5 Hot DeFi Summer Yield Opps

The DeFi trenches are full of hidden gems, but to capitalize on the opportunity, you’ll need to know where to dig…

Fortunately, this guide breaks down five of crypto’s most powerful yield strategies that can grow your bags without needing to chase the next memecoin or time the market!

Don’t let your crypto sit idle this DeFi Summer. Instead, sit back and stack by depositing into these leading onchain opportunities.

Read on for five top-tier yield plays you can’t afford to ignore. 💸👇

♨️ STEAMM

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Best For: Sui Yield
Risk Level: Medium

About:

Developed by Suilend — the same team behind Solana’s Save (formerly Solend) — STEAMM is the first “superfluid” decentralized exchange on the Sui network, designed to maximize the capital efficiency by lending passive liquidity provider deposits on Suilend’s lending markets.

STEAMM features traditional constant-product (CPMM), virtual constant-product (vCPMM), and oracle (OMM) automated market maker solutions, which can be adapted to suit the various token types and market conditions on Sui.

By depositing into STEAM, liquidity providers can receive swap fees, lending yield, STEAMM airdrop points, and any pool incentives. In the aftermath of the Cetus hack, Suilend announced it would deploy $1M of incentives for its STEAMM pools, resulting in substantial rewards rates for depositors in select pools.

Top Yield Opps:

Earn up to 12% APY on stables by depositing into STEAMM’s suiUSDT-USDC pool, or receive juiced 148% APY on WAL-USDC and 95% APY on SUI-USDC by holding Sui-native assets.

🦋 Morpho

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Best For: Custom Risk Pools
Risk Level: Low to High

About:

Designed with a modular approach in mind, Morpho is the number one lending market on Base and a top contender for the title on Ethereum, notable for providing users with access to unique risk-isolated markets that provide extremely high yields by extending credit on risky assets without creating protocol-wide loss risk.

In the Morpho design, third party vault curators determine liquidation parameters and which assets to accept as collateral, while the market dynamically sets interest rates based on supply and demand using utilization curves, similar to how rates are set in alternative protocols like Aave.

Unlike competitive lending market designs, Morpho isolates risk to a single vault and places the onus of insolvency squarely on vault suppliers, eliminating the need for protocol-level governance. This enables for truly permissionless creation of markets that can service borrower needs on any collateral type, assuming they are willing to pay the associated interest fees.

Top Yield Opps:

Play it safe with 6% APY on the Steakhouse oracle-secured USDC vault backed by blue-chip BTC and ETH, go degen mode with 14% APY on the Ouroboros Capital hardcoded price OpenEden USDC vault, or explore hundreds of other available vaults across Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and World Chain!

⤴️ Convex

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Best For: Incentivized Yield
Risk Level: Medium

About:

Although the Curve ecosystem has fallen from stardom since its original DeFi Summer heyday, its Convex liquidity rewards optimization platform remains a top yield opportunity for onchain explorers seeking token incentivized yields.

Curve pools deposits from Curve, f(x) Protocol, and Frax governance tokens to maximize the rewards rates offered to liquidity providers on these platforms, which scale with the amount of tokens locked by the LP. In exchange for providing this service, governance token lockers receive liquid deposit receipts, earn rewards from native staking activity, and collect Convex CVX token incentives.

Top Yield Opps:

Earn 19% APR with Curve’s ETH-ETHx pool on Ethereum, enjoy boosted 27% APR on f(x) crvUSD stability pool, or receive market-leading 24% APR on f(x) rETH paid in wstETH by providing liquidity with Convex.

🧶 Yearn

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Best For: Aggregated Yields
Risk Level: Low to High

About:

Yearn is the longest running DeFi aggregator. This protocol offers a slew of vault products that simplify yield harvesting with gas efficient socialized auto-compounding, lowering the costs of claiming rewards for individual depositors and enabling them to enhance yields while providing a unified interface for portfolio management.

The most popular product in the Yearn ecosystem are its yVaults, which are integrated with a number of bluechip opportunities and extend. New to the protocol’s V3 iteration, Yearn “multi strategy” vaults allow curators to deploy capital across a number of deposit opportunities in the pursuit of return maximization.

Top Yield Opps:

By staking YFI tokens, Yearn depositors can earn boosted rewards rates on select vaults (paid in YFI) and gain voting power for how to direct in-protocol token emissions. Receive up to 15% APY on USDS and 22% APY on ETH with Yearn’s multi strategy vault when you lock YFI. 

🍁 Maple/Syrup

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Best For: Institutional Lending
Risk Level: Medium

About:

Maple Finance is an institutional lending marketplace that makes overcollateralized, fixed rate loans to qualified borrowers and returns above-market yields to its lenders. Loan terms are managed by Maple’s in-house credit team, and anyone seeking to be a lender or borrower on Maple Finance must onboard/KYC with the platform.

In recent months, Maple Finance has evolved into one of crypto’s fastest growing lending protocols thanks to the success of its Syrup deposit vaults, a simplistic frontend available to anyone that accepts deposits and allocates user capital to existing high-yielding Maple lending opportunities. This strategy yields “Drips,” an additional form of token reward that can be converted into liquid SYRUP tokens.

Top Yield Opps:

Anyone can earn an estimated 10% APY on stablecoins when they deposit into the Syrup vault. Onboarded lenders can receive 9% APY with Maple’s “High Yield Secured Lending Vault” or up to 6% APY on BTC with Maple’s Core Network managed staking opportunity.