Welcome to DeFi Frontier.
Every week, I highlight the DeFi opportunities, protocols, and market themes I think are worth paying attention to.
Sometimes that means sustainable yield opportunities. Sometimes it means new protocols, best practices, risk frameworks, or broader trends shaping where capital is moving onchain.
The goal is simple: help you find what’s interesting in DeFi, understand the tradeoffs, and avoid blindly chasing the biggest APY on the screen.
Let’s get into this week’s report.
We’re looking at 30 day real yields this week with minimum of $10M in TVL (powered by vaults.fyi)
Stablecoin Yields
7 day benchmark stablecoin rates from Portals: 2.91%:
Here’s the top yielding stablecoin vaults (real yields) for the past 30 days:
Min $10M TVL
Checking in on Stablewatch to see the 7-day TVL changes.
This week the top movers were: OpenTrade (XDFIS) +39.4%, Midas (mTBILL) +20.8%, Cap (stcUSD) + 19.5%:
ETH Yields
7 day benchmark ETH staking rates from Portals: 2.22%
Here’s the top yielding ETH vaults (real yields) for the past 30 days:
Min $10M TVL
Looping
Here’s a snapshot of the front page of looping this week from yieldz.io:
My main takeaway from this week is to look into these Saturn loops. Those APYs are unsustainable, but very interesting 👀
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Fixed rate loops are here
Last week we wrote about Term’s fully revamped fixed rate protocol and we sort of mentioned their new carry product (looping). But I wanted to drill into their carry product a bit more this week because I think its really interesting what fixed rates affords DeFi users.
For now, liquidity is still ramping up so some of these loops don’t have adequate liquidity, but you can sort of start to see how user friendly these could be for looping. The key thing here is you wouldn’t have to be monitoring your loop for negative carry incidents unless the yield of your collateral dropped below your fixed rate.
Term has some interesting PT-reUSD - 10DEC2026 (from re.xyz) offerings up right now, but as I mentioned before, some of these are already full and in need of more liquidity, but worth keeping an eye on:
I used an example of a $5000 entry that borrowed about $20k to create a $25k position for 4 months and the fees to get into it were $64.18. Not crazy, but not totally insignificant. This would definitely be something to monitor to make sure entering and exiting aren’t too costly.
I also asked the team for more details about the “returned at entry” component and this is what they said:
“Returned at entry” means the transaction sends approximately $382.80 of surplus USDC back to your wallet immediately when the loop executes.
The looping route borrows enough USDC to complete the swap and repay the flash loan. Any amount not required by the final route is returned rather than left in the transaction.
Important: it is not free profit. It comes from the borrowed funds, so it remains part of the principal you owe at maturity.
In this example:
$64.18 is consumed by price impact and the flash-loan fee.
$382.80 is received back in your wallet at execution.
The projected $286.98 net return separately accounts for the position’s collateral yield, 9% borrowing cost, entry costs and other economics over 122 days.
Think of it as cash out at loan entry, not earned yield.”
I also asked the team how someone would exit early from one of these positions and apparently there is a loop out feature which will unwind the loop.
Overall, hoping to see these markets attract more liquidity so these carry products can really take off.
STRC update
The USD duration number is now up to 2.7 years. Meaning, if none of their preferred equity products grew, they have a cash balance to pay for 2.7 years worth of dividends. This has been the most important number to watch for me. However, the higher it gets, the less important it becomes. The other thing Strategy is showing here is their ability to build reserves fairly quickly.
STRC price is still reacting well to the latest moves by Saylor and Co:
How is onchain STRC holding up?
The total TVL between STRCx (by xStocks) Saturn and APYX this week is $639.37M ($644.27M last week):
Here's the Aug 10 movement update:
Saturn: $176.4M (down $8.5M) and APY at 19.16% from 22.12%. Under 20% now and still sliding
Apyx: $312.07M (flat again, exact same supply two weeks running) with APY reading 20.23%. That's repeg-inclusive so real yield is still 14.76%, basically flat. The headline dropping from 25.40 is all the par-recovery piece shrinking from 10.46% to 5.47% as STRC climbs back toward $100, not yield falling
STRCx: $150.9M (up $3.6M) holding at 12%. Seventh straight up week and it just cleared $150M
Total TVL: $639.37M (down $4.9M so off less than 1%)
Overall, still not a ton of movement this week.
3x tokenized STRC
I didn’t intend to do even more STRC coverage this week, but I saw this and thought it was a pretty interesting product.
And I know what you might be thinking, when you see 3x tokenized STRC it might remind you of this meme 👇
With great power, comes great responsibility
This is from Toros finance who is a team that cooks up all sorts of interesting financial products like this:
I think this could be a very interesting product to use during short to medium duration repeg events going forward.
But what exactly is happening here?
I asked the Toros AI chatbot to explain this product to me and this is what it said:
STRCBULL3X gives you 3x leveraged long exposure to Strategy STRC Preferred — so a 5% move up in STRC becomes ~15% for you. It's fully automated: no loans to manage, no liquidation risk, and leverage is automatically rebalanced to stay on target. One token, one buy, done.
The vault holds Ondo tokenized stocks wound up to 3x leverage, monitors it continuously, and rebalances whenever it drifts. Because of the constant re-leveraging, if STRC keeps trending up, gains compound exponentially.
So I think this part above is interesting as a far as how this Ondo product works. It takes the dividend and uses it to purchase more shares, so the yield is essentially auto compounding STRC. Then this arrangement is given 3x leverage by Toros.
Here’s an image from the Toros team that shows where all the yield comes from:
So one other thing that is important, I also asked Toros AI if the same leverage is magnified in downside events:
Yes — it works both ways. A 5% drop in Strategy STRC Preferred would mean roughly a 15% drop in STRCBULL3X.
In choppy, sideways markets there's also volatility decay to be aware of: constant rebalancing can gradually erode the token's value even without a big directional move. So this product is generally better suited for short to medium-term trending markets rather than long holds in uncertain conditions.
You may have an airdrop sitting in your wallet
If you missed this, this is worth checking out. I’m hoping some of you have some forgotten treasures lying in your wallets 🫡
The DeFi Saver team are🐐 ‘d:
Good Reads
Only one good read this week that really stood out to me and I think its nearly mandatory reading if you allocate in the space. Will Clemente is such a clear thinker and communicator and lays out how he’s approaching Bitcoin right now:
Yield Trading
Taking a look at the front page of Stablecoin yields and RWA yields this week on Pendle:
Stablecoins
10.28% - 23.7%
RWA
14.04% - 24.69%
Thanks for reading!
DISCLAIMER: Nothing written in The Edge Newsletter or said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice. Any views expressed in our content are solely the opinion of that writer, host, or guest. Always do your own research. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and guests may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this content.
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