Beam me to the Moon Scotty with Moonbeam Part 2: More Dexes
Disclaimer: I am not a certified accountant, lawyer or financial advisor. Everything I write is for educational purposes. Before conducting on any of the information, please be sure to consult an expert.
I was a little disappointed with what I found in my previous article. It really isn’t up to par with what much of what the Moongang would like from the main dexes on Moonbeam. However, this ecosystem is still very young and has a lot of room to grow. If you consider where other EVM compatible chains exist, the room for Moonbeam to swell is easily able to increase by 4 times its size.
Frax Swap
As a DEX, it works. The downside with this protocol is that it is still inferior to its ethereum brethren. It doesn’t have all the bells and features that are available on the ethereum network, yet…
Convergence
Here is another project with some yielding opportunities. The risky side of this opportunity is dealing with the celer bridge. Most of the farming opportunities are done with bridged erc-20 tokens. The other problem with this ecosystem is the low liquidity and the low trading frequency. The core reason to use this dex is for the farming opportunities. The core strategy is this; create a liquidity pool token, lock up your LP token, receive CONV and CELR tokens. Then stake your CONV for a yield. Whatever you want to do with your CELR token is a different matter.
Zenlink
I have a positive first impression of this dex. This is a dex completely native to Polkadot. Not only do they support Moonbeam, they also support projects like Astar, Bitfrost and Moonriver. This dex is unlike the previously mentioned two dexes which are half-assed ports brought to this ecosystem. As far as yielding opportunities available for yielding, their earn tab shows the following APR:
- ZLK(15.96%)
- GLMR-ZLK-LP(48.02%)
- GLMR-xcDOT(48.2%)
The GLMR-xcDOT yield is competitive to Stellaswap. It isn’t particularly feature rich right now but more features are going to be added on. For that reason, keep Zenlink on your radar of dexes for the moonbeam ecosystem. This is a project being supported by the Web3 foundation, the main backers of Polkadot and Kusama with Gavin Woods on the council.
Solarflare
Solarflare is the Solarbeam Foundation’s moonbeam version of their dex. This DEX is 100% for the Moonbeam ecosystem. It has some of the features you would want from a DEX, a swapping feature, farming, staking and bridging. There is a fair selection of farms here to select from but the following ones are the ones I would be most interested in:
GLMR/FLARE (140% APR)
GLMR/MOVR (33.75% APR)
veFLARE/veSOLAR (27.23% APR)
WGLMR (23.19% APR)
These farms offer FLARE as the APR rewards. The safest is probably WGLMR as it has no risk of impermanent loss. GLMR/FLARE is the second in terms of risk with the added risk of impermanent loss. GLMR/MOVR and veFLARE/veSOLAR adds the risk of bridging assets added in your LP. The GLMR/MOVR and veFLARE/veSOLAR farms are interesting because it allows investors to play the trading ratio against each ecosystem. Moonbeam(GLMR) and MoonRiver(MOVR) are sister networks operating on Polkadot and Kusama respectively. veFLARE and veSOLAR are incentive tokens for Polkadot and Kusama.
Next we need to talk about staking FLARE tokens. It is designed very similarly to the veCurve token and the Solarbeam project had designed it as such. Basically you can lock up your flare tokens anywhere between 7 days to 4 years. Any unlocking of your coins before that has a 75% early exit penalty. When you lock your FLARE token, you receive veFlare in exchange. Then you can take your veFlare, stake your veFlare for an APR of 75% of FLARE tokens. Then take your FLARE tokens and lock it up again for more veFlare and repeat the process. You should look into creating something similar to a HEX staking ladder from DollarCostCrypto with your veFlare tokens.
PadSwap
PadSwap is a multichain dex supporting three ecosystems; Binance Smart Chain, MoonRiver and MoonBeam. It has all the basic features needed for a dex. My only concern is that it is a low market cap coin with very hard to obtain data. I had to go to Nomics to get any data about this dex. Most of the APY kinda sucks and pays mainly PAD; a token that has only gone down in price. I gave the link if you want to check it out but I don’t think it is worth it. That is why I am going to skip the details on this dex.
Clipper DEX
This is another multichain dex supporting ethereum, polygon, optimism and moonbeam. Unfortunately, thanks to the Nomad bridge hack, they stopped taking deposits for moonbeam. I’m starting to get into the swamp dexes of Moonbeam now.
Energyfi
This is a dex being built to support the moonbeam and moonriver ecosystems. In the long run, they are likely to add more ecosystems to its dex, such as Avalanche and Near. This is still a pretty risky DEX to farm on. The native token, EFT, is a low market cap cryptocurrency. However, it was launched in February of 2022. So there are some expectations for the coin to crash in price while heading into a bear market. However, this project offers some insane high yields.
EFT/xcDOT (765% APR)
USDC/EFT (326% APR)
USDC/WGLMR (135% APR)
WGMLR/xcDOT (12.3% APR)
EFT/WGLMR (10.23% APR)
At the moment, the protocol doesn’t provide any information about its staking APR. That is a bit of a bummer. I don’t have too much confidence in this DEX at the moment.
Conclusion
My only concern about much of these dexes is the anonymous nature of the teams and very low liquidity. In fact, I thought this article would actually be longer. I had a series of dexes I wanted to discuss but either had missing information, websites that weren’t working and so on. Luckily, Moonbeam isn’t just a consortium of EVM dexes, it is a smart contract layer1 project. However, they consist of the greatest number of protocols on Moonbeam. Hence why it was worth covering two articles about them.
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