Are you looking for the highest ethereum interest rate, without locking them but with minimal risks? Well, you are 1 click away from earning 10% on your ethers.
As we have seen in the previous article, you can already earn safely 5.5% on your ETH, by just relying on one very safe protocol. To achieve the 10% apy, we will need to use 3 different but solid DeFi platforms this time (so it is riskier). To date, it is the safest and highest yield that I have found across crypto space in DeFi (i.e., excluding CeFi like BlockFi, Nexo and co.).
In one word: Lido stETH staking curve Yearn. Wait what ?
There are 2 different ways to achieve this 10% interest rate to generate your passive income.
The long way and the short way. With absolutely no difference between them in terms of security/platforms, etc.
The short way is just a shortcut that leads exactly to the same results as the long way. Actually, the short way will also be cheaper, as it will save some gas fees.
I will present both, as the long way helps to understand the short way (also, “plus c’est long, plus c’est bon”).
10% The Long Way: Lido for stETH, Curve for crvstETH, Yearn for Autocompounding.
TLDR; 1. stake ETH on Lido to get stETH. 2. Add stETH to the ETH-stETH pool in Curve and get crvstETH. 3. Placed crvstETH on Yearn Finance.
On Lido, you managed to convert your ETH into stETH (see the following article), and already earned 5.5% on your ETH (you can find also an analysis on how safe is lido).
Lido.fi: earn a safe 5.5% on your eth!
You can now head over to Curve, to the stETH/ETH Curve pool, and add your stETH to get crvstETH (for the most knowledgeable people: you could have gone directly to Curve with your ETH to get crvstETH). You have to deposit ETH right into the pool (just hit “deposit“, not “deposit and stake in gauge“).
How safe is Curve?
I particularly trust Curve, due to the high Total Value Locked of more than $10 billion, and the very good score in defisaftey’s report.
crvstETH gives you a share of the entire pool, that means you’re going to be owning a 50-50 percentage of ETH and stETH. So, the 5.5% apr from Lido.fi will be cut in half, you will thus only earn 2.75% from your stETH (wait wait, keep reading before leaving this page because of the decrease in the rate, its compensated later).
If instead of just hitting “deposit“, you have hit “deposit and stake in gauge”, you won’t be able to continue this tutorial, but you would be earning here in addition 0.11% curve token (that can be boosted to 0.27% if you have curve tokens to lock up and staked in the dao) + 5.47% Lido token.
Lido DAO
$2.22
Curve DAO Token
$0.75
You could choose this route, and already earn quite some passive income on your ETH with some additional interesting altcoins. However, if like me you just want to earn on your ETH and not earn any altcoins, after hitting only the “deposit” button, there is an additional step: auto compounding the Curve and Lido token for additional returns.
I found 2 main possibilities to autocompound and increase your returns, Harvest finance or Yearn Finance.
How safe is Yearn finance?
Harvest is supposed to be a fork of Yearn. However, based on defisaftey’s review I consider it riskier than using Yearn. Given the small difference in apy return on auto compounding crvstETH (less than 1%), I chose to go on the safest one, Yearn (yearn has more than $4 billions in Total Value Locked!)
Yearn auto compounds and maximizes the yield on any asset that you stake in their vaults. There’s actually a crvstETH vault. If you deposit your crvstETH token, Yearn will automatically sell the LDO and CRV reward tokens, sell them for ETH and then compounds that back into your crvstETH position. You will thus earn more crvstETH tokens, so you will earn more ETH.
Again, Yearn is extremely safe, and actually quite some people are already doing what I’m writing about in this article (You can see that this crvstETH pool already has $250 millions dollars of value).
By doing this strategy, you will currently earn an additional 7.2% apy!
Altogether, the 50% on 5.5% + 7.2% will give you a 10% APY, with minimal risks.
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10% The Short Way: Zapping with Yearn
Now for the short way. Well, it’s actually really cool. You only need 1 click, a “Zap” on Yearn! “Zapping” just means that Yearn will do all of the necessary swaps to get you into the vault, and you will start earning a 10% apy in seconds. You don’t have to go through any of those steps before, and it will most probably save you some gas fee.
How to Zap ? You can’t make it simpler. Just go on the vault you want to enter. You will see then that you can deposit almost any token present in your wallet. It will be zapped automatically. Be aware that for zaps, Yearn uses a default slippage limit of 1% and attempting zaps with low-liquidity tokens may fail.
Best YouTube Video
As some people are more interested by videos than reading long texts, I have found this really good and recent video that more or less covers the same areas. He talks a bit about the security of Lido, as I have already shown in the previous article. To Zap, he proposes to use a tool outside Yearn, but you can now do it from Yearn itself.
Give him a like and a subscribe if you liked his video.
Conclusion
As you might have seen, whatever the way you chose, this is a really convenient easy method to start to earn 10% on your eth, with minimal risks, as far as DeFi goes. Have a look at my different advices on how to stay safe in DeFi.
I personally hold 50% of my eth in cold wallets, and 50% through this method.
And if the risks do not seem minimal to you, as the rate is pretty high, you might want to add some insurances like Nexus mutual to protect your deposits.
PS: if for whatever reason, Lido.fi is not available in your country, you can also buy stETH on uniswap or curve.
Ps2: All estimated APRs/APYs are likely to change by the time you read this.
