crv.mktcap
March 11, 2022: Genie’s out of the Boule 🧞🔮 AladdinDAO Launches “Concentrator” Curve Yield Enhancer
gm to everybody who launches into a bear market! The most recent flywheel accoutrement launched just yesterday in the form of AladdinDAO’s Concentrator. Concentrator bills itself as a farm-and-hold yield enhancer. It claims to passively boost your flywheel yields by a whopping ~50%. By what magic can does it generate this bump? The principle at stake is that most auto-compounders utilize a farm-and-dump methodology, in which reward tokens are immediately sold off. The Concentrator instead converts to cvxCRV which is staked and auto-compounded. At present this is yielding about 43% APR per Llama Airforce. This strategy also has some fringe benefits to reinforce the flywheel. The continuous buy pressure could theoretically help reinforce the critical $CRV-$cvxCRV peg, which is off by about 3% amidst the roar of the bear market. The Concentrator strategy is also useful for users stuck in hostile jurisdictions like the US, in that users can choose when rewards can be claimed, which avoids the tax issues that can come from manual claiming. You might be wondering how this differs from the Union, which also runs an efficient auto-compounder. The Concentrator team is offering to play nice. Then again, the great Martin Krung, a true crypto OG, is involved with the project. He claims to have invented the vampire attack, so perhaps he’s concealing ambitions to vampire the Union, or maybe even Curve itself. Popcorn consumption intensifies… Although the concept of an autocompounder may be common between the two projects, a key difference at the moment is the deposit structure. The Union accepts $CRV, $cvxCRV, or $ETH as a deposit to their Curve Pounder, while their flagship product focuses on vlCVX. The Concentrator also accepts $cvxCRV directly, but in most cases the deposit token is an LP tokens from staking liquidity into a Curve pool. The concentrator uses the autocompounding $cvxCRV methodology to boost these pool gains. This also means we have yet another version of $CRV in the form of Aladdin CRV ($aCRV). If you’re keeping track, this means the alphabet is getting filled out with $aCRV (Aladdin), $aCRV (AAVE), $cvxCRV, $cyCRV, $sCRV, $uCRV and presumably others I missed. Weird that so many protocols are wrapping something that’s allegedly not even a top 100 token… Since Aladdin’s launch yesterday, over $12MM in liquidity has already been deposited to the pool. The Concentrator suggests that they can absorb ~100x this without rewards becoming non-dilutive. The protocol has been audited by SECBit which is a nice bit of disclosure, though never a guarantee. Users should always exercise caution with all new protocols and do your own research. Fortunately their GitHub is very thorough, with all contracts well documented and robust tests suite. However, I’ve not had time to conduct a full audit myself. The flywheel tools being built are just a cornerstone in the grander ambitions of the AladdinDAO team. AladdinDAO takes its cues from the ancient Greek concept of a Boule, which take the form of “big brains” elected by the Aladdin community to research DeFi and steer the project. Their incentives are aligned, and they are paid out in proportion to the opportunity they capture. These Boule meetings take place in public, which provides for a wonderful library of video content for anybody interested in researching DeFi. It’s always stunning when you see such high quality research freely available and under a hundred degens have watched. The market for eyeballs in crypto is as comically mispriced as the broader market. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re merely consuming what everybody else is consuming, you’ll get no alfa from the bargain. Pushing their way to the forefront of thought leadership, Aladdin has also been hosting a variety of Twitter spaces, sampling minds across the full distribution of the midwit curve. Repping the high IQ department, yesterday’s chat with @0xAlunara and @DefiDividends was a phenomenal listen (recording available here). This can be a double-edged sword of course: VCs need to eat too. Who gets to be first in line at the buffet? Nonetheless, you might take the fact that some of the smartest capitalists in the space smell opportunity here as a form of social proof. Aladdin DAO is relatively new to launching products into the space, but their awesome brainpower is already getting a warm reception across the ecosystem. If you’re interested in learning more about Aladdin DAO, check out their website, Twitter, blog, Telegram, or Discord. Disclaimers! Author has a stake in the Union Pounder, but no stake in Aladdin DAO or its Concentrator.