Editorial Notes (vol. 29) – CEX products, the DeFi way

“I took my funds off of an exchange, but where can I now trade, earn yield, and stake?”

In response to the FTX collapse, many CEX users have been asking questions like the one above. So, let’s explore the answers to this type of questions in today’s Explore Screen update!

Last week’s FTX fiasco has once again shown why self-custody and the mantra — “not your keys, not your crypto” are more important than ever. It is no secret that centralized exchanges are more often than not, the initial gateway for new entrants into crypto and an important and useful venue for on/off ramping. However, keeping assets on those exchanges and other CeFi platforms poses a great risk since you aren’t in control of the assets.

We’ve seen multiple collapses this year due to incompetence, malpractice, or outright fraud by the people behind those centralized service providers such as Celsius, FTX, Babel Finance, and others. All those platforms provided easy-to-use products for trading, staking, lending, or earning yield in one way or another. But, all these products are available on-chain in the DeFi ecosystem and are relatively easy to use as well. On top of that, they allow users to have sole control and access to their funds.

When it comes to staking, Omni offers the best in class staking solution, allowing you to stake and liquid-stake more than 15 tokens on multiple chains in just three taps. Moreover, the app allows you to trade tokens: swapping can be done just as easily in the wallet, not to mention earning yield through Yearn Finance or lending on AAVE. This is why we are excited to see people actually start to move funds off centralized exchanges and into their self-custodial wallets, where they can access everything they could before and more.

To help you navigate the waters of DeFi, we’ve gathered dApps that offer trading perps with leverage, swapping tokens with an even broader selection of pairs than any CEX, multiple lending platforms, and yield aggregators, which will help you earn more with your funds.

Let's dive right in and start exploring.

Perp DEX

The decentralized perpetual exchange market is expanding rapidly with projects offering a CEX-like experience – if you can handle Binance, you should also be able to handle these.

Trade perpetual contracts with low fees on dYdX. Supports margin trading, lending, and borrowing.​​

dYdX is a decentralized exchange that offers perpetual trading options for over 35 popular cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ether, Dogecoin, Cosmos. It is one of the world's biggest decentralized exchanges in terms of trading volume and market share.

Trade perps with leverage and deep liquidity on Perpetual Protocol.

Perpetual Protocol is a decentralized exchange that allows users to trade with leverage and low slippage. Perp V2 builds on top of Uniswap V3’s smart contracts, using Uniswap’s on-chain infrastructure as a key component, and offers you leverage up to 10x when trading or providing liquidity.

Trade top cryptocurrencies on GMX with up to 30x leverage directly from your wallet.

GMX is a decentralized spot and perpetual exchange that supports low swap fees and zero-price impact trades. Trading is supported by a unique multi-asset pool that earns liquidity providers fees from market making, swap fees, and leverage trading. 30% of fees generated from swaps and leverage trading are converted to ETH or AVAX and distributed to staked GMX and GLP tokens.

Trade perpetual swaps with leverage or bet against traders on Pika Protocol with Liquidity Vaults.

Pika allows you to trade multiple tokens with up to 50x leverage and very deep liquidity — the expected slippage for a $10k ETH-USD trade is 0.02%. If you prefer betting against the traders on the platform, you can deposit USDC to Pika's Vault. The vault pays for trader profits and receives trader losses. When traders lose, the vault wins.

DEX – “Spot exchange”

Uniswap – swap and provide liquidity on the largest DEX in Web3.

Uniswap is a decentralized finance protocol that is used to exchange cryptocurrencies. The protocol facilitates automated transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and other EVMs through the use of smart contracts.

Trade, stake, lend, and more with Sushi’s suite of DeFi products.

SushiSwap is a decentralized exchange initially built on Ethereum that utilizes an AMM system rather than a traditional order book. Since its inception, it has spread to over 15 other networks, allowing users to trade cross-chain as well. 

Optimize your trades across hundreds of DEXs on multiple networks with 1inch.

1inch is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) that facilitates decentralized token swaps without requiring an order book. The 1inch smart algorithm is designed to capture value typically captured by arbitrageurs. Its algorithm gives liquidity providers more competitive returns in comparison to other AMM designs.

Utilize hundreds of Curve liquidity pools, and trade with high liquidity, low slippage, and low transaction fees.

Curve is an exchange liquidity pool designed for extremely efficient stablecoin trading and trading of pairs that are highly correlated. It also enables users to engage in low-risk, supplemental fee income for liquidity providers, without opportunity cost. 

Lending

Earn on your deposits and borrow with AAVE.

Aave is a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol where users can participate as depositors or borrowers. Depositors provide liquidity to the market to earn a passive income, while borrowers are able to borrow in an overcollateralized or undercollateralized (one-block liquidity) way.

Effortlessly borrow, lend, and earn interest on your assets with 0VIX.

0VIX aims to democratize access to decentralized financial products by providing users access to permissionless lending and borrowing. Instantly supply or withdraw assets from the shared liquidity market, borrow from any of the liquidity markets using the supplied assets value as collateral, and get a transparent view of interest rates based on the asset's market supply and demand.

Access higher yields with Maple by providing liquidity for undercollateralized loans.

Maple is a decentralized corporate credit market. It provides capital to institutional borrowers through globally accessible fixed-income yield opportunities. It allows funds to leverage their reputation to take undercollateralized loans without constant fear of liquidation and margin calls while allowing the liquidity providers to access higher yields on their loaned assets to offset the risk.

Yield generation - "Earn page"

Save with PoolTogether and win prizes.

PoolTogether is a decentralized and open-source blockchain-based prize savings account. Replicating "no loss lotteries" and "prize savings accounts", all depositors are offered a chance to win prizes without needing to risk their deposited funds. This is possible because prizes are made up of the interest that accrues on all deposited funds.

Utilize Yearn vault strategies and maximize your yields. 

Yearn Finance is a decentralized asset management platform that has multiple products, ranging from liquidity provision and lending to insurance. The most prominent product in its ecosystem are Vaults, which maximize users' yields through various yield farming strategies proposed by the community.

Access sustainable yield using Ribbon’s structured products.

Ribbon uses financial engineering to create structured products that deliver sustainable yield. Ribbon's first product focuses on yield through automated options strategies. The protocol also allows developers to create arbitrary structured products by combining various DeFi derivatives. They have recently released two new products – Ribbon Earn and Ribbon Lend. The former offers users competitive yields by participating in delta-neutral strategies, while the Lend product (similar to Maple) allows users to lend USDC to institutional borrowers in order to earn 9% APY.

Explore and access multi-chain DeFi yield opportunities with Beefy.

Beefy Finance is a decentralized, multi-chain yield optimizer that allows its users to earn compound interest on their crypto holdings.

Through Vaults that have a set of investment strategies secured and enforced by smart contracts, Beefy Finance automatically maximizes the user rewards from various liquidity pools (LPs),‌ ‌automated market-making (AMM) projects,‌ ‌and‌ ‌other yield‌ farming ‌opportunities in the DeFi ecosystem.

Maximize Convex APYs and earn yield in the best DeFi tokens on Concentrator.

Concentrator is a yield enhancer that boosts yields on Convex vaults. Users deposit Curve LP tokens, which are automatically staked in Convex vaults – if you don’t have an LP token, Concentrator allows you to zap into any position with select tokens. Rewards are periodically harvested, swapped to cvxCRV, and deposited in the Concentrator vault. The Concentrator vault stakes deposited cvxCRV on Convex, then auto-compounds the resulting rewards back to more cvxCRV.