Weekly Alpha #35 - Top 3 Airdrops to Farm This Month 🌾

Latest DeFi Alphas Delivered in a Concise Newsletter.

Jun 13, 2024

Welcome to the latest edition of Weekly Alpha.

I deliver insights on the cryptocurrency market, emerging projects, macroeconomic trends, and DeFi directly to your inbox.

In this edition of The Weekly Alpha:

🗞️ Weekly DeFi News Digest
🧑‍🌾 3 Airdrops to farm this month
📈 Market overview
🎧 Podcast Alpha

Your Weekly DeFi News Digest 🗞️

In this section, I highlight the week's most impactful DeFi news. This way, you can bypass the chatter on Twitter and concentrate on the essential updates.

Ethena Expands USDe Into Aave As ‘Asset Matures’
Iggy Azalea’s MOTHER Memecoin Hits $200 Million Market Cap
ZkSync’s Gemholic project suspected $3.5M rug pull
Arbitrum to distribute $215M in ARB tokens for gaming innovation
Ethereum-based Lending Protocol Uwulend Suffers $20 Million Exploit
Curve Finance Founder Michael Egorov Suffers Massive Liquidations
Mellow Finance to Help Lido Hold On to its Place as Largest DeFi Protocol
ZKsync to Airdrop 3.6 Billion Tokens to Early Users
Symbiotic aims to be the Uniswap of shared security

3 Airdrops I’m farming this month

Now that ZK is out of the way, we can focus on building new DeFi positions and farming fresh airdrops.

Here are the three airdrops I am currently farming in June:

Karak

If you have been following the newsletter, you know that I have been discussing Karak a lot. I am bullish on a potential airdrop because they are competing with EigenLayer and have hinted at a token in a previous tweet.

The current TVL (Total Value Locked) in Karak is $1 billion, and it's only in private beta. You need an invitation to access the protocol.

You can sign up for Karak with the invitation code: 4TcAM.

If you want to learn more about Karak and how to interact with the protocol, you can read Weekly Alpha #34.

Cygnus Finance

Cygnus Finance introduces a stablecoin protocol based on short-term U.S. Treasury bills, minting cgUSD on the Base platform. This protocol provides holders with an interest-bearing asset tied to one of the world's most significant financial benchmarks. It offers a unique way for USD asset holders to gain exposure to U.S. Treasury yields through stablecoins. Cygnus employs a dual-token model: cgUSD, which adjusts daily based on U.S. Treasury values and accrued interest, and wgUSD, a non-rebasing token that facilitates easier integration into DeFi platforms.

Cygnus Finance is currently available on Base with a TVL of $15.41 million.

This DeFi play is quite risky, and I am personally not a fan of rebasing tokens, so I will not invest too much capital into this protocol. I am currently researching the protocol and have not yet minted cgUSD. If you plan to invest, I highly recommend conducting your own research and carefully considering the risks.

Infinex

Infinex is currently one of my favorite projects. Built by the team at Synthetix, which has a strong track record in DeFi, the app offers a seamless login process using passkeys and features gasless transactions.

Infinex enables cross-chain liquidity deposits into protocols integrated with the platform. For example, you can deposit liquidity from Solana into Infinex and directly access Ethena, the only integration at the moment, with more integrations coming soon.

I'm personally very bullish on Infinex. If they launch a token, I believe it could be highly successful, given the team's track record and the excellent user experience.

Weekly DeFi Market Update 📈

In this section, we'll take some time to examine useful metrics within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Daily Active Addresses

Now that we have all checked our zkSync Era airdrop allocation, I thought it would be interesting to follow the daily active addresses metric over the last 24 hours.

Following the announcement, zkSync Era active addresses are down 24.5%, likely due to airdrop farmers leaving the chain to farm other protocols. Meanwhile, Base has grown by over 23% in the last 30 days, suggesting that a significant amount of liquidity has shifted from zkSync to the Base network.

L2’s Active Monthly Users

The monthly active users on Arbitrum continue to grow substantially, reaching a total of 9.2 million. Base holds the second position, capturing a significant market share from other Layer 2 solutions.