Quick note, Yields of the week is now DeFi Frontier as this name better reflects the content that we've started to share in this weekly report.

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.

7 day benchmark stablecoin rates from Portals: 2.46%:

Here’s the top yielding stablecoin vaults (real yields) for the past 30 days:

Checking in on Stablewatch to see the 7-day TVL changes.

This week the top movers were: Superstate (USTB) +2027.3%, Superstate (USCC) + 1413.8%, OpenTrade (XEURC-LIQ) +93.7%:

7 day benchmark ETH staking rates from Portals: 2.36%

Here’s the top yielding ETH vaults (real yields) for the past 30 days:

OK Flex is genuinely one of the cooler new DeFi protocols I’ve come across.

We first wrote this up on June 17th and I think it only continues to click more.

Part of why I like it is that the design feels simple, but also really elegant. It is fully onchain, transparent, and easy enough to understand without needing to decode some crazy black box.

As I’m writing this, you can still get APYs in the 30% range, with roughly $600k of redeemable capital buffer sitting ahead of you.

That said, it’s still crypto. The yield is interesting, but you still need to weigh the risk and reward based on your own goals, risk tolerance, and how comfortable you are with the setup.

We have a podcast on Flex/Yearn coming 🔜

If you don’t want to loop, yvUSD is also an incredible product. Lakes take a closer look at that…

To loop, or not to loop. Both paths are viable depending on what you are trying to achieve with Yearn products.

If you don’t loop, yvUSD still gives you options. You can choose the fully liquid version at 6.96% 30D APY and retain full control or lock it and attain a higher yield at ~9.13% APY.

But what is powering this yield you may be asking:

If you do lock and you want to withdrawal here is the process:

Nest has a private credit product called BlackOpal LiquidStone II that has been yielding a nice APY dating back to December of 2025. It’s currently showing an APY of 11.05%:

As stated in the image above, the yield comes from exposure “in FX-hedged, short-dated Brazilian credit card receivables for yield generation and Superstate’s USCC market-neutral strategy for liquidity management”

It’s explained in further detail below:

I was actually looking for a bit more documentation on this on the Nest site such as a link to a PDF or something. One of the things I was curious about was whether this is diversified consumer credit risk, or whether the strategy is concentrated in the lowest quality borrower segment. If the yield is coming mostly from non creditworthy customers, then the high APY may just be a reflection of much higher default risk. But I don’t know and not making assumptions, I just lack information here.

Another thing that stood out is that the $25M from Nest is a large part of the entire Black Opal fund. Not that it’s a bad thing just not sure the relationship here between Nest and Black Opal and why Nest is such a high concentration:

As far as redemption times, the Nest site states 30min - 4 days with most average redemptions taking 4 days right now. That is pretty good for this kind of return IMO and not overly surprising with the short duration strategy they are employing.

Some of the risks I see here, not including all the usual crypto smart contract risk/OpSec are:

Structure / manager risk
You’re relying on BlackOpal to source good receivables, hedge properly, manage liquidity, and report NAV correctly. So a lot comes down to execution and transparency. Of which, I can’t really find anything on just yet.

Overall I think this sort of product is interesting if you can get enough information and transparency. I personally have a lot more questions I’d want answered before depositing. That said, I’m seeing a lot more teams experiment in simlar/adjancent areas such as: 3Jane, Noon (Fasanara FTAC exposure), Nara (new protocol)

I came across this post on X and just thought it was a great articulation of what DeFi tooling + leverage can do for your portfolio during a bull run. In this case, it’s showing the powers of DeFi Saver. Not saying everyone should feel like they have to do stuff like this, but its always fascinating to me how others are playing things:

As I was going to publish, I saw this market commentary by Rami and I think he sort of nails how I’m thinking about the market right now too. I bought a bit back on in Feb and have started making more small buys at these levels:

I wrote up reUSDe from Re a while back when it had slightly deviated from NAV at the time and redemptions were not live. The team just released guidance on when and how redemptions can take place.

TLDR; (But you should really read it all too in case I missed something)

Big picture: this is the first real test of how reUSDe redemptions work in practice.

Full piece is below with Stephen’s takes as well:

For fun I asked LlamaAI what is going on with SYN. You can follow the link below to read what it thinks:

I fall into the camp of: SYN pumping seems like a KOL circle jerk and if anything this just makes me more bullish on Derive who is showing real growth and meaningful traction.

Also, I didn’t intend to have another KoolKrypto rant in here, but this is on point as well IMO:

Taking a look at the front page of Stablecoin yields and RWA yields this week on Pendle:

Stablecoins

RWA

The total TVL between STRCx (by xStocks) Saturn and APYX this week is $674.77M:

Movement since the last update:

This was the big news in STRC land this week (TLDR below):

Here’s the TLDR;

The market has given this a warm reception so far as STRC corrected fairly strongly on the back of this announcement:

That’s all for this week, 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.