[Weekly] Market Return on StableCoin-based Strategies（18 July 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 18 July. 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 18 July:

• Risk Free Rate: 0.70%. Risk free rate, representing the safe yield from Compound, Aave and Curve, was higher as last week’s 0.67%, as the market continued to rise over most of the last week. The bearish sentiment was subdued and there was enthusiasm about what’s going to happen, revived NFT markets, ETH 2.0 and a few more concepts.
• Curve/Yearn/Convex: The Curve/Yearn Large-Cap Benchmark Rate is now 3.5%, lower than last week’s 4.7%. Whilst the rewards tokens have a higher price in line with the market rebound, the incentives from Iron Bank pool were terminated this week, dragging down the yield significantly. TVL for most pools were slightly less than before, and half of the funds fled out of the Iron Bank pool.
• Other Stablecoin Platforms: the yields vary from 2% ~ 22%, and averaged 8%, slightly lower than last week’s 9%. Abracadabra’s MIM pool continued to lead this category this week. Liquidity issues in Maple and Truefi did not improve much — liquidity is still tight, despite the yields being amongst the highest. Frax and D3 pool had very low yields as protocols behind these pools are now cautious about incentives, e.g. Fei Protocol has stopped incentives totally.
• Other (non-USD stablecoin or non-Ethereum) platforms, aka Exotic Strategies: Exotic strategy yields’ are from 2% to 17% now. Euro dropped below $1 last week and gold price has reached a lower level than before Russia-Ukrain war. Yields from these alternative assets are slightly better than last week. IbEUR pool on Convex has much higher yield (over 40% as is) now but the pool size is yet small and plus ibEUR is trading at a slight discount as well. All MAI related pools on Polygon and also Fantom are still delivering good yields, thanks to a higher Qi price.
• Uniswap/Alpha: Uniswap earnings were reasonably good last week, for half stablecoin, half ETH pairs, as market seems to be awakening from a month-long bearish market.
• Binance Coin-Margined Funding Rate: funding rates were positive for BTC, ETH and defi tokens, but very negative for others.

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.

(Serenity Team, 18 July 2022, Twitter: https://twitter.com/SerenityFund )