1/13/22: Proud to be a Union Man 🛠✊
Llama Airforce Drops Bribe Autocompounder
Ethereum is, and likely always will be, a playground for whales.
If you hold ETH, no reason to hate this state of affairs. Building a product popular among rich people is a great way to make numba go up.
If you use ETH, you may feel like you’re getting priced out of the neighborhood.
Imagine you’re a typical American trying to run away from inflation, so you look at staking your money into Curve. The median American household had around ~$11,700 in savings as of 2018.
With gas running around 150 gwei for the past week, getting this savings into a Curve pool will cost you about .077 ETH, and withdrawing will cost another 0.052 ETH. At current ETH price of $3,340, this works out to about $430 to move round trip, which rounds down to $420 for the lulz.
Chump change for a whale. For the median family staking their 5 figured life savings though, if they put it into 3pool getting ~2.5%, it would be about a year and half before they broke even. This ignores the separate transactions to stake CRV, this family would likely stake in CVX instead, where the payback window is closer to a year and a month.
If they happen to pick a pool that returned good yields, like UST-3CRV factory pool which got 25% lately, this payback window is shortened to three months. Certainly better, but still a bit risky for a family living paycheck to paycheck to lock scarce funds for an indeterminate amount of time.
For whales, $100K would pay itself back in a couple months even if they plopped it into a bottom tier pool. $1MM within days. I’m not qualified to give financial advice, but you should ask Mrs. Hilton, a famous cryptocurrency advocate, if perhaps she is can derive a moral from the story.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of users (author included) do worry about gas prices when using Ethereum. Thus far the solutions have been to ghettoize users onto sidechains. This has been workable, TriCrypto has generally yielded double digits on L2s, albeit with the price fluctuation risk of cryptocurrency. Still, the yields flow to the wealthy, who can afford to use L1.
Convex bribing is still on mainnet. Harvesting Convex bribes frequently, potentially among several different coins, has generally been off limits for whales-in-training due to gas costs.
Enter the Llama Air Force to save the day. Yesterday the Llama Air Force dropped The Union, an auto compounder with gas-conscious users in mind. What is The Union? @0xAlunara conducted an interview with 0xAlunara explaining everything:
With such razor thin fees, the Union is potentially a solution worth investigating for whales and minnows alike. No wonder the greater flywheel community welcomed this development to thunderous applause:
If you are a whale, you should consider donating to the Llama Airforce at the address they list on their website.
The ecosystem of tools being built for users across the Curve-Convex flywheel is a testament to the power of the grater Curve community. In addition to the Llama Airforce, @DefiDividends is tracking both v2 pools (https://v2pools.com/) and DAOs staking on Convex (https://daocvx.com/). The latter just launched a rumor mill, so you can best keep up to date on all the latest gossip.
Finally, as we covered last week, the Crypto Risk assessment team continues to churn out high quality analyses. Their endorsement of FEI, which had some issues in the early days, is very powerful signal.
Apes of the world, unite!
Disclaimers! Author does not identify as a whale.
Updated 1/13/22 2:15 PM PT
Author has not yet aped into this pool, as his wallet is stuck due to a silly mistake in trying to cheap out on gas.
The repository includes robust and well written tests, and they all passed, which is a great sign. This is not conclusive proof that it is safe, all should of course exercise caution.
I assume it doesn't/can't work for veCRV? Probably due to non-transferable nature?