Starting on June 1st, 2021 Ethermine started allowing miners to take their payouts at as little as .005 ETH. This is great because it allows small miners to get paid more often and do stuff like participate in DeFi on Polygon. To do this you need to take your payment on the Polygon network.
1. From your Ethermine Dashboard, click Settings.
2. Click Payment Method.
3. Connect your wallet via MetaMask. (If you are mining to an exchange wallet you need to switch your miner to a wallet you control the private keys for.)
4. Click the "L2 Polygon (Matic)" Button.
5. You can then save your changes and you will be asked to sign a transaction with your wallet. This is just a signing so it does NOT cost gas.
Yield Farming on Polygon
Now that you have some ETH on Polygon (it is actually WETH) you can start participating in DeFi Yield Farming opportunities. The opportunities range from simply staking a single asset like ETH, BTC, or stable coins, to more complex strategies including providing liquidity and then staking those LP tokens for more rewards. Let's stake our ETH on Polygon and start earning over 10%+ APY instantly for about a penny in fees.
1. Go to Matic Supply and get some Matic.
1a. If you need extra Matic you can swap some of you ETH for Matic at Quickswap Exchange (0.1 Matic is enough for about 100 transactions.)
2. Go to Polycat Finance and then go to "Vaults".
3. Search the list for "ETH" or scroll through the page to find it.
4. Approve the contract. (Same as interacting with any Ethereum contract)
5. Deposit your ETH.
As an example, the ETH Vault takes your ETH, deposits it into Aave, then recursively borrows and redeposits more ETH into Aave. All of those deposits and borrows earn a WMatic reward which the Vault claims every minute and sells to buy more ETH which is deposited directly back into your Vault.
Another option would have been to trade some of your ETH for Matic or USDC and then providing the tokens as liquidity on QuickSwap or SushiSwap. Finally you would stake your LP Tokens here and earn extra LP tokens at the listed APY.
Farms
The farms are used to stake Fish-Matic LP tokens and earn Fish as a reward. The current reward rate is over 35,000% APY if you compound daily.
Pools
Pools are single assets vaults where you deposit a single asset and earn Fish as a reward. The deposit fee is used to buy back and then burn Fish.
