Wake Up Ser, New RWA Yield Trading Just Dropped

A weekly recap of the largest crypto events and narratives, with an extra dose of insight.

Here’s what we have for you:

• Rollbit new tokenomics

• Aevo pre-launch token futures

• Mux integrates GMX V2

• This is SPARTAAA

• Practicing good op-sec

Gm Raiders,

It’s been a relatively hectic week. Coinbase’s L2 has officially launched, and so far, nearly $150M in tokens has been bridged over. As part of the launch, Coinbase is running an onchain summer initiative. Various projects have launched on Base, including DeFi blue chips such as Uniswap, but also smaller projects such as Aerodrome.

In other news, there have been a few hacks ongoing, including SteadeFi for $1.14M and Cypher protocol for $1M. Similarly, Goldfinch had a $5M loan default that represents 4% of their deposits. Remember to be careful onchain. Never deposit too much into one protocol, as even the safest ones still have vulnerabilities (see Curve).

Mantle, an exciting L2 established by BitDAO has introduced a new governing body for treasury management. Being one of the largest treasuries in crypto today, they have $4.2B in assets, mostly in their native token MNT, to spend. Much of that could be used as incentives or to grow the ecosystem, and as of today, the ecosystem still only has $40M. It could be worth bridging there and playing around. It often pays off to be one of the earlier users of a new ecosystem.

-RektRadar

Wake up babe, it’s RWA season. On the back of increased interest in RWAs, including MakerDAO’s eDSR which is passing back real yield of 5% to sDAI holders, and various tokenised treasury bills, more and more protocols are entering the RWA space.

Money printing season from RWA’s is in full steam, with some staggering numbers being reported across the board. We have Tether reporting a net profit of $850M on the back of treasury bills in Q2, Coinbase 10x’ing their interest income since a year ago, and Maple Finance launching on Solana. I’m starting to think I should raise for a protocol, and then just yeet the seed round into treasury bills and live off that.

RWA’s are all about yield. And who else but one of the largest yield protocols, Pendle, the premier yield trading protocol, joins the party. Pendle just announced a whole host of RWA markets, namely sDAI by Spark Protocol and fUSDC by Flux Finance.

Now users will be able to trade and hedge their yield on sDAI and fUSDC on Pendle. Think interest rates are going up later this year? There’s a trade for that. Want to fix your returns? You can do that. Want to yeet whenever Jerome Powell says money printer go brrr? The fUSDC market on Pendle’s got you.

Expect to see more RWA integrations across DeFi, whether that’s passing along yield from real world loans, or interesting derivatives built on RWAs. The world of RWAs is much much larger than we think, and you would be silly to ignore it.

Oh sorry, one last point. Binance Labs (WOAH) made an investment in Pendle Finance. It seems like even CEXs are onto the RWA and yield trading narrative. Imagine if one day Binance decided to integrate Pendle into their CEX UI 👀

I’m sure you are so so so sick of hearing about friend.tech by now. It’s dominated your Twitter feed for one week straight. Same my friend, same. But how do you evaluate if the party is really over? That’s right, you guessed it. Data.

The chart above shows that friend.tech TVL has ever so slowly been on the downtrend, from a peak of $7.25M a few days ago. On a similar metric, it looks like the number of new users has begun to slow down, with cumulative # of users peaking at roughly 100K.

Users and the amount of $ on the protocol are only one side of the equation. You would also want to take a look at user activity. And there is no better graph to see user activity than number of traders and trading volume. From the graph below, we can see that the trading volume has fallen off a cliff. From a peak of over $15M to less than $3.2M a few days ago. At this point, I think it’s safe to say the party is over.

One big winner of friend.tech were the MEV bots. We can see that the top MEV bot made off with nearly $580K in profits, while the second highest profit was $177K. These all add up to more than $1M or so, which is fairly staggering considering the TVL of the protocol only amounts to $6M or so.

One can use data like this to tell when a project has peaked. This type of data analylsis isn’t limited to a protocol like friend.tech. Data always shows the insights before the market prices it in.