I’ve been into DeFi pretty much since its inception. I went through crazy gold rushes back in 2020/2021 when everyone was looking for the next gem they could farm, the highest APR possible, layer farming, etc. It was always wild but time and time again, providing stablecoins liquidity to reliable protocols has always proved to be the best investment in the long term for a few simple reasons:

  • little to no risk of impermanent loss;

  • no risk of being out of range with concentrated liquidity;

  • your principle is immune to market volatility and wild price action;

  • low maintenance (due to all of the above) and therefore, low fees.

On top of this, it has — at least for me — been an effective way of establishing some sort of a “savings account” instead of having all of it at a distance of one or two clicks to FOMO into the next shitcoin coming your way.

This said, where have you been parking your stables?

As of late I have been using mostly 2 blockchains only, although I use different protocols, but they might not seem obvious. I’ll go through all of them but I’ll definitely get started with the most profitable at the moment of writing, which is also much more hyped than the second option (which still is a very good one in my opinion).

Stride Zone on Berachain

Berachain got people’s attention for a good while and if you look at $BERA ’s performance and Berachain’s TVL, no one can deny it was a very successful launch, especially when compared to other chains that decided to airdrop their tokens during this bullrun. Stride Zone took a decisive step outside of the Cosmos Ecosystem by embracing the difficult task of providing an LST for BGT (which is non-transferable and not tradable) but also improving the return associated to it, by launching stBGT. And all was going great with a $200k worth airdrop to liquidity providers, vaults of USDC/HONEY and BYUSD/HONEY started at really good APRs around 20ish% but of course, as more people hopped in, it dropped.

Then a few things quickly changed: as usual, Stride Zone strives to plan ahead so stBGT was whitelisted, a partnership with Kodiak Finance (the leading protocol native to Berachain) and native BGT incentives to stBGT/BERA were a game changer. But it didn’t stop here.

The way Stride Zone uses your LP receipt tokens in order to capture fees and rewards to provide stBGT as a final product, led to the current situation in terms of vaults:

Basically, you can’t ignore the fact you have a stable’s pool earning you 48% APR (USDbr/HONEY) using Kodiak through Stride Zone. You can still allocate some of your capital to rUSD, USDa or even BYUSD pools (and I am doing so, “never put all of your eggs in one basket”) but this is a no brainer at the moment. It’s easy to do, add liquidity with Kodiak but DON’T stake your LP receipt there, go back to Stride Zone’s UI and do it there. And that’s it, just harvest your stBGT daily and do whatever you want to with it (add it to LP pool for airdrop and more stBGT, sell it and compound it, etc).

Abracadabra on Kava Chain

Kava Chain. Abracadabra. What?

Well, if you are relatively new to crypto, this might understandably be your reaction. Kava chain launched years ago, backed by Binance. It’s an EVM compatible Cosmos chain (well, not exactly but that’s how they it was marketed at the time, the same way Evmos or Canto did) that’s still listed on Binance and that interestingly, although it might seem like a “dead chain”, not only has maintained a decent price action in recent months as you can also use its chain to withdraw USDT from main CEXs like Binance or KuCoin, with relatively low fees. Not only this has become one of my favourite routes to send/receive stables to/from Cosmos as there is decent money to be earned here, with negligible fees and trustworthy protocols.

What?! Abracadabra?! Launched by Daniele Sesta (Sestagalli actually)?!

Well, yes because… after he moved on to next scam the project was basically taken over by the community and MIM has actually survived several exploits by now (the most recent one less than one month ago but again, it affected its “cauldrons” and not farms). I would expect MIM to be stable — this is, pegged 1:1 to $USDT / $USDC — in the long term but hey, do your own research, know your risks and decided if you’re ok with it or not. I just wouldn’t touch SPELL or any of their cauldrons to be honest.

Anyway, you can still use their farms with deep liquidity and relatively stable APR, currently sitting above 20% despite the recent plunge of $KAVA ’s price due to Binance’s change to leverage and margin’s limits. Funnily, in the days after the recent exploit of the cauldrons, the FUD led people to withdraw significant amounts and the APR surged aboved 60%. You can also try their other farms on Arbitrum if you prefer deeper liquidity and a more reliable, albeit usually lower, APR but rewards are paid in… SPELL…

Kinetix Finance on Kava Chain

Another option on Kava is Kinetix Finance, with several options for stables but again I usually go for MIM-USDT, which usually simmers around 17–24% APR. If you want to avoid MIM, you can still ape into USDT