[Weekly] Market Return on StableCoin-based Strategies（24 Jul 2023): Mai or Not Mai, That’s the Question

We provide a weekly update of the platforms we track, based on the strategies discussed in Serenity Fund’s Overview of Stablecoin Investments 2022 and the periodical updates.

Note: this is NOT a portfolio. This is an average yield calculation of each risk category, to be used as a benchmark for assessing the risk-return of an investment or a portfolio. Yields derived from mining reward tokens are based on the prices of tokens on 24 July. Yields that are cumulative, e.g. Uniswap and Binance funding rates, and are actual yields over last week, compounded weekly to derive the APY.)

Quick analysis on 24 July:

Risk Free Rate: 2.86% (last week, 3.01%)

• Risk free rate is down, back to below 3% level. Our long term observation is that the core lending rate of USDC on Ethereum is also a sentiment indicator.

Mainstream Rate (Curve1.5x/Convex): 3.1% (last week, 3.7%)

• Mainstream rate is lower as the prices of CRV and CVX dropped.
• Liquidity in sUSD continued to drop by another 10m, and the peg is firm.

Benchmark Rate (Other Stablecoin Platforms): 7.7% (last week, 9.3%）

• Bella topped this week, as Vesper’s Frax vault had slightly lower yield. Most pools saw yield coming down as market turned a bit down.
• Conic was hacked twice last week, affecting the ETH and crvUSD vaults. We have replaced the Conic crvUSD vault with Yearn’s DAI vault. Yearn DAI vault applies multiple strategies and at this moment, it’s folding DAI to farm in Compound.

Exotic Strategies (non-Ethereum or quasi stablecoin strategies): 4% to 20% (last week, 5% to 20%）

• We are now including Equalizer’s Axelar USDC/USDT vault. The yield is 20% but the TVL is still small. This topped globally this week.
• Mai depegged about 8%, as further bad debt revealed beyond the Multichain incidence (we had an article last week calculating the impact of Multichain hack on Mai). As a result, we have replaced the Mai vault on Quickswap with the Davos DUSD vault. DUSD is a stablecoin on Polygon collateralised by MATIC and liquid staking ETH.
• For Sommelier, we have replaced its stablecoin vault with its Fraximal, a vault that rotates FRAX in different lending pools of Fraxlend, the Frax Finance lending market. It has incentives ending in two weeks.

Delta Neutral Liquidity Providing (Uniswap V2 and GMX):

• GLP’s estimated yield dipped again to 8.3% APR this week (earnings before adjustment for impermant loss, hedging cost and traders’ PnL, 5 days estimate of the current week), in line with its historical trading fee yield range. Over a few weeks period, GLP usually has yield that is about 50% more than the Uniswap V2 ETH-stablecoin yields. Gains gDAI (Arbitrum) is at 3.9%.
• Uniswap fees remained low as market was quiet.

Funding Rate (Binance Coin-Margined):

• Funding rates were all positive except for DOT and were very low. BNB turned positive, however, as the criticism of Binance on Twitter has subdued recently.

Serenity Premium:

• New article on Pendle LP Staking Services, Penpie and Equilibria, and this our third article on Pendle Finance.

Business Update:

• We have made a SubStack for premium content, mostly our strategy papers for more complex investments. This is a paid service at $49 per month (free for research clients). You can subscribe to the Free version to get a summary of each strategy paper. However, to support our work, we hope you could subscribe to it for the full article — $49 for four to five papers a month on stablecoin and DeFi strategies. For this, we offer a 70% discount for our Twitter and Medium audience: https://serenityresearch.substack.com/1a082767.

The above summary is a snapshot of what the market looks like over the last week and as of Monday. It is not 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, 24 July 2023, Twitter: https://twitter.com/SerenityFund )