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: 2.30% (up from 2.15% 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: Frax (sfrxUSD) +24.6%, Unitas (sUSDu) +18.2%, USD.ai (sUSDai) + 17.2%:

ETH 30 day benchmark rate on Aave: 1.70% (1.70% last week)

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

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

Yesterday while scrolling I saw this thread:

I hadn’t tried any of the OpenClaw iterations before and was pretty curious to test it out.

One of my main hesitations was deploying it on my current setup. I didn’t feel like buying and configuring a Mac Mini just to run it.

This setup from Byreal changes that. The agent is hosted in the cloud and you interact with it through Telegram, which made it much easier for me to finally give it a shot.

I’ve also always been a bit hesitant about connecting Telegram bots directly to my own wallets. With this setup, you can log in via social sign-in and a Privy wallet is automatically created in the background.

Much smoother, and honestly one of the final pieces that pushed me to try it.

And just like that, Nomatic Clawpital was born…

TLDR;

I’m actually blown away by it.

For fun, I’ll share with you what I’m doing.

Disclaimer — I’m not trying to make money here, and I’m not trying to lose it either. This is purely a UI/UX test.

I’ve only put in $50 to get a feel for how everything works:

I set this up on April 13th and on April 14th I asked Nomatic Clawpital for a report:

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being misled. This is a memecoin paired with USDC, so I wanted to confirm there wasn’t any hidden impermanent loss.

I had it take the calculation a bit further:

Final Thoughts

This was way smoother than I expected, and onboarding was easy.

I’m usually not a fan of Telegram bots, but this feels very different. The bots in the past were rigid and only as good as their preset prompts. This actually understands natural language and gets me to what I want quickly.

I don’t know exactly when, but this feels like where things are heading. Frontends will still exist, but the depth of control and precision you can get from an agent like this is impressive.

And if it feels like I’m extrapolating too much from a 24-hour, $50 test, that’s fair.

But I’ve been using DeFi for a long time, and this felt very natural.

I’m pretty safety conscious when it comes to DeFi, and my initial reaction here is that this could end up feeling more like self-driving vs human driving. Potentially much safer.

The agent can analyze everything pre-transaction and surface risks in plain English. I can do some of that on my Grid+, but contract interactions aren’t always easy to interpret, even for me.

And yes, right now Nomatic Clawpital is confined to Byreal, but I actually reached out to the Pendle team. This would be an incredible fit there.

The ability to deploy an intelligent agent onto Pendle that knows the docs and the code inside and out would be interesting.

For one, just being able to set YT limit buys within preferred ranges would be a great feature, or even actively trade them as they move.

But beyond that, there are so many potential applications on a platform as deep as Pendle.

I came into this skeptical, and it ended up working much better than I expected.

I wrote about Katana a few times here in YOTW ahead of their token launch, and one of the frustrating parts was trying to estimate yields before TGE. The token plays such a big role in the overall yield profile, so it was mostly guesswork.

In my last writeup before TGE, I was being extremely conservative and modeling Katana at a $50M FDV.

Today, it’s sitting around an $80M FDV with ~$364M in TVL, and this feels like the point where you can start to trust the yield more. If anything, there may now be upside if Katana can keep building momentum on its flywheel.

So what do the yields actually look like today?

When factoring in KAT rewards, yields are above the Aave rate and likely in line with, or slightly above, the broader DeFi average.

What’s been more interesting is Katana’s willingness to consistently incentivize the borrower side. I’ve been tracking this for around eight months now, and they’ve continued to reward borrowers throughout. Early on, it wasn’t clear how long that would last or whether negative borrow rates would still make sense post-TGE, but so far they’ve stuck with it.

For example, this pool allows you to borrow USDC against BTC collateral at a slightly negative rate. Of course, that’s dependent on your view of current MORPHO and KAT prices, but if we are near a bottom, these rewards start to look a lot more defensible in this environment.

I will keep tabs on Katana as they introduce new vaults and assets as its a really interesting experiment to watch play out and I hope it succeeds.

If interested, we talked to their CEO Matthew Fisher on our our podcast recently. All links can be found below:

Lastly, if you’re reading this on the day the newsletter drops and you’re a KAT holder, you have one more day to vote.

KAT holders who stake into vKAT can direct emissions toward specific pools, boosting returns on the assets they’re exposed to (like Yearn USDC or Yearn USDT). Alternatively, you can opt for AutoVote and follow avKAT’s max return strategy.

It feels like the default reaction has been to dunk on Aave for not having massive TVL in its first few weeks. Regardless of how you feel about what’s played out publicly over the past year, taking shots at them for ramping a new protocol in a measured way feels misplaced.

We’ve gotten used to teams launching with $50M of bought and paid for TVL. Aave doesn’t need to play that game. They’re already established, have a strong reputation, and every incentive to take a more cautious approach, as they should.

Excited to see the “hub and spoke” vision play out. If anyone has earned the time to execute on it, it’s Aave.

I say all this as someone who hasn’t loved Aave’s comms over the past few months. I’m not a holder and have no affiliation, but as a DeFi user, I genuinely want to see Aave win.

I’m a big fan of what the Accountable team are doing so I always take a closer look at their vaults. This new one is solid and here’s the yield breakdown:

This is higher than the vanilla yield you would get on Neutrl’s frontend which is 7.9% APY. However, it’s not higher than the Strata Markets Jr position which is sitting at 9.78% APY at time of writing this and its also pure real yield:

Given the Accountable Neutrl vault is still effectively junior, with no loss coverage, I’d probably lean toward the Strata vault here if I wanted exposure.

DeFi Dad breaks down some impressive yields on Pendle using tokenized STRC strategies from Apyx and Saturn.

Personally, I think STRC could end up being the Ethena basis trade of this cycle:

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

Stablecoins

RWA

Stephen from DeFi Dojo and founder of Mezzanine breaks down two of the major tokenized STRC offerings:

Incredible article on Jeff Yan the founder of Hyperliquid. I’m halfway through it as its very long, but so far its an incredible deep dive on his life and the story that led him to building Hyperliquid:

Also, this is paywalled, but there is a little website called archive.is… 🤫

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.