Intro
Last time (my previous blog post) we talked about depositing BAT rewards from publish0x (or any other erc20 coin), along with an equal amount of eth to provide liquidity on Uniswap, and get rewards in the form of transaction fees. You could use different combinations of stablecoins or volatile coins with eth to have different levels of risk and potential returns. We also talked about some tools for calculating ROI. But there was always a risk of "impermanent" or unrealized losses because you always have to provide eth, which is subject to volatility. It turns out that there are some new alternatives that offer less risk, and higher yields.
iEarn.finance
iearn is a "yield aggregater" or "yield bouncer" which will get the best rates from various services for several different stable coins. If you deposit dai, for example it will give you ydai back which represents the dai + interest that it was able to earn from different defi services. The documentation explains the various strategies in more detail.
The "zaps" will allow you to perform various functions with less steps, such as converting eth to dai, or dai to curve.fi tokens. "Cover" is for smart contract insurance with Opyn. APR just shows you the current yields for different coins on different services.
curve.fi
There are currently 5 separate liquidity pools - Busd.curve.fi, y.curve.fi, Susd.curve.fi, compound.curve.fi and usdt.curve.fi. You can get higher rates on your ytokens by becoming a liquidity provider on y.curve.fi. The returns vary and fluctuate between pools. In any case, there are no impermanent losses, since they are all stablecoins, and you don't have to deposit eth. Here is a good recent article on curve.fi with more detail.
You can deposit dai, and the system will automatically split the coin into the 4 stable coins, or you can deposit any, or all of the individual coins. You will get the curve.fi token in return which can be redeemed for capital + interest + fee income. You can check current value at defisnap.io
You will accumulate interest and fees at good yield rates. You can also withdraw one or all of the component stable coins at any time.Full trade data and analytics for http://curve.fi at pools.fyi
Conclusion
I have tested pretty much everything, and it all works well for me. Its the highest rate that I can get anywhere, but there are always risks, so be cautious and consider investing in the insurance. Apparently there have been audits of the smart contracts, but they havn't been released publicly yet. All the smart contracts are opensource, and available on github. These 2 services (above) were developed independently, but are integrated and work well together. I expect them to only get better over time, based on their roadmap which is publicly available, and weekly updates are provided by the founder (Andre Cronje). The community on telegram, and twitter also seems to be pretty helpful. You will earn a good return whether the market goes up or down. It doesn't really matter.
