⚡NEAR Protocol's Time is Near
Plus Avantis airdrop farming, DEX volume slows, and more
The Dynamo DeFi newsletter covers trends, on-chain analysis and tools in crypto each week. Be sure to also check out my YouTube for more regular content.
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📈Trends and Narratives
NEAR Protocol’s Time is Near
NEAR Protocol is a next-gen PoS Layer 1 blockchain that aims to be infinitely scalable, robustly secure and very cheap to use. In a rather uncertain market, NEAR has continued to see stablecoin inflows, higher TVL, and a resilient token.
One of NEAR’s product visions is user-owned AI, a market that has an expected growth of nearly $1T before 2030.
“NEAR aims to lay a sustainable foundation for web3 and envisions decentralized, user-owned AI rather than being centralized and stored in servers.”
Another NEAR technology within the stack is called Chain Abstraction. You’ve probably heard of Account Abstraction; a way to make managing crypto assets easier and making the ‘crypto’ part less visible, like banking apps today that ‘abstract away’ all of the nonsense that isn’t critical for users to see.
Chain Abstraction is similar in that it abstracts away the parts of blockchain tech that are difficult for most people to grasp. Here’s a look into chain abstraction and why it’s important for the next step in mass adoption:
The market has been waiting for the Crypto x AI trade as that’s been a major narrative over the last year. Could NEAR be the Crypto x AI trade that the market is looking for?
How to Capitalize
Study NEAR’s technological features using the resources above. Does NEAR have a technological advantage against other chains? How could it win against it’s competitors, and how could it lose?
Dive into the protocols building on NEAR. Here are a few to get started:
Meta Pool, a Liquid Staking Token on NEAR (I’m an advisor for Meta Pool).
Burrow, a lending platform built on NEAR with 10x TVL growth in the last 6 months.
Ref Finance, the largest DEX on NEAR. Been around for nearly 3 years.
Find protocols building on NEAR that could gain attention in the coming months.
🔢On-Chain Analysis
On-Chain Activity Slows Down
DEX volume has slowed down recently, hitting its lowest point since February last week. While this isn’t a reason to panic yet, it does suggest that the market frothiness from March has subsided.
Declines in on-chain activity rarely go in a V reversal, so expect things on-chain to consolidate here for a bit.
Notably, even after this drop, DEX volume is higher than it was for all of 2023 and most of 2022 (excluding a few outlier events). Also of note, Ethereum and Solana have maintained their dominance levels as the overall market slowed down, with weekly volume on both chains declining by similar amounts this week.
🚜Farm of the Week
Avantis
Avantis is a leverage DEX built on Base. Avantis allows you to lever up your on-chain trades and earn yields from trading fees by providing USDC to the protocol. backed by Base.
How it Works
Each week, Avantis holds a reward campaign for traders and liquidity providers. It’s an 8-week campaign, and we are wrapping up week 7, so there’s still time!
Here are more details:
There are only 6.4k participants in these weekly competitions. This qualifies as low-competition farming, and is worth spending some time on.
You can provide liquidity for a yield as a cut of the protocol fees - looks like vaults are filling up.
Additionally, this could be considered airdrop farming, as Avantis does not have a token yet.
Risks
Traders become profitable and the vault tranches don’t earn fees
🛠️Tool Spotlight
Plan Concentrated Liquidity Strategies with DeFi Lab
With the market down, now is a great time to earn yield on your long-term positions. If you’re looking to experiment with Uniswap v3’s concentrated liquidity pools, you can plan out your positions using DeFi Lab.
DeFi Lab’s Uniswap v3 strategy simulator features pools on 8 different chains, allowing you to simulate impermanent loss and backtest different concentrate liquidity strategies.
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📅Key Events This Week
Macro Events
📊Feds funds rate - May 1st
📊FOMC statement and press conference - May 1st
📊FOMC member Williams speaks - May 1st
📊April US jobs report - May 3rd
Token Unlocks
🔓 OP (2.31%) - April 29th
🔓 PRIME (4.43%) - April 30th
🔓 MANTA (0.75%) - April 30th
🔓 DYDX (10.72%) - May 1st
🔓 ZETA (2.24%) - May 1st
🔓 ACA (2.85%) - May 1st
🔓 ENA (3.76%) - May 1st
🔓 NYM (6.36%) - May 3rd
🔓 MEME (32,24%) - May 3rd
Launches & Updates
Note that these launches are mostly unvetted by the Dynamo DeFi team and this isn’t an endorsement of any of them.
🚀 Access hub launch by Access protocol - April 29th (Source)
🚀 BNB Greenfield's Serengeti hard fork - April 29th (Source)
🚀 Stratis tGBPT release (testnet) - April 30th (Source)
🚀 OpenCog Hyperon Alpha release - April 30th (Source)
🚀 Canxium POS sidechain launch- April 30th (Source)
🚀 Lukso grants program launch- May 1st (Source)
🚀 ZKFair EIP-4844 mainnet launch - May 1st (Source)
That’s all for this week. For more frequent content, follow me on Twitter and YouTube.
Until next time,
Patrick Scott
Dynamo DeFi