The Humble Farmer's Digest 1/24

Your weekly dose of Crypto, DeFi, and more...

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Jan 24, 2024

Hello Humble Farmers, thanks for reading!

This substack aims to share everything we’re paying attention to, including new launches, good farms, tokens, and much more. If any of that sounds interesting to you, please subscribe!

What We’re Watching

Metaplex

Solana has cemented itself as one of the few alternative layer one chains that has true PMF, and will likely play a big part as we enter the next bull market. It has been one of the few ecosystems that has managed to retain and grow its user base and developer ecosystem, which has led to countless new applications as well as speculative mania. One of Solana’s strongest points is its NFT ecosystem, which has been the only chain outside of Ethereum to grow to such a large status. This has mostly been led by cheap fees, quick finality, plenty of collections, and unique applications such as Tensor and Metaplex, and this NFT ecosystem will only grow over the coming months.

Let’s get to the focus of this section, which is Metaplex. For those who may not be familiar, Metaplex is an NFT infrastructure protocol in the Solana ecosystem. Metaplex continues to facilitate almost 100% of all Solana-based NFT mints, due to compressed NFTs which make it substantially quicker, cheaper, and easier, for creators to make their own collections. Metaplex has also turned on a fee switch, enabling a clear path to profitability for token holders which has been reflected in the price over the past few months. If you’re interested in learning more about Metaplex, we recommend checking out the article below.

Overall, Solana is here to stay and Metaplex will be a clear beneficiary of this growth. With Tensor and Magic Eden likely launching tokens within the near future, eyes will slowly turn to Metaplex as the infrastructure that powers the NFTs traded on these marketplaces.

Restaking Plays

We’ve talked about Restaking in the past, and we believe that it’ll continue to be one of the hottest narratives going into Eigenlayer’s mainnet launch later this year. While there aren’t many ways to get exposure here at the moment, here’s a quick breakdown of what we’re watching when it comes to restaking.

Picasso Network

Picasso is an interoperability protocol in the Cosmos, Solana, and Polkadot ecosystems, and will be launching SOL restaking very soon. This could be interesting going forward, and we’ll be paying close attention to this as it launches.

Restake Finance

Restake Finance is building a liquid-restaking-token (LRT) on top of Eigenlayer, and will likely do well going into Eigenlayer’s mainnet as one of the few ways to get direct exposure. We aren’t as interested in Restake due to the large competition within the LRT space, but it has been the first and only LRT project to launch a token.

SSV Network

SSV Network is an infrastructure project for liquid staking through their decentralized validator technology, or DVT. They’ve also announced their plans of expanding to restaking, and could be a good infrastructure bet going forward.

Pendle

We’re sure most of you are familiar with Pendle, and this has been a clear infrastructure play for both LSTs and LRTs. As these liquid restaking tokens start to go live, they will likely set up pools on Pendle similar to what we saw last year with liquid staking tokens.

Vector Reserve

Vector Reserve is an upcoming LPD-Fi project built on top of ETH as well as LRTs, and aims to create a liquid ETH asset to take advantage of these yields. Vector plans to do this through Eigenlayer’s Superfluid restaking, enabling users to restake their LP tokens as well as their LSTs. Vector Reserve’s token is currently trading on Fjord Foundry, though it is worth noting that its current valuation is extremely high.

Octopus Network

Finally we have Octopus Netowork, an interoperability-based restaking protocol enabling users to restake NEAR to secure app chains. Again, this could be an interesting bet going into the growth of the restaking as a whole, but as always DYOR.

Farms of the Week

Upcoming Projects

Isekai Money (Real yield platform coming to a chain near you)
Anzen Protocol (Optimizing Operator Payments on Eigenlayer)
Venium (Innovative Gaming Ecosystem On Scroll)
CubHub (Poke The Bear, Get The Claws. An Augmented Reality Based Project On Berachain)
Prism (Discover a new dimension of trading with Prism Exchange on Blast)
The Bagel Network (Infinitely scalable machine learning data lake)
Eigenpie (Eigenpie is a Liquid Restaking SubDAO created by Magpie using the infrastructure of Eigenlayer)