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: 2.55%:

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: Maple (syrupUSDG) +93.7%, Securitize (BUIDL) + 28.1%, Midas (mBASIS) +13.4%:

7 day benchmark ETH staking rates from Portals: 2.27%

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

Ammalgam is a protocol I’ve followed for a long time back when they were first raising capital. The founder DuelingGalois and team are very solid and I love it when I see DeFi builders trying to solve a problem differently than others. Or in this case, drawing on multiple other great mechanism designs and putting them all together.

Now, I’m giving Ammalgam a lot of grace to build up, it’s just gone live and they need to plug into more market makers and curators, but I’m very curious about what the bones of this protocol can do when it’s fully humming. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on it.

Now, what is it? I think this is a good high level explanation from their Launch Season X article:

They’ve just launched into their “Phase 3” so yields currently aren’t ready for primetime just yet:

I wanted to write this up now because I think they have some promise and potential. Although, as with all newer primitives, DYOR. For more information visit their docs page here

This is KPK’s USDC Yield Vault which they deem “medium risk”. It has been returning a fairly consistent 30d APY of 7.69%.

If wanting to understand what’s under the hood here you can view it on Morpho here:

The bulk of this position is made up of savUSD (avant) and srRoyUSDC (royco). Both of these positions are senior tranches.

A resson to use a curator like a KPK can be found on what’s in the description header right above the vault. It says:

That sort of thing can look like window dressing, but the KPK team has earned these words by navigating the very turbulent last 12 months of DeFi extremely well. Their automations and rebalances kept user funds safe. They’ve managed to avoid taking losses in all of the recent exploits, depegs and other close calls over this period.

Here’s a notable example from their blog:

Inside the War Room: How KPK Responds When DeFi Protocols Are Exploited

I personally have not deployed into this vault yet, but some of these curated/managed vaults are actually making more sense to me as you realize you could literally lose all your funds while you’re sleeping if you’re always in full control all the time. There’s definitely tradeoffs that are positive and negative for outsourcing some of this. I also feel like we’ve had enough mask off moments to know which curators are legit and which ones aren’t. Again, if you want to learn more about these guys, they’ve got excellent blogs and docs.

I like keeping an eye on Yieldz.io because I think it’s a great site for looping discovery. It gives you a lot of good filters to find certain loops you’re after. For example, I like that you can sort by stable pairs, loops with $1M+ in liquidity and also 30 day apy.

For instance here’s what 30d apy looks like on yieldz right now with the filters I mentioned above:

At a glance, there’s a lot of things that stand out here. Definitely the top 3 stablecoin loops that are all over 30% with decent liqudity, but also that wstETH <> ETH loop on Fluid is pretty interesting and appears to be performing very well over a 30 day period.

Looping isn’t for everyone, but I still like to check in here and see what’s popping. Also if you remove the $1M liquidity filter some of it really looks wild:

Just another quick reminder if you have been in reUSDe, redemptions are open until July 23rd, follow tweet below for full article that explains all the details:

3Jane continues to think differently and pioneer new ground in DeFi. They continue to run into problems, but instead of stopping they look to TradFi and ask the question “has this problem already been solved”? If the answer is yes, they set out to replicate the solution on DeFi rails.

Sounds very simple. However, I don’t think many teams do this all the time. Recently, 3Jane dropped a thread + article that exemplifies what I just explained. And candidly since they’re constantly trailblazing new ideas I had to read it twice to fully grasp the problem and their novel solution. Then it finally clicked and I realized I have a bit of real world experience with this as well that I’ll get to below.

Introducing Levered Callable Capital:

So what is happening here? I can actually explain it from a bit of my own experience.

Before we started The Edge, DeFi Dad and I worked at a crypto fund together where we had LPs that committed capital. If someone committed $1M to the fund, they did not necessarily wire the full $1M on day one. Instead, the fund might call $100K or $250K when they had deals ready, while the rest stayed with the LP until it was actually needed.

The thing making that commitment real was the legal agreement. The LP had certain obligations to fund when the fund made the capital call.

Levered Callable Capital is basically 3Jane bringing that same model onchain.

Instead of committing $1M through a legal agreement, a user posts a smaller amount of margin as a performance bond against a much larger commitment. In their example, you post $75K and commit to providing up to $1M when 3Jane needs it.

While that capital is sitting uncalled, you keep custody of most of it. You also earn yield on the margin you posted, plus a commitment fee based on the full $1M commitment.

Then, when 3Jane has an actual lending deal ready, it can make a capital call. You have a few weeks to provide the money. If you do not, your margin gets slashed and auctioned off to help bring in someone else who will.

So this gives 3Jane something DeFi protocols usually do not have: confidence that future capital will be available without forcing all of that capital to sit idle inside the protocol today.

It is basically the LP capital call model from private markets, except the legal agreement has been replaced by margin, smart contracts, and an auction backstop.

Definitely give their full article a read.

I dropped a new piece called…

Token Radar: Valuing Syrup AUM all-time highs. SYRUP back near May 2025 levels. Is it time to buy?

I’m looking for tokens I want to own for this bull market and SYRUP is one I’m watching. If you want to read the full piece it’s here below:

Not DeFi, but stumbled upon this and thought it was interesting:

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 $652.67M ($679.87 last week):

Movement since July 7:

Strategy is doing exactly what they should be doing IMO. They are shoring up their USD reserves so they can continue to pay the STRC dividends (and other preferred equities) and regain some consumer confidence in STRC itself.

They now have 20.4 months of dividend coverage:

I’m not sure what others think, but to me this is one of the most important confidence numbers for STRC. When this dividend coverage number started materially dropping, it coincided with the erosion of investor confidence.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to keep this above 24 months or maybe even 3 years going forward. Or maybe even a full 4 year cycle worth.

It feels to me the market is continuing to reward better operation from Strategy in the recent weeks. Also, he’s becoming less of the main character, which I think is a good thing.

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.