Appearances can often be deceiving. Take $BONK for example https://www.bonkcoin.com/about
$BONK started life as a meme token. And it sort of still is. Big price spike and then a fall. So far so meme-coin
Looking more closely
You want to be very careful judging books by their covers.
Curve Finance is one of the ugliest sites I've ever seen. It had, for the longest time, a website that looked like the websites I saw when I first started using the internet.
The most recent UI update only really brought that website into the late 90's.
At time of writing Curve Finance has a (not including staking) a TVL of $2.53B USD, a yearly volume of $55B USD, and yearly fees of over $12M USD.
All in the middle of a bear market (and off the back of a nasty recent hack).
BONK is not serious defi like Curve is. I think the project will always be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. However it would be a mistake to assume that they're not serious about what they're doing.
This is part of a series of posts where I will expand on some of the most interesting things in the Bonk ecosystem. There is a A LOT going on and nearly all of it is interesting experiments that have much larger long term implications.
Lesson #1: Silicon Valley Bonk How about a game that will keep rewarding you, even if you lose?
Welcome to Silicon Valley Bonk. The newest degen game that also showcases important Solana innovations.
In one way it's a massively multi-player last one in wins lotto. You buy keys (entries) to play. Last one to buy wins. So far so Bonk.
See here for more details about the initial mechanics:
And the team wasted no time in integrating user feedback. After Game 3 was finished the team paused the game, retooled and updated the game, added some new features and released an updated game experience for Game 4!
Play here https://svbonk.com/
The next bit is where you get more bang for your $BONK. The losing keys aren't losers. They'll get a stream of yield from the next game keys, and the next game after that, and so on and so on.
These are soul-bound keys. Non transferrable. Once again they taken new tech in the Solana ecosystem and rolled it out into production in an interesting way.
You go to the Claim page to claim your yield from the subsequent games that your keys have collected.
Is SVB....?
A degen game of collecting soul bound tokens + yield with some lotto wins sprinkled in.
OR
It's an example of an extremely cost effective and fair model for distributing ongoing payments like royalties and commissions.
Spoiler alert: It's both
In a past job I worked helping distribute royalties from digital music sales on mobile phone online content marketplaces (remember them? Just about every carrier and manufacturer had one...). It was a costly and inefficient system then and it's not improved a massive amount since. The payments to key holders in SVB are, in comparison:
-
permissionless
-
cheap
-
open
WARNING
$BONK is likely not intergenerational wealth (and these keys definitely aren't) so please: Degen Responsively.
Lesson #2: Kamino Vaults
$BONK is great but it's pretty volatile.
Holding $BONK means you only are exposed to price increases & decreases.
Q. How do also you get exposure to those transaction fees but with (basically) the same effort as holding?
A: Kamino Finance
Kamino offers cutting edge vaults that sit on top of concentrated liquidity LPs on Raydium Protocol and Orca.
Go to the home page and search for 'bonk' to see the available vaults.
Once you're in the vault it's as simple as select one of the two assets (in this case $BONK or $USDH) and depositing into the vault. Kamino will look after the rest. You can track your deposit performance from the vault or from your Portfolio page. https://app.kamino.finance/liquidity/bonk-usdh-orca/8XgX1EkSHC43mwdaUCZeXL2JVFz15JJynFrcxrQa3jss
$BONK is volatile. It often attracts large APYs due to the large amount of trading fees it generates.
Kamino V2 (coming soon!) offers a range of metrics to help you track your performance.
Large APYs mean large yields, but that doesn't mean your $BONK vault will always be profitable. Prices will play a significant part in your overall position.
Kamino V2 (coming soon!) helps you assess this by showing you how different strategies compare to the vault.
Holding volatile assets comes with risks. Yield is essential in offsetting price decreases.
Over the long term a compounding yield strategy will grow your position and give you more exposure to price increases.
It doesn't guarantee profit but it increases your chances of it.
While you're waiting for Kamino V2 to change the analytics game, head over to @DefiLlama to see the stats on underlying LPs from the vaults.
This is the $BONK - $USDH LP on Orca which Kamino vault of the same name is built on top of.
All of the other things
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