So if you’re like me, you probably have friends and family around that roll their eyes every time you talk about crypto or web3. And when you do find that one person that expresses any type of interest, when you start talking about gas fees, liquidity pools, #realyield, or any other DeFi native terms…they probably flake out after a few minutes and tell you that it’s all going over their head.
To those that can’t/won’t process all the hooplah of what makes DeFi so insanely complicated, what Rainmaker offers is a way to meet that person half-way. With Rainmaker, users are able to still engage in preset DeFi strategies to earn the great yields that DeFi has to offer while not having to worry about paying gas when making transactions and all the while maintaining self-custody of your crypto.
Gasless transactions? How is this Possible?
It’s not that there’s not gas being paid on transactions, but as of right now, there are separate “paymaster contracts” that subsidize the gas fees so that Rainmaker users are able to do it for free. Additionally there are several methods that Rainmaker uses via account abstraction in order to simply the ways in which transactions are handled:
Paymaster contracts — once again, these help sponsor and help subsidize the gas for each transaction
Bundlers — through atomic transactions, Rainmaker allow many transactions to be grouped to write them on chain all at once. In other words, atomic transactions will group consecutive transactions all at once so that users don’t have to tediously approve/sign for multiple steps. Think about all the steps that you need to perform in order to simply stake one token or LP:
- Approval needed to connect to the protocol
- Approval needed for the protocol to access the token you want to swap out of
- Swap for the token you want to get
- Give approval for the protocol to access the token(s) in order to make the LP
- Give approval for the protocol to access your LP token
- Stake the token
All of these steps are just if you want to stake, let alone trying to claim rewards or auto-compound them. Similar to a flashloan, when an atomic transaction occurs all of these steps above have to occur or none of them will, which when all is setup correctly creates a very simplified process.
It’s uncertain about how long the runway will last for these free transactions. Assuming that Rainmaker significantly scales up, I would assume that making transactions on chains like Ethereum Mainnet will get quite costly. It’s apparent that the Rainmaker has already thought of this however and is talking to different major DeFi protocols to see if the protocols themselves might help subsidize these transactions — a proposition which seems like it would be a win-win. If protocols are able to get users on their platform performing transactions, they would ultimately gain more fees, while at the same time Rainmaker users would essentially be able to use these DeFi apps for gas-free.
DeFi Yield Hunting Simplified
Besides account abstractions and bundled transactions, Rainmaker handpicks different strategies that users can go in and out of, all with pretty decent (and not degen) yields. The majority of yields range around 5–6% with the highest on Avalanche:
It should be important to note however, that just because Rainmaker simplifies DeFi, it doesn’t make you impervious to exploits and hacks. If you take a look at the graphic above, many of the strategies involve Platypus, who suffered now their 3rd exploit just this past week:
Rainmaker will subsidize your gas fees, but it’s doubtful they can recover your exploited tokens.
Other Items to Note:
How does Rainmaker generate revenue? Similar to protocols like Beefy.finance, Rainmaker has auto-compounding positions where they take small performance fees on the yield earned from each strategy. Other features that will most likely be rolled out are either subscription services for wallet use, or possibly future tax reporting services to help people simplify all the tax headaches that DeFi can accrue during tax season.
Self-Custody — To be clear, Rainmaker is considered as a self-custody wallet, but not in the way that most crypto-die-hards would be happy with. Similar to what Ledger announced as a new seed recovery service last summer, Rainmaker gives the option for users to have their seed phrase sharded and encrypted. Despite these criticisms, I think realistically seed phrases are a hindrance to many normies, and I wouldn’t trust my 94-year-old grandmother to keep track of one.
What chains does Rainmaker support? Currently you can hold assets on the following chains:
However even though they listed BNB chain, there are currently no strategies available to utilize.
Invite Only — Rainmaker is still very early, and is only available via invite. If you’re interested in trying it out or if you want to take advantage of their free gas fees, you’re more than welcome to use my invite code: FOUNDER-1539325
IOS/Android — Speaking of being early, currently the Rainmaker wallet is only available on IOS and Android, but a desktop version is in beta testing. If you’re a bit reluctant to do DeFi on your phone, then you can always jump in their Discord to request beta access.
Conclusion
When crypto finally gains mass adoption, I actually think that many DeFi projects will start providing gas free or gas subsidized services in order to attract liquidity, and in fact I think it’s a bit surprising that it took this long to get there.
If you’ve already messed around with Rainmaker, I would love to hear about your experiences in the comments below. Otherwise if you’d like to give it a shot yourself, all you have to do is go to https://rainmaker.nyc/ in order to get it downloaded on your phone. Once again, you’re more than welcome to use my invite code, or else there’s always ones being thrown around in their Discord server as well.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. If you want to get access to all my draft links or get an idea about what’s next on my docket before I publish, find me on Friend.tech, where I share all that information in my chatroom. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!
