Why we’ve launched cross-chain yield opps

Bear markets are great for builders. But they’re not so great for traders, and we know this has been a very volitile time for our community.

There are major gains to be had out there, but not everyone has the time to research them. Some of you will want to bury your digital gold, go down into your bunker and wait until the bears are hibernating again. 

This is the great thing about yield opportunities. They allow you to lock your tokens and unlock rewards at the same time. And crypto yields are usually significantly higher than fiat ones, so you can hench up your portfolio while keeping your powder dry for the next bull run.

But, if we’re honest, the DeFi yield experience has been pretty sucky so far. 

The best opportunities are strung out across different chains and you’ve had to pay eye-watering gas fees to grab them. Given the whole point of passive investment is to enjoy steady, guaranteed income, this is distinctly sub-optimal.

So we want to open up the yield markets to the same cross-chain possibilities we’ve created for active swaps and trades. This will provide five key benefits:

1. Security

Even the strongest investments carry certain risks, and that’s as true in crypto as it was in fiat. Many projects are offering huge returns right now, but these are often the ones with the biggest potential downside.

With cross-chain yield opps, you can diversify your portfolio across different chains and reduce your individual exposure to each of them. So if a chain loses popularity, faces liquidity challenges or suffers a high-profile hack, you’ve got ballast elsewhere.

          2. Higher yields

By opening up different blockchains, you can identify the ones where the yields are currently highest and jump on them before everyone else has arrived.  

         3. Interoperability

Cross-chain yield DeFi facilitates interoperability between different networks. In layman’s terms, this means you can move your assets easily without having to trust complex bridges, keep switching networks or open endless new wallets, which, frankly, is a waste of your time.

         4. Reduced costs

As well as saving you the gas fees, cross-chain yield allows you to choose the most effective chain for your transaction: the one which charges the lowest fees and offers the least congestion. 

         5. Strength in numbers

Now, you and other yield-hunters can participate in several different ecosystems at once. This will increase overall liquidity across the digital world and thereby reduce downside risk.

Our approach to cross-chain yield

 
We’d love to tell you that cross-chain yield was a back-breaking challenge to overcome, that we spent weeks on end grappling with arcane mathematical problems and ended up producing the greatest feat of coding since Ada Lovelace was building her steampunk algorithm.

But we don’t want to be liars.

In fact, the problem was relatively simple to solve: we simply updated our existing cross-chain contracts for passive trading. 

Now you can access the liquidity outposts we’ve established on different chains for investment as well as swaps. The rest of the system – the liquidity outposts, the central router, the user signatures – is still the same.

So if you take Polygon, for example, you could previously only swap Polygon tokens. Now, you can instruct this contract to invest your tokens on Polygon’s yield platforms.

For our launch opportunity we’ve joined forces with Beefy Finance, a yield aggregator that wraps existing opportunities for compounding without the need for you to manually claim and reinvest (paying gas each time) .

Here’s how it works:

1. You deposit or swap USDT on rhino.fi and we then bridge that into Polygon, once you have indicated your request via a user signature.
2. On Polygon, we then take that USDT and deposit into the Stargate pool. In return we get Stargate liquidity provider (LP) tokens, which we deposit in the Beefy finance vault. This gives us receipt tokens which are held in the rhino.fi smart contract and controlled by you.
3. Meanwhile, Beefy continues to compound the original investment. In other words, the interest is collected at regular intervals and added to your initial investment in the Stargate pool, along with any earned bridging transaction fees. 
4. The next tranche of interest is earned on this new figure, rather than the original (this cycle continues to repeat itself, so you earn progressively more rewards each time).

Because Beefy takes care of the wrapping, you can enter and exit easily and do not face significant exposure to Stargate’s native token.

Bear in mind, though, that the compounding period is irregular and is based on several factors, such as the amount of yield earned, the gas fees and the amount of activity in the pool.

How are my yields calculated?

When we talk about yield returns, we’re usually talking in annual percentage yield, or APY. This is a more complex figure than the old-fashioned annual percentage return, or APR, and there’s a good reason for that: crypto investments are usually compounding assets, which means they regularly harvest a proportion of your interest, add this onto your investment and earn the next chunk of interest on that figure, not the original.

In other words, your interest will keep increasing as it’s collecting itself on an ever-bigger base number. We’ve got a whole blog post on how this works, which you can find here.

Ok I still have questions. Who can I ask?

No worries: just hit us up on our Discord or Twitter and we’ll do our best to answer them.

And if you’re ready to seize the opportunity, here’s that button again. Enjoy your financial freedom!