[Weekly] Market Return on StableCoin-based Strategies（13 June 2022)

We provide a weekly update of the platforms we track, based on the strategies discussed in Serenity Fund’s Overview of Stablecoin Investments and the periodical updates.

(Note: Yields derived from mining reward tokens are based on the prices of tokens on 13 June. Yields that are cumulative, e.g. Uniswap and Compound’s basic earnings and Binance funding rates, and are actual yields over last week, compounded weekly to derive the APY.)

Quick analysis on 13 June:

• Risk Free Rate: 0.61%. Risk free rate, representing the safe yield from Compound, Aave and Curve, was lower than last week’s 0.90%. Market declined further last week and was at its lowest of the last 12 months period. Investors are cashing out, both in terms of selling off coins and also in terms of exiting the cryptocurrency market. As a result, the borrowing rates and incentives are at the lowest levels.
• Curve/Yearn/Convex: The Curve/Yearn Large-Cap Benchmark Rate is now 2.7%, lower than last week’s 4.9%. There was little movement in the TVLs of these pools, but the decline in CRV and CVX prices had a significant negative impact on the yields. At the time of writing, CRV alone declined about 20%, dragging down the yields across the board.
• Other Stablecoin Platforms: the yields vary from 1% ~ 11%, and averaged 6%, lower than last week’s 8%. Gro Protocol’s PWRD incentivised pool continued to top this week. For more details, please refer to our premium strategy paper on Gro Protocol. Fei Protocol has stopped its incentives of TRIBE globally, and the only the some of the Convex pools are still giving incentives to pools containing FEI (d3pool and FEI-3CRV). Other than Gro Protocol, rewards from centralised lending protocols like TrueFi and Maple are still higher than average, maintaining around 10%. However, there’s uncertainty in the credit-worthiness of large crypto institutions, given Celcius is experiencing an insolvency issue now. It’s good to step away at this moment and stay safe from anything you have doubts. And come back later.
• Other (non-USD stablecoin or non-Ethereum) platforms, aka Exotic Strategies: Exotic strategy yields’ are from 1% to 7% now. The yields from alternatives are weak now. EURs are less of a topic, when investments of USD-denominated cryptocurrency are fading. EVMs have also less popularity now, as funds flow back to Ethereum, where gas fees are mucher lower than before and safer at this moment. There are still many new protocols surfaced during this period of time on EVM chains or Solana; we will be adding them into our list selectively.
• Uniswap/Alpha: Uniswap earnings were very high last week as, for half stablecoin, half ETH pairs, allegedly the result of a massive ETH liquidation happened in the early hours of Monday.
• Binance Coin-Margined Funding Rate: funding rates were half positive and half negative. Whilst funds are still into ETH and BTC, even their prices declined, they decline to a less extent compared to other coins and investors believe they are first to rebound when market recovers.

The above summary is a snapshot of what the market looks like over the last week and as of Monday. This is by no means the portfolio of any of Serenity Fund. Neither is the above table meant to be a ranking table nor to be exhaustive. There are various other defi protocols and products that can offer different risk and return exposures. Follow our Twitter below to have more timely and detailed information on the defi market.

In view of the changing landscape of the DeFi industry and increasingly complex product offerings in the space, we are now publishing premium strategy papers to cover these “degen” type of protocols. For more information, please refer to our article “Launch of Premium Strategy Paper” in Medium on 9 May.

(Serenity Team, 13 June 2022, Twitter: https://twitter.com/SerenityFund )