If you’re taking profits to stablecoins during this bull market then you can put them to work on Gearbox Protocol. This platform offers a low-maintenance Earn mode for passive yield, with no impermanent loss and no lockups, and a higher-reward Farm mode for leveraged strategies. There are returns above 20% available in straightforward pools, and over 80% with leverage, and Gearbox operates across several networks, with strategies also for BTC and ETH.
As the bull market progresses you might find yourself cashing out profits and as a result holding an increasing share of your portfolio in stablecoins. Or maybe you just like to hold a stack of stables anyway.
In either case, rather than letting your stablecoin supplies sit idle, it makes sense to be earning yield on them, and right now Gearbox Protocol is offering some attractive returns. So, let’s take a look at how you can earn in a simple way by depositing coins for lending, and also at how you can ramp up rewards by applying leverage.
Before we get started though, keep in mind the risks involved when you use DeFi protocols, which can include smart contract exploits, frontend attacks, stablecoin de-pegs, and systemic crypto risks.
What Is Gearbox Protocol?
This platform was covered here in an earlier guide at the start of this year so check that out too, but basically, Gearbox specializes in decentralized onchain lending and states that its mission is “to make DeFi accessible and user-friendly”.
That means you can use it for borrowing against your assets but–as we’ll concentrate on here–you can also supply assets for lending and pick up passive earnings on your positions. Note that lender deposits are single-sided (you only deposit one asset, rather than supplying both sides of a trading pair), meaning there is no risk of impermanent loss.
Gearbox has seen its TVL rise considerably since April of this year, so that the figure now stands at almost $380 million.
Earn Passively With Gearbox Earn
If you want a straightforward way to capture yield, with minimum management and immediate withdrawals when you need–there is no lockup period–then you can make use of the Earn facility on Gearbox.
This gives access to passive income, it doesn’t use leverage, and as mentioned, it’s not a strategy that carries any risk of impermanent loss since you’re only depositing one type of asset, which is then utilized for lending.
To get started with this option, open the app, connect your wallet, and click on the Earn tab, where you’ll then see a list of pools that can be deposited into.
There are a couple of filters at the top here, so you can select a particular network and filter the type of asset to be supplied. This includes BTC and ETH, but we’re just going to focus on stablecoins today.
For this example, I’ll leave it set to All Networks and select USDC as the deposit asset, and if I click on Supply APY I can view pools listed according to how high the APYs are. Straightaway then there are four pools offering Supply APYs above ten percent with, at the top, a pool on Etherlink (an EVM-compatible chain built on top of Tezos) that currently offers a sizeable 27.1% APY.
Click into that and you need to click the button to sign the Gearbox agreement, switch networks as prompted, and you can then deposit assets. Note that…
