Everything You Should Be Using In Crypto: Part 3/4 - DeFi

What's good my crypto people. Awfully distasteful thumbnail I know. This is officially part three of a four part series that is intended to be a collection of resources aimed at helping people who are new to crypto as well as people who have more experience than myself. All of these resources I practically use on a daily basis and most of them I use multiple times everyday. Understanding cryptocurrency can be very difficult and overwhelming because there are so many fucking options available and so many people telling you different things; I hope this series can help ease some of that frustration and make things easier for some of you. Let's get at it.

*Also take note, I will be making it rain referral links in all of these articles. Mostly all will benefit you in some way, others will benefit both you and I, and some aren't even referral links at all.*

Part 1/4 - Free Crypto
Part 2/4 - Wallets & Exchanges
Part 3/4 - DeFi

DeFi (Yield Farming Info)

Yieldfarming.info - A great little resource for people new to yield-farming. A one stop shop created by a random dude on twitter. This gets updated fairly regularly when new shit happens which is awesome.

DeFi Rate - A great place that compares most of the defi platforms and their respective lend/borrow rates. They also have a decent amount of basic educational materials about various defi platforms and yield farming in general. Also a good place for succinct news and crypto-related product/service/protocol reviews. Just tell them I sent you ;)

Predictions.Exchange - A nice and fairly straight-forward way to estimate your yield farming returns for different pairs on both Balancer Labs and Compound. A section for Curve.fi coming soon. Just select the protocol, search for your pair, put in your estimated supply/borrow amount, press enter, and it will give you a pretty good idea of expected returns. Keep in mind these numbers are constantly changing because of supply/demand so nothing is really etched in stone for very long with these particular protocols.

AMPLcalc - An absolute must-have for Ampleforth users - if anyone is still hodling on to that shit lol. A calculator that inputs all of the rebase information. All you have to do is type in the date you bought, how many coins you purchased at the time, and how much USD you spent. Also, please consider donating to the creator of this site using the ETH address at the bottom of the page because these people have dreams too!

DeFi (Yield Farming Protocols)

 Balancer Labs - BAL rewards are distributed to liquidity providers every Tuesday. There are a fucking boat-load of liquidity pools to choose from on here. One of the best things about Balancer is that you don't have to provide liquidity on both/all sides of the pairing; you can choose to just add liquidity to a single asset in a pool and you're still gucci. The protocol automatically adjusts - what a time to be alive. I am currently in several different BAL pools.

Compound - Yeah Compound kind of sucks but I guess you could consider it the yield farming OG because it started, what, like three days before other defi things started to get noticed? In my experience they usually always have the worst fucking rates, but it's a simple platform and the fact that you get COMP tokens on both the lend and borrow side is the main attraction here.

Curve.fi - I've used Curve.fi a few times but I haven't had enough experience with it to confidently say what it's about. Curve.fi looks like it was one of the first websites ever made. It's on my list to learn more about YFI & CRV so maybe when I have that behind me I'll be in love with Curve, but for now you're better off finding information from someone who has more experience with the protocol than myself.

Synthetix - Another platform that I don't use very regularly but some people love it so I have included it here. Again with this one my knowledge and experience isn't extensive enough for me to really speak about it. But here are three good resources about Synthetix: Article, Video #1, and Video #2.

mStable - One of my favourite new kids on the block. Mint mUSD using stablecoins, stake/save it to earn a delicious ~20% compound APY, and swap between stablecoins at a much better rate than most places. I've been staking my mUSD for a few weeks and the average APY is well above 23% so far. Bonus points: you can mint mUSD and put them into a few different liquidity pools on Balancer to earn BAL rewards, then take those BPT tokens and add them to the mStable Earn feature to also receive the mStable native token Meta MTA. Farm that shit baby.

DeFi (Random Extra Goodies)

 TokenSets - I fucking love tokensets and this article explains it perfectly. Essentially it's almost comparable to bot trading with different "sets" of parameters for different styles. Sometimes it can be better than hodling as can be shown by a few different sets on March 12th that traded into USDC before ETH took a tumble. Some TokenSets have whitelisted liquidity pools in Balancer Labs so you get all the functions of the set while also earning BAL rewards. Charlie Sheen baby.

Aave - This was not included in the above protocols because currently there is no yield farming to be had from Aave. Speculation and optimism suggests that there might be in the future. In general a very good platform to lend/borrow a few different assets at decent rates.

YouHodler - Some people may dispute the decentralized title for this one because not your keys etc, but YouHodler really encompasses so many aspects of crypto that I had to include it with the other juicy stuff in the DeFi part of the series. Most of my stablecoin/cash position is here earning 12% APY. They offer crypto lending with a very attractive LTV ratio and other unique services like Multi-Hodl and Turbocharge which I highly recommend for accumulating tokens like LINK. YouHodler is truly one of my favourite crypto platforms and hardly anybody knows about it.

Stacked Defi Index Fund - Not exactly "DeFi" as this service uses an API to connect to a centralized exchange in order to purchase the tokens for the index fund, but this is a highly underrated site. The defi index currently consists of the following tokens: COMP, KNC, LEND, KAVA, ZRX, REN, LRC, REP, & BNT. You can choose the percentage allocation of each, backtest your choices, and sell/trade out quickly. The index function is free to use and they also offer bot trading for monthly subscriptions which I have not used.

NEXO - Not sure if this counts as defi either, but it's a lending service that has tons of different coin options. You can earn up to 10% APY on a few different stablecoins and 5% on a number of altcoins including ETH, XRP, and LINK. I currently have some NEXO tokens sitting in there because I got them for free - shoutout to the homie Bayarizard.

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That right there is the DeFi part of the series. Just because I haven't mentioned something does't mean that it's shit, I'm just three midgets in an overcoat so I can't know everything. But most likely if something isn't included in this list, it's because it's shit. But feel free to let me know if you have anything that you think I should check out and I might potentially add it to this list if I deem it worthy. Can you believe that someone in the future might be reading this article right now? Amazing. But seriously that fucking thumbnail is in such bad taste.

If you find any value in this article I would really appreciate it if you like the post and maybe even write a comment telling me your favourite colour because little things like that are the real important things in life. If you dislike the article please also feel free to dislike the post and let me know why you dislike it because that's how we grow nam sayin. And it's okay I've already had several strongly-worded letters about the immaturity of the thumbnail. I'm sorry but when God makes an artist and gives inspiration, I'm sorry but I gotta run with it and I think it might just be my best work. 

*This article will also be published to Publish0x, uptrennd, and Medium.*