🔍3 new DeFi tools you should try out
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Quai Network, the world’s fastest Proof-of-Work Network, launched its all-in-one DeFi platform called Quainance.
GM friends.
Here’s what I’ll cover today:
🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out
📊 Crypto chart of the week
🗞️ The latest DeFi news
🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out
Recently, I’ve come across a lot of DeFi tools that I consider quite useful.
Since they are all free, I thought it would be interesting to write a newsletter covering these tools and how I use them.
Let’s dive in 👇
1. Pharos Watch
Pharos is a platform where you’ll find any information you need regarding stablecoins.
This includes:
Recent depegs
General stablecoin news
Upcoming stablecoin launches
A breakdown of each stablecoin's backing and how it works
Mint authority (This section shows if an asset uses multisigs, timelocks, and other security measures and is helpful to assess how seriously its team takes security)
A safety score based on the redemption mechanism, volume, DEX liquidity, durability of that stablecoin, and more
And so much more. If you want to research a certain stablecoin product and better understand its risk profile, I think Pharos is a good place to start.
Besides that, Pharos also has a very cool Telegram Alert Bot.
You can use it to get depeg alerts for free on Telegram whenever a stablecoin depegs or there are some unusual on-chain movements related to it.
I find this very helpful because I want to be alerted when one of the stablecoins I hold starts to depeg so I can exit my position quickly if needed.
2. Yieldz
Yieldz is a platform built specifically for yield farming.
It has three main pages:
Dashboard - Here you can see your positions across money markets such as Aave and Morpho, as well as what collaterals you are exposed to
Deposit - This one shows the top lending opportunities across Aave, Lista, and Morpho while also displaying their historical performances
Leverage - This page looks similar to the Deposit page in terms of user interface, but it shows leveraged yield opportunities instead, filtered by APY
The Leverage tab is the one I use the most.
Using it, it is very easy to spot the best looping opportunities across almost all major money markets as Yieldz automatically calculates the yield you’d get for looping a certain asset at maximum leverage.
For each looping opportunity, it also shows how its borrowing and supply rate evolved over time in the form of a chart, which is helpful for assessing its performance.
You'll also find other details on the Yieldz UI, such as how much liquidity is available in a certain market, its utilization rate, liquidation LTV, and so on.
This makes it relatively easy to decide what loop may be worth opening.
Moving on, there’s one more tool I want to cover.
But before that, here’s an overview of Quai, which just launched its DeFi platform:
Together with Quai Network
DeFi just went live on Quai Network
Quai, the world’s fastest Proof-of-Work blockchain, has recently launched Quainance.
Quainance is an all-in-one DeFi platform where you can bridge, swap, and earn yield by providing liquidity from one place.
This makes Quai one of the very few L1s powered by Proof of Work to add support for DeFi.
Here are a few things you should know about Quainance and Quai:
You can bridge USDT to Quai in just a few clicks via the Quainance website
Once you bridge it there, you can use that capital to swap into QUAI/WQI, Quai’s native assets, and provide liquidity to earn a yield
Quai is a highly scalable blockchain with an architecture built to support up to 50,000+ transactions per second without fees spiking
What’s particularly interesting about Quai is its Proof-of-Entropy-Minima consensus mechanism, which can be seen as an upgrade of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work.
Quai’s Proof-of-Entropy-Minima aims to offer the best of both worlds:
It combines a high transaction throughput with the security guarantees of Proof-of-Work, making it well suited for DeFi applications.
Thanks to it, Quai can offer a good DeFi UX while staying decentralized and secure.
To bootstrap user activity, Quai is currently offering triple-digit yields to early users providing liquidity to its pools on Quainance.
Explore Quai’s Quainance DeFi platform here!
🔎3 new DeFi tools you should try out (part 2)
3. Monarch
If you use Morpho for DeFi lending, you may like this one.
Monarch Lend has been live for a while, but I only recently discovered it.
It’s essentially a lending platform built on top of Morpho’s smart contracts with advanced features for DeFi power users.
For instance, what you can do on Monarch that isn’t possible via the Morpho UI is to lend directly against a set of collaterals that you choose yourself.
Why does this matter?
Because in this way you get full control over your lending positions and no longer have to rely on a vault curator who may (or may not) do a good job managing risk.
Another advantage is that, by letting you lend directly against a collateral you choose, Monarch often provides higher yields than you can get via Morpho UI.
To give you an actual example, at the time of writing, you can lend USDT against stcUSD collateral on Morpho via Monarch and earn 15.74%.
If I then go to the Morpho user interface, there’s no Morpho vault providing such a high APY, as no vault provides direct exposure solely to stcUSD.
And that’s why I think using Monarch as a Morpho lender makes sense.
That said, the trade-off is that you're fully responsible for managing your own risk.
While using Monarch can definitely offer some advantages as I shared above, it also requires doing proper research on the markets you choose to lend to make sure you understand what risks you are exposed to.
Anyone can list a market on Morpho as the platform is permissionless.
Monarch turns users into their own curators, and there are a few things I recommend you check before lending to a market via it if you intend to use it:
What oracle the market uses
How liquidations are performed (based on the NAV price or DEX rate?)
What collateral it exposes you to and how risky that collateral is (if it’s a yield-bearing asset, look into how it generates yield)
Whether any well-known curators deposited capital into that market (which can be helpful to determine if other curators trust that market)
Those are the main things I pay attention to.
With that said, I hope you found this list of tools helpful!
I will continue to cover lesser-known DeFi tools that I find useful as I discover them.
Chart of the week
Robinhood Chain surpassed Base in daily active users
Crypto meme of the week😂
The latest developments in DeFi
Morpho released Morpho Midnight - a money market for fixed-rate loans
Hyperliquid announced plans to support the permissionless creation of HIP-4 outcome markets
Aave Labs’s proposal to launch Aave App went live
Aerodrome scheduled the launch of Aero, a new multichain DEX, for September
eCash.com announced an upcoming ECX token airdrop in August for every wallet address holding BTC
Ondo released Ondo Points - a points program for trading activity on Ondo Perps
Ethereum’s validator exit queue fell to zero (no one tries to unstake ETH anymore)
MegaETH has shut down its MegaMafia incubator
Telegram announced plans to launch a new crypto wallet with zero tx fees
Hylo launched xBTC - a liquidation-free token offering 3x BTC exposure
Yearn’s proposal to launch a risk tranching system for its vaults went live
Ethena went live on Monad L1
Ostium announced plans to reopen trading today
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
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