The Ultimate Guide to the Top 10 Protocols on Optimism

**What is Beefy?**
Beefy is a Decentralized, Multichain Yield Optimizer platform that allows its users to earn compound interest on their crypto holdings.

Through a set of investment strategies secured and enforced by smart contracts, Beefy Finance automatically maximizes the user rewards from various liquidity pools (LPs),‌ ‌automated market making (AMM) projects,‌ ‌and‌ ‌other yield‌ farming ‌opportunities in the DeFi ecosystem.

The main product offered by Beefy Finance are the 'Vaults' in which you stake your crypto tokens. The investment strategy tied to the specific vault will automatically increase your deposited token amount by compounding arbitrary yield farm reward tokens back into your initially deposited asset. Despite the name 'Vault' suggests, your funds are never locked in any vault on Beefy Finance: you can always withdraw at any moment in time.

DeFi applications are unique in the sense that they are permissionless and trustless, meaning that anyone with a supported wallet can interact with them without the need for a trusted middleman. While you have funds staked in a vault, you remain 100% in control of your crypto.

**What is $BIFI?**
$BIFI tokens are 'dividend-eligible' revenue shares in Beefy Finance, through which holders earn profits generated by Beefy Finance and are entitled to vote on important platform decisions.

For all the vaults deployed on every blockchain, Beefy Finance has its native governance token $BIFI at its core. Platform revenue is generated from a small percentage of all the vault profits and distributed back to those who stake $BIFI.

The revenue sharing mechanics entail you can stake $BIFI to either earn more $BIFI in a BIFI Maxi vault, or earn $ETH, $BNB, $FTM, $MATIC, $AVAX, $HT, $ONE, $CELO, $MOVR or $CRO in the native staking pools.

The supply of $BIFI is limited at 80,000 tokens and available on the top decentralized exchanges such as Binance, 1inchexchange and PancakeSwap. 

For more details, please refer to the official Beefy Finance documentation: https://docs.beefy.finance/moo/

Beefy

MetaMask

Binance Chain Wallet

Welcome to Beefy Finance's Community channel aggregated by CoinMarketCap.

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

XPR Network

StaFi

Student Coin

Aura Finance

Katana Inu

AVINOC

Keep3rV1

GameGPT

UniLend

dogwifhat

Lends

Hachi

Scotty The Ai

Octopus Network

Keep3rV1 is a decentralized platform designed to facilitate the coordination between projects that need to source outside development operations and those who can provide those required services. Essentially, the project serves as a job board that facilitates the interaction between job posters, such as decentralized finance protocols, and job executors, known as Keepers. The tasks performed by Keepers range from submitting and calling transactions on-chain to completing complex operations off-chain. Keep3rV1 uses an ERC-20 token, KP3R, for governance and to provide rewards to Keepers.

The project was first announced on Oct. 22, 2020. It launched on the Ethereum mainnet in beta mode on Oct. 28, 2020.

C.R.E.A.M Finance is a decentralized  DeFi lending protocol for individuals, institutions and protocols to access financial services. Part of the yearn.finance ecosystem, C.R.E.A.M. Finance is a permissionless, open source and blockchain agnostic protocol serving users on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain Polygon and Fantom.

Users who are passively holding Ether or wBTC can deposit their assets on C.R.E.A.M. to earn yield, similar to a traditional savings account. For more information visit https://app.cream.finance/.

The C.R.E.A.M. Finance protocol was created as a Compound Finance fork.

C.R.E.A.M Finance is open-source, permissionless, blockchain-agnostic and offers yield farming rewards to its users in order to inclusively develop its network.

The project (which stands for Crypto Runs Everything Around Me) was launched unexpectedly on the Ethereum network on Aug. 3, 2020 through the YOLO liquidity pool. In September 2020 it went live on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

The CREAM token allows users to lend, borrow, stake assets and help govern the network, allowing them to vote on assets to support or delist.

Cream Finance

Alpaca Finance

QuickSwap [Old]

Venus is an algorithmic money market and synthetic stablecoin protocol launched exclusively on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

The protocol introduces a simple-to-use crypto asset lending and borrowing solution to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, enabling users to directly borrow against collateral at high speed while losing less to transaction fees. In addition, Venus allows users to mint VAI stablecoins on-demand within seconds by posting at least 200% collateral to the Venus smart contract.

VAI tokens are synthetic BEP-20 token assets that are pegged to the value of one U.S. dollar (USD), whereas XVS tokens are also BEP-20-based, but are instead used for governance of the Venus protocol, and can be used to vote on adjustments—including adding new collateral types, changing parameters and organizing product improvements.

The governance of the protocol is entirely controlled by XVS community members, since the Venus founders, team members and other advisors do have any XVS token allocations.

Venus

Harvest Finance

Yearn.finance is an aggregator service for decentralized finance (DeFi) investors, using automation to allow them to maximize profits from yield farming.

