Welcome to your #1 source for crypto news, DeFi, and everything in between. If you want to know what's happening in the world onchain, well, you've come to the right place.

What's in this edition:

1. Best DeFi yields for September
2. Kalshi wins big against the CTFC
3. Friend.tech is dead

Don't forget to check out the best long-form "Good Reads" at the end of the newsletter

The Best Yields in DeFi

The crypto markets are volatile, and prices have fallen off in the last few weeks, but if you are a savvy farmer, there are tons of great yields to find across Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Base, just to name a few.

We've searched high and low to bring you some of our favorite yields. Let's dig in.

#1 Dyad on Ethereum

The hottest farm right now is Dyad, a brand new stablecoin that we've covered in depth for Flywheel since before they even launched.

As of writing, the DYAD-USDC pool on Ethereum is printing a massive 34.7%.

The reward token is Kerosene, which is both the governance token for Dyad and can also be used to take loans against the deterministic value of the excess collateral in the Dyad vaults.

#2 BTC Boost Pools on Chainflip

One of our new favorite pools is Chainflip's BTC boost pool, which helps expedite swaps on the platform. When a user opts for a Boosted swap, the protocol checks these pools for sufficient collateral. If available, this collateral is used in place of the deposit (minus a small fee), enabling near-instant execution of the swap.

The Boost pools dramatically reduce wait times - for instance, a Bitcoin to Ethereum swap that typically takes 20-30 minutes can be completed in as little as 30 seconds with Boost. If insufficient collateral is available in the Boost pools, the transaction defaults to standard confirmation times without any additional fees, ensuring a fail-safe mechanism for all swaps.

APRs for this pool have trended around 30-40% and offer a great way to earn a high yield on your Bitcoin.

If you have WBTC and want to deposit it into Chainflip, you first need to unwrap it to native Bitcoin and then deposit it to Chainflip.

#3 Timeswap's USDC/ARB lending pool

Timeswap has a new lending market that provides quasi-cash-secured puts. In these, you put up one asset, and if the price of the borrowed asset is below the strike price (TP) at maturity, you receive the collateral asset.

In the case above, you would lend USDC to the pool. If the price of ARB was lower than .40 on November 1, 2024, you would get ARB at the TP rate. If the price is above .40, you simply get your USDC back.

This is a great way to earn yield while betting on the price of the collateral token in the future. This pool might make sense for you if you think ARB will be above .40 in 45 days.

#4 Contango Markets

You must check out Contango. Dolomite is currently receiving ARB incentives for its borrowing markets, and three pools are offering over 50% on yield right now for USDM/USDC, USDM/USDC.e, and GRAI/USDC. These are all great, stable yields that you can farm.

One thing you can do while farming the ARB is use GammaSwap's hedging capabilities to insure the value of the ARB rewards you will receive. You can use their ARB/USDC pair to hedge the expected yield return for the duration of your LP.

Note that the earned rewards are a mixture of ARB and oARB. The latter is a locked version that requires you to vest over a maximum of 40 weeks to receive the full yield.

#5 Frax Bonds on Fraxtal

We can't have the best yields in DeFi without mentioning Frax. They are currently offering great rates on their FraxBonds FXB products on their network Fraxtal.

By adding LP to Curve for the December 2025 expiration, you can earn 44% APR plus 207x Fraxtal points, which is absolutely bonkers. The pool has no lockups, and you earn yield from both the FXBs and the reward incentives.

Want more yields? Check out our full database

Are you ready to bet on US elections?

Kalshi, a prediction market startup, won a significant legal victory when a federal judge overturned a 2023 decision by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which had blocked the platform from listing contracts on the outcome of U.S. congressional elections.

The ruling clears the way for Americans to legally bet on political events, marking the first time in over 100 years that election markets are legal in the United States. Kalshi plans to offer contracts for betting on whether Democrats or Republicans will control the U.S. House or Senate, potentially going live as soon as next week.

However, the future of these election contracts remains uncertain, as the CFTC filed an emergency motion seeking a 14-day delay to consider an appeal. The CFTC argued that allowing such bets could harm public confidence in election integrity.

Despite this, Kalshi sees the ruling as a major step forward in legitimizing U.S.-regulated election markets, Polymarket has been crushing volumes in the past months, with hundreds of millions in trading volumes.

Polymarket is also rumored to be launching a token sometime later this year.

Friend.tech is Dead 😦

Friend.Tech is no more.

The Web3 social network that allowed users to trade tokens for access to individuals' feeds, has effectively shut down after developers renounced control of its smart contracts.

Initially launched on the Coinbase-backed Base Layer 2 network, the platform saw a rapid rise in popularity, with its daily earnings surpassing Ethereum's at one point.

Despite this early success, including raising a seed round from crypto VC firm Paradigm, the platform's user engagement dwindled over time and is effectively zero now.

The launch of Version 2 and a token airdrop failed to revive interest, and with the developers relinquishing control, future developments seem highly unlikely.

FRIEND is down 30% today on the news... gg everyone who farmed this religiously for months, only to see it sputter and die.

Good Reads

• 0xCrayon: Decentralized AI isn't Commercially Viable Without Privacy
• Artemis research on "How Many Stablecoin Dollars ACTUALLY Exist?"
• Helius wonders "Is Solana’s Inflation Too High?"
• Kapursanat thought piece on why ZK will replace Cryptoeconomic Mechanisms
• Uniswap Labs research paper on "What drives crypto prices?
• Yash Agarwal publishes Ethereum VCs Have EBOLA for Infra