Hey folks, in the past I’ve done several articles in the past about where you can get the highest yields stablecoins, but it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about $AVAX, and in fact, I believe this is the first time I’ve dedicated an article solely to $AVAX single-sided strategies. And as I usually do with most of my “best places” articles, there’s a couple of criteria that I’ve considered when compiling this list together:
- Little to no impermanent loss: there’s a ton of degen LP’s out there that are offering triple-digit returns, but all of these strategies in this list are either completely single-sided or at least only exposed to liquid-staked derivatives, none which should expose you to any significant IL.
- High TVL: There’s technically no objective standard for what a lot of TVL means, but for me personally, I’m considering a high TVL to mean greater than $200k. I’d imagine that for the average retailer, most are only moving around sums at most of 1–2 thousand dollars, which means that with a TVL of more than $200k, an entry of a thousand bucks shouldn’t significantly dilute the yields.
With all that in mind, let’s go ahead and dive in shall we?
Balancer’s Composable Stable Pool, $WAVAX-$yyAVAX: 19.42–45.01% APR
Balancer is an OG of the cryptospace, especially with all the groundbreaking work they’ve done in creating balancer pools. This strategy involves wrapped $AVAX as well as $yyAVAX, which is the LSD created by the team over at Yield Yak, where at the time of writing, 1 $yyAVAX equals approximately $1.1184 $AVAX.
If you’re uncomfortable with getting exposed to $yyAVAX, you could instead opt into Balancer’s $sAVAX-$WAVAX composable pool that also has an impressive variable APR of 11.17–13.45% APR:
Obviously the the APRs a bit lower, but arguably this second pool is much more stable as it has a TVL of more than $9 million, as compared to the $yyAVAX pool that has roughly $500k. Additionally if you’re unfamiliar with $sAVAX, it’s by far the most popular LSD of $AVAX, created by the BenQi finance team.
If you’re unfamiliar with Balancer, their “composable pools” simply mean that they’re dynamic in the sense that the assets in a pool don’t need to be paired one-to-one. As you can see in the case for their YieldYak pool, the ratio is nearly 9:1:
My take: Balancer is a super-well known protocol in DeFi, one that’s really proved their meddle through multiple cycles. That being said, despite being audited, Balancer has had a history of hacks — twice in one month in fact that happened last year.
Cian’s Recursive Staking Strategy, $AVAX-$sAVAX: 14.98% APY
Cian’s recursive staking strategy utilizes an automated leverage strategy utilizing a borrowing loop between $AVAX and $sAVAX via Aave, one of DeFi’s premier lending and borrowing protocols.
There’s actually two different $AVAX strategies on Cian, but I’d recommend using the BenQi strategy because not only does it offer higher yields, but the Aave strategy is slightly riskier as it has a significantly higher collateral ratio of 87.54% with 8x leverage compared to BenQi’s ratio of 64.51% with 3x leverage. (To clarify, both strategies actually use Aave for flashloans, but the BenQi strategy uses BenQi for borrowing and lending, not Aave.)
In full transparency, I heard about Cian more than a year ago, but I didn’t pay it much mind because on the surface level it seemed pretty complicated. In order to take advantage of this strategy you have to create and fund a smart wallet — a wallet which is able to execute several steps including borrowing, lending swapping, flashloans, all in one click (hence, why these strategies are called “automated”).
Diving in a bit deeper, not only has Cian had several audits, but their strategies also have automated Flash Repay mechanisms that will help exit your positions just in case if you might be nearing liquidation.
My take: I’m super bullish on Cian as it’s been attracting a lot of TVL and has yet to have their own token — an airdrop that has been confirmed to be in the works:
Besides simply opening up a position, I’d recommend completing some tasks on their Zealy questboard. Bottom line is that if you’re super avoidant towards leverage, you might want to stay away from this one, but if you’re curious and would like to learn more about the risks, I’d hop over to their discord as they appear super responsive towards when asked questions.
Definitive’s Hyperstaking Strategy, $sAVAX: 17.19% APY
This is by far the newest strategy on the list, for as you can see from the graphic above — this strategy only opened up last week. Similar to Cian, Definitive’s strategy also utilizes leverage using BenQi, yet focuses on arbitraging price differentials between the borrow rate of $WAVAX and $sAVAX’s innate staking yield.
As I already mentioned, this is an extremely new strategy so it hasn’t been fully tested yet. In fact, users are limited as access to Definitive’s entire suite of different hyperstaking strategies unless they provide an invite code: “HYPERSTAKING.”
My take: There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening on Definitive, but in general I’m a bit more wary about protocols that haven’t been sufficiently tested (and if you read through some of the chat history in their telegram, you’ll probably get a sense of what I’m talking about.)
That being said, they already completed an audit and their entire team is doxxed. With a UI that is super clean and easy to use, it seems like they’re really off to an exciting start.
DeltaPrime $yyAVAX-$AVAX Vault, 19.54%-73.87% APR
DeltaPrime has some massive APRs including up to 73.87% for their $yyAVAX-$AVAX vault, and up to 29.59% APR for their $sAVAX-$AVAX vault — both utilizing leveraged position on top of Balancer.
If you’re unfamiliar with DeltaPrime, it’s a platform that’s able to offer users undercollateralized loans up to a rate 5x’s their original deposit. Within a “walled garden” users can perform actions just as if you were doing so from your own wallet — paying gas fees, making LP tokens, staking, etc. The only thing that you are unable to do is to send them to an outside wallet that is not connected to your Prime Account; however, you can withdraw as long as much as you want, as long as your position stays solvent. The more you want to withdraw, the more, you need to repay (at least part of) your borrowed funds.
Nervous about using leverage? DeltaPrime has a pretty nifty calculator which will allow you to setup your positions before hand to see what they’d like live
My take: Having written about them a couple times before, I’m a huge fan of the DeltaPrime team and have been super impressed about the preemptive actions they’ve taken to protect its users. I myself was caught victim to the last Platypus exploit last October, and was pleasantly surprised that the team already had a contingency plan in place if one of their strategies were compromised. The only downside I can think of is that using DeltaPrime might require a more hands-on approach — it’s important to check-in periodically to see if your health rate has changed.
Conclusion
At the time of writing, $AVAX just hit its support level just under $32 dollars, so I’ve taken it as an opportunity to load up on my bags as I’m pretty confident that it will recover nicely once this current pullback is over. While I’m waiting for the next leg up to occur in the bull market, I’ll be keeping a close eye on each of these strategies to help make sure I’m doing everything I can to stack more $AVAX along the way.
Is there a strategy I missed? If so, please let me know in the comments below because I’d love to go check it out.
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. 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!
