After a short-lived mania around FoodFi the last few months, I’m personally relieved to see the DeFi markets return attention to more quality projects. During equity market drawdowns, capital tends to rebalance into higher quality, fundamentally sound investments. In crypto and DeFi, it’s no different. There are definitely blue chip teams with blue chip DeFi tokens, and there are, well let’s call them “less than blue chip” teams. 😂
One of the most common mechanisms in DeFi (and permissionless applications built on Ethereum) is staking. I honestly don’t know where the term comes from but to stake, means to deposit an asset for an extended period of time. In DeFi, we often can stake an asset and withdraw whenever we want, but as you’d expect, the longer one stakes an asset, the more rewards one might earn. A primitive example of staking is when I receive a letter in the mail that says “Deposit $500 into a Chase account for 90 days and receive a $100 bonus.” The difference with crypto staking rewards in blockchain enabled applications, and specifically what I use on Ethereum is the following:
- Real-time earnings–often DeFi apps pay rewards continuously every second
- No minimum to stake in most cases
- No KYC (meaning no ID or sign-up)
- No lock-up (withdraw whenever I want)
In the near future, the mother of all staking opportunities will arrive with Ethereum’s migration away from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), where one can stake ETH and be rewwarded with additional ETH at some interest rate (eg 1.8-18% APY). If you want to geek out, EthHub has incredible wiki articles on PoS and staking mechanics forecasted for Ethereum.
On that note, let’s talk about 5 staking opportunities provided by some “blue chip” DeFi platforms built on Ethereum.
#5 Staking BZRX on bZx
Skill Level: Beginner
Where to go: https://staking.bzx.network/
Assets: One can stake BZRX, vBZRX (a form of BZRX vesting for partners and investors), or the Balancer Pool Token (BPT) from from the Balancer 80/20 BZRX/ETH pool here
What to do: Just connect one’s Ethereum wallet and deposit any of the 3 tokens above
Estimated APY: Not available. This is less than a week old and is “dynamically based on trade volume” according to the CoFounder Kyle Kistner.
What’s good and what’s bad: This is very easy to stake and one can actually take a loan out against staked BZRX (depending on liquidity on bZx), but the downside is the staking returns are very unclear at the moment. For someone holding BZRX, it’s a no-brainer to stake BZRX, with little else to use it for, but without clear forecastable returns, it could be an opportunity some choose to skip. One should join the bZx Discord group to learn more.
#4 Staking ADEL or AKRO on Delphi by Akropolis (at capacity!)
Skill Level: Beginner
Where to go: https://delphi.akropolis.io/staking
Assets: ADEL or AKRO token
What to do: While this program is currently maxed out, keep it on your radar because Akropolis is continually opening more capacity to stake, while they’re still in “guarded launch.” All one has to do is connect an Ethereum wallet and deposit AKRO or ADEL into this staking platform on their new Delphi product.
Estimated ROI: With about 500M AKRO staked and 1.5M ADEL staked, over the course of 1 week of staking, one earns about 1…
Hi! My name is Lark Davis!
I’m a cryptocurrency investor with years of experience and I’ve been making consistent profits in the crypto space.
I’m passionate about helping others do the same, so I run multiple educational channels on crypto investing.
