❈ DEFI TOTAL TVL ❈

$49.31 Billion (+13.94% last week)

❈ Chain TVL Winners & Losers ❈

Canto (+59.50% last week)
Bitcoin (+39.32% last week)
Ronin (+38.24% last week)
Optimism (+36.67% last week)
Klaytn (+34.94% last week)
Tron (+30.60% last week)
Fantom (+25.70% last week)
Aptos (+24.68% last week)
Arbitrum (+23.10% last week)
Avalanche (+16.42% last week)
Near (+8.48% last week)

❈ Arbitrum Airdrop

The biggest news from this past week was easily the announcement of Arbitrum’s $ARB airdrop. You can check how many $ARB tokens you will receive at arbitrum.foundation.

This airdrop has probably been one of the most highly anticipated events for the past year in defi. With this airdrop, many individuals who casually used Arbitrum will essentially be getting a 4- or 5-figure stimulus check this coming Thursday. 🤯

The number of airdrop tokens individuals will receive was determined by a number of different factors.

• Bridged funds to Arbitrum One and/or Arbitrum Nova

• Number of transactions over time

• Transaction frequency + interaction

• Transaction Value

• Provided Liquidity

• Arbitrum Nova activity

Here was the official announcement video.

Here are the important details if you want to read more.

There’s been a lot of speculation around what the price of the $ARB token will be once it is claimable (March 23rd). Truth is - no one really knows but there has been some really interesting analysis. Olimpio’s thread on different price scenarios was the best one that I came across.

Regardless of what the price ends up being - it will almost certainly be highly volatile in the first 12/24 hours of trading. Grab some popcorn 🍿

❈ Uniswap live on BSC

In 3 days, Uniswap already has $10.88 million TVL on BSC and is processing ~$7 million in volume per day.

❈ Euler Finance exploited for $200 million

This story has been interesting to follow. Euler is decentralized borrowing and lending protocol. On March 13, it was exploited and the hacker drained $200 million from vaults.

Throughout the week, the Euler team sent a few on-chain messages to the exploiter’s wallet to try and negotiate a deal.

Then as recently as Saturday, the Euler hacker started to send some funds back to Euler. 3000 ETH has been returned so far.

MetaCVX brought up a really good point about Euler. They had 10 audits by 6 different companies that all assigned it as low risk and concluded there were no major security flaws. This is a great example of how defi can be incredibly risky and that you should never have more than you’re willing to lose in any one protocol or wallet. No matter how safe a protocol may seem.

Another interesting point about the Euler exploit is that it highlighted the downside of composability. A lot of protocols had built on top of Euler and also ended up losing funds.

• Angle Protocol had $17.6 million USDC deposited in Euler

• One of Balancer’s liquidity pools was affected

• Inverse Finance’s DOLA-bbeUSD pool was affected

• Yearn had Euler stratgies

• Alchemix was affected by the Yearn vaults

Hopefully, this will be a learning lesson for everyone and an encouragement that better risk management systems should be taken when building on top of defi building blocks.

❈ Pendle

Pendle is a defi protocol that allows individuals to tokenize the principle and yield portions of their favorite tokens, sell future yield, buy yields, and more.

Below is an example of 100 DAI, being split into 100 principal tokens and 100 yield tokens.

With this mechanism, a lot of really interesting options present themselves. Pendle provides a marketplace where both the Principal Tokens and the Yield Tokens can be bought and sold.

This mechanism allows for some really interesting strategies:

• Longing assets at a discount

• Fixed yield for low-risk, stable growth

• Longing yield

• any strategy that involves a combination of those 3

This is a pretty advanced topic that requires some basic understanding of defi yield. But I would highly recommend you read through their learning section. Unlike most other defi protocols, this walkthrough is actually very educational.

I’ll be watching Pendle pretty closely over the next few weeks. If the Yield Token for GLP dips, I may look into experimenting and buying my first “future yield” product.

With the recent hype around the $ARB airdrop, I thought it would be helpful to share some more information about airdrops and a few threads that came out this week that outline detailed instructions on things you can do to try and setup yourself up as a good candidate for future airdrops.

Airdrops can be pretty impactful - especially for smaller wallets. In the past two years, I have made mid-five figures from airdrops and I wouldn’t even consider myself an “airdrop hunter”.

Before I share some threads, a few things to remember when “airdrop hunting”:

• It’s always a good idea to create a new wallet (or a few). Airdrop hunting usually involves interacting with brand-new chains and protocols. It’s probably not something you want to be doing with any wallet that has substantial funds.

• Airdrops are never a “sure thing”. While you can often guess what protocols and chains might do airdrops in the future by looking at which don’t have tokens yet, you can never know for sure. Even if a protocol/chain confirms a future airdrop they often won’t say what the qualifying actions/metrics will be for determining who get an airdrop and how many tokens they’ll receive.

• I think the best approach to take is to experiment and try new protocols for the sake of learning, being curious, and testing new tech. If you get an airdrop, great! If not, you learned things along the way!

With that said, here are some awesome threads about airdrops that came out this week.

Cyril - Defi posted an awesome thread with protocols that will likely have future airdrops.

Rekt Fencer published an awesome thread with very detailed instructions for actions you can take to hopefully set yourself up well for the zkSync airdrop.

Most chains had their highest volume weeks of 2023 this past week or weekend with all of the craziness caused by the USDC temporary depeg.

Avalanche saw $311 million in volume last weekend. Double that of the second-highest volume day in 2023.

Ethereum saw a crazy $20.75 billion in volume last Saturday. The highest single volume in a single day, ever recorded on Ethereum, by a very wide margin.

That’s all for this week! As always - stay safe and stay yielding. 🌾

-Andy