure that with every cycle this space becomes robust and gets cleansed from all the scams, rugs and grifters

i am hopeful as ever that crypto is the technological platform to build the future on

Thread on wallet security and my favorite wallets to safely navigate the life of a Web3 degen 👇 Digital self-custody and sovereignty is the biggest blessing and worth paying any price for but let’s not kid ourselves, it can be stressful even for the most seasoned crypto investors

https://twitter.com/Arthur_0x/status/1506167899437686784?s=20&t=S7a7S39e8oWG4QsyGYD6fg

it's beautiful to see the traction around synthetix on @optimismPBC

it's still early days but all the pieces to build a truly decentralized suite of DeFi apps powered by synths are coming together

$snx is the base layer issuing these synthetix assets

https://twitter.com/danny_sacks/status/1509932903450705920?s=20&t=AM5CtwyvWROTM9oj1fQD8w

$SNX stakers collateralize the system and earn $SNX inflation & $sUSD from trading fees in return

the more adoption and trading of synthetic assets like $sUSD, $sETH etc. the more fees $SNX stakers earn

It’s not a secret that i’m omega bullish on $ETH so I wanted to share a few good yield sources that I consider safe

Some of the coolest high-yield tricks atm involve leveraging up on interest-bearing $ETH tokens (e.g $stETH) 👇 This works because borrowing rates for $ETH across DeFi lending protocols are much lower than the interest gained by staking.

The Ethereum Max Yield Index (aka $ETHMAXY) achieves exactly that.

setswap.xyz/ethmaxy

Ethereum will undergo a 90% cut of daily emissions from 12,000 $ETH a day to 1280 $ETH

Yearly inflation will go down from 4.3% to 0.43% the equivalent of three halvenings *at once*

Meanwhile rewards for PoS validators will go up from 4.5% to 10-15% in the months after The Merge At the same time, its energy consumption will drop by 99.95%.

It will be tiny even compared to traditional payment networks like Visa (0.4% of Visa).

first time in a while i market bought a defi token but $NOTE started to look undervalued af

@NotionalFinance is extremely useful, being the only project i am aware of where you can earn over 8% guaranteed yield on a 1 year deposit

$8m market cap ($95m fdv) with a tvl of $500m for the past weeks i saw big whales depositing and borrowing almost on a daily basis attracted by these fixed interest rates

https://twitter.com/NotionalFinance/status/1494701231838613504?s=20&t=uzb_6goddUO8wefNIHCSDw

I see lots of discussion about bridge security recently (rightly so).

It’s very hard to assess the trust model of each bridge especially for non-technical people.

Imo it’s up to bridge operators to explain their trust model to users so i'll try to explain @HopProtocol's 👇 Bridges differ mostly with regards to how they transfer data between chains.

This data transfer is needed to do *something* on the destination chain whether it's minting or unlocking a token or settling transfers in some other way.

Token transfers = data transfer

it's easy to miss all the amazing developments happening in the space with all the noise surrounding crypto twitter everyday

ignore the ponzis, embrace innovation, contribute to builders who are in for the long term

here's a couple of projects i'm bullish on👇 first off, i'm mostly focusing on L2's this year (#L22022 is not a meme😜)

Many new L2 native projects launching in the next couple of weeks, completely skipping mainnet

Once you get a taste of the cheap transaction fees there's no turning back..

liquidity mining on @arbitrum and @optimismPBC is coming very soon

stoked to announce we were able to get an audit by ABDK (@Khovr) which has started today and should be completed in 2-3 weeks. for reference ABDK is one of the top audit firms (list by @lawmaster)

Time for an update: as you can see the consensus check regarding whether to incentivize $UNI liquidity on L2 has PASSED.

I couldn’t be more excited. This is what makes the Ethereum community so special imo.

Together we can achieve literally *anything*. It's also bullish for decentralized governance imo.

I haven’t spoken to the Uniswap team once about this proposal.

I am a normal user who had an idea and mobilized support to make it happen.

Ofc this vote has not passed yet. Far from it.

Did a list of projects on Optimism recently so doing same for Arbitrum now and will continue adding to the thread when I see new projects

@PremiaFinance just launched a really nice option trading platform

250% projected APR for LP'ing $ETH into the option pools + 30% $PREMIA 🔥 also loving @GMX_IO a perpetual exchange that allows you to trade $BTC, $ETH, $UNI and $LINK with up to 30x leverage

Top UI/UX

They currently do around $4m in monthly revenue, 100% of which goes to $GMX and $GLP (the liquidity token) stakers 👀

I have re-submitted the proposal for @uniswap to incentivize liquidity on L2, this time for Stage II of the governance process.

As such, the proposal is much more concrete laying out all the details of the liquidity mining such as length, no. of assets and how to reward 👇 The proposal strives to achieve two goals:

I. Kickstart L2 adoption by incentivizing users to bridge and shift their DeFi activity to L2’s

II. Offering deep liquidity for key pairs on L2

Number I is super important to understand this proposal.

Optimistic Rollups like @arbitrum and @optimismPBC have been been battle tested for months, it's time to accelerate, it's time for a mass migration to L2.

I have published a proposal for @Uniswap to start a liquidity mining program on Ethereum L2's to kickstart adoption 👇🧵 he's right why are there no megastar apps on ORUs yet?

in my opinion it comes to down to 3 things..

https://twitter.com/ukolodny/status/1456196768425811969?s=20

i see many people referring to @HopProtocol as the best option to *deposit* tokens from L1 to @optimismPBC

while it can happen (often) that Hop is cheaper for L1 -> L2 deposits, it's not it's strong point

it's main USP is direct L2 <> L2 transfers and fast exits from L2 -> L1

https://twitter.com/pythianism/status/1437982949811441667

this being said it can often happen that even L1 -> L2 deposits are cheaper using Hop

for example, right now there is positive slippage if you send which on this $10,000 $USDC transfer gives you a $10 premium

the suggested gas fee on @MetaMask is $36

total cost: $26