As more liquidity is (finally) coming back into crypto, Altitude is one of DeFi’s biggest secrets offering some of the biggest returns on bluechips liquidity pools (including ETH, BTC and also USDC). Each LP is comprised of one single type of asset, meaning in other words, farmers can capitalize single native asset liquidity pools going back and forth from mainnet, different L2s, and other EVM-compatible networks, with less risk, no impermanent loss, and massive APRs.
Liquidity is a double-edged sword for many different protocols, especially bridges.
All protocols, let alone bridges, need liquidity in order to be able attract high volume orders, and Altitude is no different. When one of Altitude’s LP has low liquidity, people can’t execute transfers if their funds exceed what’s available on the otherside. For instance if I wanted to send $100 $USDC from Mantle to Arbitrum, using two different transactions, Altitude’s LayerZero endpoint on Mantle will communicate directly with the endpoint on Arbitrum to ensure that there is enough liquidity on the opposite side to complete the transfer. If there is not enough liquidity on Arbitrum in order to complete the transfer, then the transfer simply does not get performed.
Alternatively for the liquidity suppliers, the smaller amount of liquidity in the liquidity pool means that they will get paid out in a higher proportion of rewards. For this reason we easily see triple-digit APRs in some of Altitude’s lower liquidity pools:
These pools are incentivized by Altitude’s rebalancing fees and rewards, where fees are levied when a user goes from a chain with low liquidity to a chain with high liquidity but a user going from a high liquidity to low liquidity chain will be rewarded.
What are the most lucrative farms?
As some of these farms have extremely low liquidity with rates that can change on a moments notice, here are the highest yielding farms that have at least a $1,000 dollars or more worth of liquidity:
$USDC on Mainnet going to Arbitrum — 40.97% APR
$USDC on Arbitrum going to Avalanche— 20.86% APR
$USDC on Mantle going to Arbitrum— 97.73% APR
$USDC on Arbitrum to Mainnet— 87.76% APR
$WETH on Mainnet to Polygon— 62.86% APR
Once again Altitude does have other farms with 4–5x’s the APR, but these conversely also have extremely low liquidity, meaning that with a small deposit, rates will inevitably (and drastically) change.
Great, but how does Altitude stack up against other bridges?
As one of the first bridges to use LayerZero-tech and because apples-to-apples assets are being transferred, the only amounts lost are on protocol fees. Here’s a comparison on bungee.com (a bridge aggregator) of how other bridges compare against Altitude:
As you can see in the screenshot above, Synapse (the “best” return) has more than 4 times, and Stargate (the #3 ranking bridge according to DefiLama) has nearly 7 times the amount taken out of your initial token supply once they hit the other side. Altitude has a flat rate bridging fee of 0.05% which is incurred on all bluechip/stable transfers, and as I mentioned before, with rebalancing fees/rewards, this could make certain transfers better or worse.
It’s exciting to see bridges like Altitude come out with better infrastructure to secure crypto-bridging — a much needed advancement in the crypto space. If you want to get a deeper dive about how Altitude works and processes its transactions, check out my full-length deep dive that I wrote earlier in the month.
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 (and now New Bitcoin City), where if you’re a keyholder, 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!
