Before we get started, this is not a recommendation or endorsement to buy any token mentioned.
In late 2019, I met one of the CoFounders of Zapper, Nodar Janashia, who was still operating under the original name of DeFiZaps. Nodar was an early builder in the growing DeFi movement. He had a hunch that DeFi was just the start of Ethereum’s first real product-market fit to go mainstream. In order to access the growing list of protocols and yield-earning opportunities, DeFiZap offered bundled transactions in a simple UI to help users discover new DeFi and easily enter/exit with a single token.
As the crypto bull market kicked into high gear in spring 2020, a major accelerator to the DeFi movement was the introduction of user-friendly tools like DeFiZaps, which ultimately merged with another fast-growing DeFi project for tracking your portfolio called DeFiSnap, to become Zapper. Zaps by Zapper quickly gained popularity as users demanded them to easily deposit or exit liquidity provisions (LPs) with a single token on Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, Yearn, SushiSwap, and more. Zaps made it possible for more to get in and out of LPs, which could then be used to stake and earn yield during the height of DeFi Summer.
Fast forward to 2022, the alternative to bundling transactions with Zaps is still a very manual process vs where one must prepare a 50/50 ratio of tokens for popular AMMs like Uniswap. Zaps solved major pain points for DeFi users who need help:
- Identifying LPs based on tokens and protocols
- How to prep the necessary amount of each token to deposit
- How to work through multiple transactions
Earlier this year, Zapper retired Zaps as they unveiled a new roadmap for building the ultimate Web3 explorer. While it’s exciting times at Zapper, this has left a major gap in the DeFi toolset for the most active DeFi users. Thankfully, one of the CoFounders of Zapper has built a new protocol called Portals to provide “1-click access to all of DeFi.” Portals is a DeFi API for builders–where Portals can be easily integrated by builders in a few lines of code, enabling anyone to condense multi-step DeFi transactions into a single step with a simple API request.
Anyone can bundle multiple transactions with a single token to enter/exit popular DeFi LPs and yield-earning positions on Uniswap v2, SushiSwap, Curve, Balancer, Yearn, and Convex, by using the Portals UI and API. Developers can build Portals into their own DeFi applications and UIs to ease the friction for users who need to execute multiple transactions. Portals should enable the next generation of DeFi builders to build their own Portals without having to rely on a third-party team to integrate such features.
Portals is currently supported on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, BSC, Fantom, and Avalanche, with plans to continue adding EVM-compatible chains as well as Cosmos chains.
Today, I’ll show how I can deposit with a single token into the Curve stETH/ETH LP staked in Convex using Portals using a single transaction. Normally, this would require at minimum 3 transactions, and if starting with an ERC20 token like USDC, it would require 5-7 transactions to manually prepare an LP and then stake the LP in Convex.
How to Master 1-Click DeFi Yields using Portals
Before we get started,…
DeFi Dad is one of the earliest power users of DeFi, having worked with early Ethereum startups going back to 2018, including Zapper.
