Tracking Down Safer Yields in DeFi

Crypto’s latest rash of exploits has made onchain risks feel inescapable. More than $630M has been stolen from blockchain-based financial applications this month alone.

The hacks have shaken confidence in onchain yields. Earlier this month, a nefarious actor used illicitly minted and unbacked rsETH to open a multi-hundred-million-dollar bad debt black hole in lending market lynchpin Aave V3, siphoning nearly $200M from lenders in the process.

While no crypto protocol can guarantee full immunity from smart contract risk, it's true that some employ fundamentally safer approaches to yield farming than Aave V3, whose depositors are exposed deployment-wide to potential insolvency if even one single onboarded market suffers unexpected losses.

Today, we break down safer crypto yield opportunities 👇

🕰️ Pendle

Pendle is a yield splitting protocol, a special type of DeFi primitive that creates two distinct tokens: principal tokens (PTs) and yield tokens (YTs). The first can be redeemed for an underlying crypto asset at a specified future date, and the second represents a claim to all yield generated from that asset in the interim.

Using PTs, Pendle yield farmers can safely guarantee their yields until a specified future date, denominated in units of the underlying asset. PT holders can also redeem early by purchasing an equivalent amount of YTs, which can be used in combination to create a liquidity provider position and redeemed for the underlying.

While Pendle users are responsible for evaluating the safety of the individual yield markets they deposit into, there is zero risk of protocol-wide contagion if the value of any single Pendle-onboarded crypto asset becomes impaired. The Protocol’s smart contract logic is only responsible for ensuring that users can redeem their tokens for a pre-specified amount of underlying assets, insulating the broader system from any specific asset shocks.

Top Yield Opps:

Get risky and receive 9% APY on sUSDai (a GPU-backed stablecoin) for the next six months, play it safe and lock in 3% APY on Lido’s stETH until June 24, or select another risk-return combination that meets your needs with Pendle principal tokens.

🦄 Uniswap

Uniswap is one of the longest standing and most simplistic crypto yield generation protocols. At the highest level, Uniswap “liquidity providers” (users who deposit two different crypto tokens into a Uniswap pool) get paid every time a trader’s swap is intermediated through their tokens.

The Uniswap model of risk management is extremely bare bones and outsources all decision making onto the liquidity provider. Users must navigate between thousands of available pools to identify ones with safe asset pairings. They are also responsible for manually setting a liquidity range distribution, essentially a tradeoff slider between position efficiency and risk.

While long-tail asset pairings can earn higher token-denominated yields on Uniswap, the dollar value of these yields cannot be assured. Additionally, tighter liquidity position ranges may increase a position’s capital efficiency (and thus its returns), but can leave users exposed to unexpected losses when token values rip beyond their expected range.

Innumerable sudden token rugs have occurred on Uniswap, yet this AMM’s design ensures that losses are fully contained within the affected pools, leaving Uniswap’s overall solvency untouched every time.

Top Yield Opps: