Nov. 16, 2022: Reasons for Optimism? 🥃😌
Curve $OP grant to promote activity amidst broader sidechain slump
With so much cool news coming out of Curve, we often have a backlog of stories built up. Ergo we highlight the release of
and @chanho’s curvesim, but force it to the backseat as we today review last week’s Optimism grant.Interested parties should read the above thread, play with the Github repo, and set their calendar’s for Friday Llama Party at 9 AM PT, where Naga King has accepted a nomination to join as guest of honor!
Reasons for optimism?
We’re speaking quite literally here, in that @WormholeOracle successfully fished out a grant to bring $500K in $OP rewards to incentivize Curve pools on Optimism.
As detailed in the above thread, this is grant is particularly notable as the first Optimism grant handled end-to-end in a fully decentralized manner. The process was kicked off by a community member, and managed by smart contracts and DAOs at every step of the process.
Even before the grant, Curve had a healthy presence amidst the growing Optimism ecosystem. In terms of TVL, Curve’s $53MM ranks second to the $64MM for Velodrome, an Optimism-native Solidly fork, and above launch partner Uniswap’s $41MM.
The grant authorizes a meme-tastic 42,069 $OP to be distributed each week to gauges on Curve’s Optimism branch. Even before this grant starts flowing, some LPs may already notice several good incentives to jump into the Optimism ecosystem:
Noticeably lacking is a TriCrypto pool, one of the few sidechains with such an omission. A TriCrypto launch would be a natural target for Curve $OP rewards. Wherever it has been launched, TriCrypto has seen good usage and competitive performance. On Optimism in particular, TriCrypto’s constituent ingredients (dollarcoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum) are already quite strong thanks to the success of Synthetix and their current stream of $OP rewards.
Synthetix is providing 4.35% $OP rewards to their sUSD pool, putting them roughly on par with US Fed token emissions. They’re also providing industry competitive rates for Bitcoin yield. Where it gets wild is that Synthetix is paying out particularly heavy rewards for ETH, where they’re presently yielding north of 14%.
This is loads better than you can find on the already intense mainnet LSD wars. Yet it pales in comparison with Lido’s Wrapped stETH pool on Optimism. This pool, with about half a milly TVL, is presently earning 89% $LDO rewards. Of course, this is likely to come down as word gets out, but pretty good for newsletter readers who jump.
Admittedly, even this is downright stingy relative to the ample 525% $LDO rewards on its Arbitrum equivalent. Sometimes it pays to poke your head onto sidechains!
Big thanks to @WormholeOracle for pushing this grant though, and to all parties credited with help along the way, including Curve’s
, Optimism's @PraiseVitalik/OPUser, and Synthetix’s @mastermojo83.More on the Optimism grants from
:
