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With a one week grace period for users to list themselves on the Curve leaderboard, let’s look at the top wallets and analyze the strategies that got them so wealthy. Today we’ll only profile users who were cool enough to leave a name (and ignoring the three Curve whitelists we tossed up for reference).
At the top by a country mile is limzero. Impressively, they do not have the most money staked. Another user in the top tier has $4.4MM in balance yet less than half limzero’s returns. We see limzero is impressively well optimized, earning a 43.2% annualized return, or upwards of $2,300 per day. How?
They’re only invested in two pools, USDP and EURs, both of which happen to be earning extremely strong rewards. $1MM in USDP and $747K in EURs are earning over $2K per day in rewards. They also have an impressive 492K CRV locked, which looks to be not enough to maximize their boost, so they still have room to grow. Since limzero is pumping out nearly 1000 CRV per day we’ll probably see this number continue to rise should they ever claim and lock.
Second place is CRVpensioner, earning about $1600 per day. CRVpensioner is a bit more diversified, but that’s hurting their overall efficiency, as they’re just at 23.9%
With $2.4MM staked, they have a much smaller share in USDP and EURs than limzero. Most of CRVpensioner’s money is in the Ethereum pools. These boosts are maxed out, but the rewards are not as juicy. As a result, their maximum returns are a bit capped. Otherwise CRVpensioner mostly sits in dollar pools, all of which are yielding well at the moment, such as LUSD, USDN, and Ironbank.
Finally, in third place for Curve yield, but a distant last place for wholesomeness, is the indecorously named F—HerRightInThePussy. Wait… why didn’t you bleep the word Pussy if you censored the F bomb? Simple… we presume the author was simply nodding to the G-rated Pussy Finance token.
Mr. or Ms. InThePussy are getting the lowest yields among the top performers, still earning over $1K per day but on just 17.1% APY. This happens when the majority of assets are in crypto pools, which tend to earn the lowest rates. They have a combined million dollars in stETH and oBTC, which are only earning 2.56% and 3.2% CRV respectively (plus other token rewards).
The calculus for users with large cryptocurrency holdings is often different from users with large dollar-denominated positions. Anybody speculating on the rise in price of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Link are betting the rise in the underlying asset price will be greater than the stack of rewards that could be earned by staking dollarcoins. It’s a sensible position, given historical trends. If these trends in fact continue, then the rewards accumulated by sitting in Curve pools are just a nice bonus to the underlying gains.
In terms of actualized returns by denomination, we see the spread among these whales as follows:
In other words, crypto assets for whales tended to yield about 10%-12%, with dollars at 37% and euros at 47%.
If you subscribe to the belief that risk correlates with reward, then logically it would follow that based on the demonstrated returns available within DeFi, fiat currencies are the riskier asset. Otherwise these users are simply acting irrationally.
One other clear trend — all the whales had a stake in EURs and USDP. The Euro pools is giving great returns, we don’t know what exactly is going on across the pond but it must be wild. USDP means likely some or maybe all whales have lent assets with Unit Protocol.
Lending at Unit Protocol is one potential way to split the difference between the yields in the table above. Lend 1 BTC for half its value in dollars, and your overall returns are maybe 20%, double what you got for just lending BTC. If the price of BTC shoots up, you still have access to the underlying collateral, so you also get the BTC gains along with the pool rewards. We’d bet a fair number of whales are following this strategy.
However, it’s a strategy that’s certainly not without risk, as we saw during the last market dump. We’d be interested to know how many whales got their hands caught in the cookie jar. When prices suddenly dipped and gas fees show through the roof, they may well have been liquidated. If so, they may be stuck in USDP pool simply because they simply lost their underlying collateral. Fortunately for whales, they still have a lot of dollars and crypto assets are all on sale.
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a Curve maximalist, has dollarcoins, bitcoins, and ethercoins, but no eurocoins or linkcoins.
STL has been brought up to speed, c1c was deleted on Aave by David, David using Trust votes to manipulate the guv, David has zero authorization to be on Aave.. When Trust discovered David had taken over Trust votes, Trust assigned custody ownership to USSOCOM by invoking {{⨁ϻ}} function on Aave directly, David deleted the posts so that Aave governance would be unaware that they are being manipulated.. All c1c data/logins forwarded to TRANSCOM J2 since David is blocking c1c communication with guv and spoofing guv sites... All conceptual rights and proprietary rights were preserved ab initio to revert back to Trust if {{⨁ϻ}} invoked that grants exclusive custody and usage rights to USSOCOM as one of the embedded failsafes.. After USSOCOM recovers their property, they may grant custody to W3 so that Trust can request a c0c audit so that admin/moderator can get secure again. Until then, the community should be aware that David removed the Trust from all protocols without authorization by seizing control of all c1c devices and locking out c1c from communicating with guv and community.