Parsec Weekly #134
Plasma Mainnet
Plasma Mainnet
Yesterday saw Plasma mainnet go live along with their native token XPL and what a launch it has been so far...
~$3bn in TVL in ~24 hours
Most insane S tier list of Day 1 integrations, almost every DeFi bluechip you could think of deployed with mainnet launch
XPL incentives in abundance
Before we get into the state of mainnet and opportunities on offer, let’s back track a little.
Plasma is an L1 focused on stablecoins: payments, yield, DeFi... you name it, if it involves stablecoins they want it on the chain. Backed by Tether, their north star is to make USDT transfers free and instant. Technically, the L1 is an EVM-compatible Bitcoin sidechain running “PlasmaBFT” consensus for rapid finality. It features a native BTC bridge, whitelisted gas tokens, and zero-fee USDT transfers.
Plasma raised:
$24M from VCs
$50M from the community via Echo
They’ve further strengthened this community first focus with actions taken during the token launch process with rewards for discord role holders, community contributors etc;
This also included rewarding minimum depositors into their June predeposit with a completely unexpected airdrop upon TGE:
As a highly anticipated project, unsurprisingly, many exchanges listed XPL pre launch perps prior to the spot token launch yesterday. This led to a great deal of contention around how the token would launch into mainnet and where it would find fair value. Safe to say, the pre launch markets were under selling by a quite a significant margin as XPL traded ~+60% yesterday:
Naturally, this price action along with an aggressive post mainnet XPL rewards program has created a bunch of attractive opportunities as summarised by this Merkl dashboard:
APRs were absolutely insane for the first few hours so naturally a significant amount of capital has bridged across to harvest the outsized yields. Despite that, yields remain elevated across the board, especially when we consider the amount of capital in some of these opportunities.
~20% on $2bn+ of capital is no easy feat!
For those who dig a little deeper there are even more attractive opportunities albeit with lower capacity, for example the “Borrow USDT0 from Fluid USDai-USDT0/USDT0 Vault” opportunity created an interesting looping opportunity.
With a 0.87 collateral factor, 0.9 liquidation threshold and collateral hard coded to 1, opportunities like this have offered extremely juicy opportunities for loopers. But as with any very attractive opportunity, capacity was gobbled up very quickly with caps filled at the time of writing:
Ethena have taken things into their own hands and look to be running a Plasma-focused incentive program of their own, subsidising USDe supply on Aave to the tune of ~10% (unlevered):
Plenty of opportunities for both the passive and the active in what has been the first new and exciting chain launch in quite some time. I look forward to monitoring and writing about future opportunities on Plasma but for now, go out there and enjoy some of those yields :)