Welcome to Yields of the Week! Every week, we spotlight the top DeFi yields across the crypto landscape, focusing on opportunities that are not just the highest APYs but also sustainable risk-adjusted opportunities. Whether you're new to DeFi or a seasoned degen, our goal is to help you navigate the yield farming space with confidence. Let’s dive into this week’s picks!

USDC 30 day benchmark rate on Aave: 1.99% (down from 2.01% last week)

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: M0 (M) +21.8%, XSY (yUTY) +16.2%, Cap (stcUSD) + 9.8%

No real trends I’m noticing here, but I like to check in on Stablewatch every week:

Also somewhat related:

ETH 30 day benchmark rate on Aave: 1.75% (down from 1.98% last week)

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

We had the chance to meet the Altura team a little over a month ago and came away really impressed.

The core team comes from Fidelity, PwC, and Deutsche Bank and Nomura, and they’re bringing a lot of that real world experience onchain to build a new source of exogenous yield. More on that below 👇️

But first, Altura describes themselves as:

Ok so what does that mean?

Here’s their deployment strategy from their docs:

We’ve seen a lot of (1) and (2), but (3) is where it gets interesting. It currently makes up about 43% of their vault strategy, as you can see from their Accountable dashboard:

So what is Inessa (RWA)? This is strategy (3), their RWA gold trading strategy.

In simple terms, the Altura team buys physical gold in regions where prices are depressed and transports it to more liquid markets for sale. I didn’t realize before this that there’s a full arbitrage market built around this.

This strategy is a major driver behind the ~20.03% base APY on the vault, not including Altura rewards:

When I first hear about a novel yield source like this, I usually have two reactions. First, I’m fascinated by the types of yields people are bringing onchain. Second, I immediately ask, where are the risks?

When we first spoke with the team, they had the full gold transfer process insured end to end, from point of origin to point of sale. More recently, they’ve taken it a step further.

About $5.75M of their $11.7M in TVL is now insured across multiple risk vectors, including employee theft, smart contract exploits, onchain components, transit, forgery, and counterfeit or fraud, among others. This coverage is also intended to scale as TVL grows.

All of this is covered by a regulated provider, Native Insurance, which specializes in digital asset insurance:

Despite using Accountable, one thing we flagged during our call was that parts of this gold trade weren’t fully onchain or auditable.

Since then, the team has told us this is going live, possibly by the time you’re reading this.

I’ll be interested to see what this actually looks like in practice and how transparent this real world gold trade becomes onchain.

Curious to see how this actually looks once it’s live.

Rysk

I’ve written about Rysk before, but it’s worth revisiting. It’s one of the more interesting and inventive protocols I’ve come across recently, and one of the first I’ve seen that actually strips away some of the complexity of options.

I may end up using this myself. I’ve been looking to DCA, and this feels like a clean way to either buy BTC, ETH, or HYPE at lower levels, or earn above average risk adjusted yield while waiting.

One way to do this is through a cash secured put. The interface is very straightforward:

In the image above, I’ve keyed in on the $1,800 strike. If ETH is above that in 23 days, I get back my $900 plus the $21.76 I received upfront.

It’s easy to see how this scales. Some months you get assigned and buy, other months you just take the yield. It’s actually a really interesting trade-off, and depending on your situation, both outcomes can make sense.

Yield is tough to come by right now, but mStable’s sUSDe yield token is currently netting 18.42% APY:

This is essentially taking Pendle Ethena PTs, layering leverage on top, and handling all the rollovers under the hood in a tokenized wrapper. It removes a lot of steps and shifts the execution risk to the mStable team.

Some people are not comfortable outsourcing that risk and would rather run it manually. I think there’s merit to both approaches.

I was in this myself for a few months last year when yields were bouncing between 20% and 40% APY. Good to see it starting to pick back up again.

Get paid 15% APY to borrow against stocks onchain? More on this below 👇

Tokenization of assets and bringing them onchain wasn’t something I was immediately excited about, but that’s changed. It felt like something institutions were excited about, but I wasn’t convinced it would move the needle for the average onchain user like myself.

I already had access to most of these assets in my brokerage account, so why go out of my way to use what felt like an inferior onchain version?

What’s changed for me is a combination of a few things:

Let me use an example that pulls all three of these points together. I was a bit late getting set up with an EtherFi card, but over the past ~1.5 months it’s honestly been mind blowing to use.

I’ve been building up a base of Liquid ETH, Liquid USD, HYPE, and a smaller ETHFI position to use as collateral against my spending. The longer term goal is to grow this base to a point where the yield alone fully offsets my annual spend.

Why is this relevant?

Veda’s vault infrastructure is what powers these EtherFi vaults, and it’s getting to the point where it feels robust enough, with enough lindy, that I’m more comfortable putting my own funds into it. On top of that, the ability to pool multiple collateral types is powerful in itself. It’s essentially Aave, but with a card attached.

Full control and custody won’t be for everyone, but it’s something I personally value a lot.

Quick tangent. I called my mortgage provider two days ago to look into a HELOC in the $50K to $100K range. I got through the initial screening call, but that’s where I stopped.

From there, I need to go to a separate site, fill out forms, and wait for approval. If approved, I still need to pay for an appraisal, which could change the outcome. Then I need to involve a lawyer to finalize everything. Only after all that do I actually get access to the funds.

It’s not unreasonable, but when you compare it to the speed and control you get onchain, it starts to feel pretty clunky.

Bringing it back to EtherFi, I’m basically running close to 100% crypto exposure right now outside of my Liquid USD position. Tokenization opens the door to holding things like gold, silver, or equities directly within this same system, which adds some balance.

I’m not usually big on the “diversify everything” mindset, but I am very long crypto. Having the option to balance that out, without leaving the ecosystem, is compelling.

And this is already starting to show up. xStocks just launched on Morpho, and at least for now, you’re actually getting paid to borrow against your stocks.

It won’t last forever, but it feels like a glimpse into where things are heading. I’m increasingly convinced that bringing stocks onchain is going to be a massive opportunity.

I could keep going, but Stephen captures a lot of this well in the post below:

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

Stablecoins

RWA

On March 30, two papers from separate teams dropped on the quantum threat to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). One came from Google, the other from OrAtomic.

The most immediate downstream risk here is to crypto, and even more so to Bitcoin.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on this, but of everything I’ve read so far, this piece below stood out as one of the better explanations if you’re looking to get up to speed:

Also Nic Carter has been all over this for a while and he’s been taking some victory laps over the last 24 hours:

Here’s a bit of pushback from the Bitcoin camp:

Adam Back hasn’t said much on this since the papers dropped, but I thought his reply below was interesting:

That’s all for now, thanks for checking it out!

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.