August 22, 2022: When In Doubt, Just Wait ๐กโฑ
Convex Adds FRAX Pools for $IQ, $PitchFXS, $SYN, $FRAXBP
Late last week we Convex announced the Convex-Frax portion of the flywheel was expanding.
The extremely knowledgeable Convex community has been patiently waiting throughout the bear market for deepened partnership between Convex and Frax. As always, Sam offers great life advice (not financial advice) for such situations.
For those who missed the nuances of these developments, Frax v3 pools were deployed in late July, and the team has been carefully monitoring the rollout since.
Just as with Curve, staking Frax LP tokens through Convex is designed to make your life easier and diversify your cash flows.
What are these new pools?
Everipedia ($IQ)
Ever wonder how big Samโs brain is? Before launching Frax Finance heโd co-founded a competitor to Wikipedia. Half a decade later, the rest of the world has caught up, and concerns about Wikipedia has become commonplace.
Fortunately Everipedia capably solves this problem, having built out a decentralized knowledge resource with a far greater Web3 focus. Compare how threadbare the former...
With the robustness of the latterโฆ
Only one of these provides adequate knowledge of cryptocurrency โ crypto being a critically important subject that is sorely lacking decent information.
According to, of course, Everipedia, the Everipedia team airdropped their $IQ token in 2018 via the EOS network. Since then, the token has been expanding its footprint slowly and steadily, plugging in of course with the Frax ecosystem..
Meanwhile work continues in the background on the new version of the Everipedia site, which is announced to have full on-chain support for making edits on L2s. But Wen?
Pitch ($PitchFXS)
Pitch Money launched earlier this year in the ever-evolving bribes ecosystem. The Pitch team has been among the first to recognize the importance of FRAX governance and has accumulated over $1MM worth of $pitchFXS, no small sum in a putrid market.
Pitch is used for both Curve and FRAX governance, and being early to add value to the FRAX ecosystem itโs a particularly useful hub for the latter.
For LPs, Pitch also serves as an easy solution to manage your yield farming directly via Pitch.
For more check this recent fireside chat with founder Charlie Pyle.
Plus a snail-mail paced written interview is in the works. But wen?!?
Synapse ($SYN)
The challenges of cross-chain communication is readily apparent to anybody whoโs been in crypto since the last bridge exploit (weโre not bothering to look up the exact date, but weโd set the over/under at a week).
So itโs worth celebrating the one year anniversary this week for Synapse โ a decade in crypto time and a decade^2 for a cross-bridge protocol. Synapse escaped out of BSC, where it got its start operating a Saddle Finance fork called Nerve. As a protocol, they needed more robust means of transacting and communicating cross-chain.
The result is Synapse Chain, an EVM-based optimistic rollup serving as an execution layer among several chains.
Synapse chain now has integrated with an impressive 17 chains.
โBut when $DOGE?โ asked nobody. And anyway, it already happened.
For more details, the team is now hosting weekly community calls, worth a listen!
Given the track record of exploits, the cross-chain space is surely perilous. A true black swan event would be a crypto bridge not getting hacked.
Nonetheless, efficient communication between or among chains is in incredibly high demand. Small wonder so many smart entrepreneurs are quickly rushing to fill the void. If you are interested in doing more research:
Frax BP ($FRAXBP)
The Frax Base[d]pool is en route to amass its first billion in perhaps just a couple months, a particularly impressive metric in the bear market. From the great new Blockworks Research Dune dashboard:
The $USDC volume in the pair started to plateau August 13, coinciding with USDC intensifying censorship efforts and a 2% drop. At the time of FraxBP, few would have guessed $FRAX would be perceived as the less risky part of the pair.
Regardless of any hypothetical $USDC risk, the thought of Frax kicking in its treasury towards rewards for pools launched against the FRAX BP is delicious enough to spur tons of activity on Curve. We observe eight funded pools already built against the new base pair:
In crypto, incentives predictably drive liquidity. Users are willing to ignore pretty much any amount of risk if the yield is good, so weโre quite likely to see more value flowing into these pools. Wen tho?
Weโre always very keen on protocols that build aggressively, particularly during the bear market. Frax is certainly tops of the list โ see also Fraxlend right around the corner.
Compare / contrast with other protocols whose malintent is being exposed in the bear market. Weโve avoided highlighting some of the recent notable blow-ups because we feel thereโs already enough depressing news in the space. Some of the recent behavior in the space has been notably rough though, as called out directly by Sam himself.
Stay bullish on protocols building and driving #RealYield revenues during this time!
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