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: 2.60%:

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: Cap (stcUSD) +30.8%, Inverse (sDOLA) + 10.5%, Maple (syrupUSDG) +8.3%:

7 day benchmark ETH staking rates from Portals: 2.29%

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

It’s hard not to be a skeptic in DeFi these days. However, as much as I need to be a skeptic, I’m also an eternal optimist. Those are two difficult views to hold simultaneously.

So when I see something like the below tweet, I’m both intrigued, but also highly skeptical.

What got my curiosity is Luke ( a guy I know pretty well), claiming they have a way to generate “high 2-digit APY” on on their “Boosted USDC Accounts”. Now, I should also point out I hold MAMO tokens, but that doesn’t make me any less skeptical when I see claims like this. That said, the optimist in me wants this to work.

Take a minute or two and click this thread below and give it a quick read through:

I wrote up Mamo a couple of times last year in this report. I’ve had USDC in the Mamo app compounding for probably over a year now and while I was very impressed with the UI/UX once they hit their stride, I was hoping yields would be a bit higher.

This looks like a path to higher yields. I reached out to their team to get a bit more color on what’s happening here. Below is a bit of our back and forth:

One other thing I asked was: if a user puts $1000 of USDC into the boosted vault can they redeem instantly if they need to withdraw? Also, is our principal protected in most cases or can we have a drawdown on the principal? Here’s the response:

We’ll learn a lot more as this gets closer to going live, but I definitely don’t look at it as risk free. That said, if it works as advertised and you have a longer time horizon and are willing to stay in it for some duration, the hope is that any minor principal losses are more than offset by the yield. We’ll see.

Either way this looks interesting and I will be watching closely 👀

Starting around ~6 months ago I started writing more about BOLD in the DeFi Report.

Why?

Just look at all the yield tokens that have blown up over that period. When you look at the yields they were offering and the risk profiles they had, the juice was rarely worth the squeeze.

Which is why I wanted to go a bit more in depth on this concept. Big thanks to Scrolling with Ceazor for putting this post on my radar this week.

Does BOLD have better yield AND a better risk profile than sUSDS and sUSDe?

Before we get to the BOLD yields, lets just stay on the risk profile for BOLD for a minute. BOLD gets the highest grade on Pharos which is a platform that has rated ~400 stablecoins.

And just as a reminder, what is the counterparty risk with something like BOLD? What are the tradeoffs you’re making or what assets do you have to trust underneath?

I think Reserve Composition is a good thing to look at for this and basically with BOLD you have to be comfortable with wstETH (Lido), WETH and rETH (Rocket Pool). That’s a pretty comfortable list for me:

There’s tons of other metrics you could point to, but when talking to Ike and Token Brice, the one attribute that has created the most grave stones for stablecoins has been Mint Authority.

How is Mint Authority derived and scored?

So we’ve established BOLD as one of the better, if not the best, designs for risk/safety, so now lets look at the yield.

If you zoom in on this box, some of the yields are very good, especially for a stablecoin with the risk profile of BOLD.

Obviously you still need to DYOR on the strategies above, but the underlying asset of BOLD is a great foundational asset to start generating yield with. I’m becoming even more BOLD-pilled by the day.

We have a podcast with Paul Frambot dropping very soon all about Midnight so I will let that do most of the talking. Possibly even coming out the day this goes report goes live or maybe the day after.

However, one thing I wanted to touch on quickly is how big of an upgrade this could be for DeFi.

Fixed-rates gives DeFi something it didn’t really have: predictability.

I think whole new primitives and funds will rally around this when Midnight really gets up to full speed. The other aspect that excites me is what this will do for leverage. People love looping and its had horrible UX with variable rates. Fixed rates are the missing link to really drive even more capital into looping.

Stay tune for our podcast with Paul…

As I alluded to above in the 30D stablecoin section, this dCOMP vault has been at the top of the yield list for a few weeks now. I’d been meaning to check it out and then I saw an interesting post about it. Personally I wouldn’t touch the vault myself, but the story is developing into something intriguing.

It’s always interesting when you stumble upon stuff like this in crypto. Give this a read:

So it would appear an account named “Humpy” is going full activist investor George Soros mode on Compound. Pretty wild story here:

Just as it seemed all hope for Clarity passage was starting to wane, we get this:

With this news, the Polymarket for the Clarity act spiked to 48%:

So what I understand this to be is the White House has finally agreed on the ethics language which was the last component holding things up. However, what this still doesn’t have is democrat support. So while we’re another step closer, we’re still a long way away from this having full support. It also wouldn’t surprise me if democrats have a voluntary knee jerk reaction to anything crypto right now based on how this administration has weaponized grift in this space.

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 $648.17M ($652.67M last week):

Movement since July 15:

Once again, more effort is being put towards what I think is one of the most important numbers for strategy. Their USD months of dividend coverage.

Last week in this column they had 20.4 months of USD dividend coverage. Since last week they’ve upped it to 22 months:

I don’t see him stopping adding here. I think he should continue to at least 2 - 3 years if he can. I think another key move would be loading up on this during the bull cycle rather than the bear cycle, but we’ll see if Saylor can help himself. He’s never met a bitcoin he didn’t like, regardless of the price.

STRC is holding mostly steady since we posted last 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.