25
Yes, it’s a bear market but it doesn’t mean that you should not put your tokens to work while we’re waiting to come out of it. If you’re new to my blog, this is essentially a continuation from a previous article I wrote earlier in the bear market. Many of those high APRs didn’t last for very long, and I thought it best now to update some of the methods, namely this time with Liquid Staking in addition to Liquidity pools to help maximize your token numbers.
Why Accumulate?
If you’re completely sold on a project, and believe with 100% conviction that they’re going to survive this crypto winter, or else if you’re simply stuck with a whole bunch of alt-bags that have lost 85% of their ATH-value and you’re refusing to sell, it makes sense to try position your crypto to work as hard as possible until the winter is over.
Why Liquid Staking?
First of all, if you’re unfamiliar with Liquid Staking, essentially it’s considered “liquid” if you stake your token and are able to get a receipt token in return. This receipt token will appreciate in value, corresponding with the added gain you are are receiving from your original staked token.
Liquid Staking + LP’s:
This part is the easy— once you receive your liquid staking token, you can turn around and accrue interest on top, thus leveraging your gains by adding it to a corresponding liquidity pool. As we’ve seen this season with the slight depegging of stETH, there are still definitely risks with liquid staking, and of course there’s also risks of impermanent loss with liquidity pools as well. However if you’re willing to accept the risks in order to maximize gains, the following options I will lay out are methods that you can utilize in order to not only retain the amount of tokens you have, but also accrue some nice yields going further.
All the following strategies are through DeFi as opposed to CeFi, so the major security risks are theoretically only smart contract-based, allowing you to maintain control of your keys and crypto. Without further ado, here’s the best liquid strategies I could find for BNB, FTM, ETH, MATIC, and AVAX.
$BNB (17.83% APY via Liquid Staking +10.95% APR via LP) using Stader Labs and Beefy Finance
I think Stader Labs is one of the clear winners coming off of the Terra collapse, as they’ve created a very simple way to maximize off of liquid staking as well as providing an easy way to find great LP’s off of your liquid staking tokens. By staking your $BNB via liquid staking you’re essentially able to earn 17.83% APY by trading in your $BNB for BNB, and then if you choose to do so, you can enter one of of their liquidity pools to earn the extra 10.95% APR.
One more tip — for this strategy, unless you’re super bullish on the $SD or $EPX token, I’d recommend going through one of beefy.finance’s yield optimizers (as seen below) as opposed to going directly through Apeswap or Ellipsis:
Beefy finance is awesome because they will auto-compound your $EPX/$SD tokens and add your harvested rewards and add them back to your $BNBx/$BNB LP. In other words, it will minimize your exposure to $SD/$EPX and maximize your exposure to $BNB.
$FTM (13% APY via Liquid Staking + 7.1% APR via LP) using Stader Labs and Reaper Farm
Yet again, this is another strategy with Stader labs, where you can stake your $FTM and receive $sFTMX in return. And likewise with $BNB, unless you’re bullish on tokens like Spooky Swap’s $BOO, then I would go with one of the yield optimizer’s on Reaper Farm:
Personally after doing the math, I think it makes more sense to go through the sFTMX Granary Crypt and do single sided staking because for one, you’re not exposed to impermanent loss, and two, you’ll actually earn less yield doing an LP because you wouldn’t be getting the 13% Liquid staking off of the $FTM portion of your LP token. For the math geeks out there, if I had $1 dollar’s worth of $sFTMX staked in the granary, I would have roughly: $1.13 (from liquid staking alone) multiplied by 1.05643% (the extra yield from Reaper Farm single-sided staking), which totals roughly $1.19 after 1 year. Alternatively if I had $1 dollar’s worth of LP instead, using similar calculations I would have only roughly $1.14, and once again that’s because the $FTM side of my LP isn’t earning the 13% from liquid staking.
$ETH (3.8% APY via Liquid Staking + 9.48% via LP) using Lido Finance and Convex Finance
I know there’s been a lot of FUD since the temporary depeg of $stETH, but assuming that the $ETH POW/POS merge is successful, there shouldn’t be a problem with $stETH and people should be able to redeem their $stETH soon. But essentially with this strategy, you can lock up your $ETH to get $stETH from Lido Finance, earning 3.8% APR:
And then after receiving your $stETH, you can add it to Convex Finance’s ETH/stETH liquidity pool to earn an additional 9.48%:
Unlike the strategies on Stader Labs, you can not unstake your $stETH until post-merge, so once again depending on what your outlook is on the merge being successful, this is a risk factor to be wary of. It’s for this reason that the fall of Celsius was catalyzed, as there was a bank run on $ETH when most of their $ETH was staked — meaning that they had immense pressure to dump all of their $stETH which caused its depeg to occur.
$MATIC (6.3% APY via Liquid Staking + 22% via LP) using Lido Finance/Stader Labs and Beefy Finance
This strategy also uses Lido Finance to earn 6.3% via liquid staking, where after staking your $MATIC you can get $stMATIC in return. Unlike $stETH however, liquid staking with $MATIC is NOT locked, meaning that there’s more likely less chance of a significant imbalance of buy/sell pressure causing a potential depeg:
After receiving your $stETH, you can go to Beefy Finance to take advantage of their Lido-Boosted stMATIC-MATIC LP Vault and earn more than 22% APY:
And maybe I should have said this initially, but using Beefy Finance, you can also skip the step on Lido Finance and swap out your $MATIC directly on Beefy when you decide to stake.
Also to note you can also get similar returns using liquid staking via Stader Labs when you stake your $MATIC to get $MATICX in return and then using that on Beefy Finance’s MaticX-MATIC vault
$AVAX (7.2% APY via Liquid Staking + 11.4% via LP) using BenQI Finance and Beefy Finance
This strategy uses the protocol BenQi Finance where one can liquid stake $AVAX tokens and receive $sAVAX in exchange, earning roughly 7.20% APR:
Next, you can earn up to 11.$% APR on traderjoexyz’s by staking your $sAVAX into the sAVAX/AVAX pool, earning $JOE in the process:
Alternatively if you don’t want anymore exposure into $JOE, there is an sAVAX-AVAX LP Vault on Beefy Finance that yield optimizes Traderjoexyz’ LP at currently a slightly reduced APY of 9.15%:
Conclusion:
Once again, if you’re completely sold on a project and you’re hodling anyways, then it would make sense to simply try to maximize your holdings, and from what I’ve found, liquid staking and LP’s seems to be one of the best ways to do so. However, comparing this article to my last article about accumulating alts, it is worth noting that all of these rates are subject to change (especially with $ETH once/if the merge successfully happens) so it’s also important to keep your strategies updated because rates can here today and gone tomorrow.
Have you found any alternate strategies that I haven’t listed in this article? If so I would love to hear about it in the comments below. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all of those latest updates.
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!