Its goal is to simplify the ever-expanding DeFi space for investors who are not technically minded or who wish to interact in a less committal manner than serious traders.

Launched in February 2020, the service, formerly known as iEarn, has seen huge growth in recent months as new products debuted and developers released in-house token YFI.

yearn.finance

DFI.MONEY, also known as YFII, is a fork of popular decentralized finance (DeFi) aggregator platform yearn.finance (YFI).

Launched in July 2020, it aims to optimize returns for DeFi investors while adhering to changes proposed in an upgrade plan called YIP-8.

In addition to protocol changes, DFI.MONEY has also released new products, chief among which, the Vault, it describes as its “killer product.”

The native token of DFI.MONEY is YFII, a fixed-supply token which liquidity providers earn in accordance with their network interaction.

DFI.Money

Launched in 2020, Dego Finance is a decentralized ecosystem that offers a diverse combination of non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) tools. It is an independent, open NFT ecosystem.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Dego Finance.

Any user is allowed to launch an NFT and initiate mining, auctions and trading, covering the entire lifecycle of the product. Dego’s NFT protocol is a cross-chain, second-layer infrastructure for Blockchain projects that can be leveraged for user acquisition and token distribution.

Dego uses a modular combination design concept that combines various elements of a product to form subsystems with specific functions.

Dego Finance

Kava Lend is a decentralized money market built on the Kava Platform that enables the lending and borrowing of cross-chain assets. Kava Lend supports supply-side deposits for BTC, XRP, BNB, BUSD, and USDX. The platform will allow overcollateralized borrowing for supported assets.

Kava Lend

Unifi Protocol DAO

Stella is the leveraged strategies protocol with 0% cost to borrow. Stella’s mission is to redefine how leveraged DeFi works. DeFi needs a good leverage system in order to drive more usages on DEXes and money markets, the fundamental building blocks of DeFi. With growing usages on these fundamentals, more protocols and new innovations can arise and tap into the deep liquidity and robust foundation.

Stella strives to become the go-to destination for DeFi users to access maximum yield potential. Whatever on-chain strategies that users want to use on leverage (and safe enough to be supported), then Stella will support at 0% cost to borrow.

The protocol is made up of two parts: Stella Strategy and Stella Lend.

Stella Strategy: Users can access multiple selections of leveraged strategies with 0% borrowing interest for the first time and get yields on leverage.

Stella Lend: Lenders can lend assets to the lending pools on Stella and get real yields. Yields generated from Stella Strategy are shared to lenders.

Stella

Balancer is an automated market maker (AMM) that was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and launched in March 2020. It was able to raise a $3M seed round by Placeholder and Accomplice. Balancer protocol functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio, price sensor and liquidity provider. It allows users to earn profits through its recently introduced token ($BAL) by contributing to customizable liquidity pools.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Balancer(https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-balancer.

The protocol operates a few types of pools:

Private pools give the owner governance over the pool, and make the person the sole contributor of liquidity to the pool. Also, all the parameters are mutable by the owner.

Shared pools are for those who want to become liquidity providers (LPs). The LPs are rewarded with the Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs).

Smart pools are similar to private pools but are controlled by a smart contract. They also reward using BPTs and allow anyone to contribute liquidity to the pool.

Balancer

Badger DAO is an open-source, decentralized automated organization that is dedicated to building products and infrastructure of simplifying the use of Bitcoin (BTC) as collateral across many smart contract platforms.

The platform is a shared space where the developers, known as Badge Builders, have the ability to collaborate and implement Bitcoin as collateral to as many blockchains as possible. A developer can earn a percentage of the fees and BADGER tokens from the developer mining pool for every implementation. The mainnet was launched on December 3, 2020.

A builder can be a single developer, a group of developers, or even a company. There are no fixed obligations to participation requirements, and anyone can create. The pillars of Badger DAO include the Badger Builders, the community-created products, the Dedicated Badger Operations team, the fairly initial distribution of the BADGER tokens for governance and the fact that all of the code is open-sourced.

Badger DAO

BarnBridge, founded in 2019, is a protocol for tokenizing risks. It was launched in September 2020. BarnBridge is a sort of decentralized finance (DeFi) lego for creating tradeable tokens that expose a consumer to market volatility. As of March 2021, the platform is still in an early stage of launch.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Quant.

BarnBridge is a project that expands the functionality of DeFi to make it more flexible and efficient. By tokenizing market fluctuations and exposure to risks, it can reduce volatility for conservative investors or increase it for daytraders. BarnBridge enables traditional risk management tools and fixed income instruments on the DeFi market. The main focus is dividing cryptocurrency risks into tranches so market participants, depending on their risk profile, can invest in different products or assets.

BarnBridge

BurgerCities aims to create a unified and standardized metaverse world of Web3 via integrating DeFi, NFT to the wider Metaverse.
In this world, users could carry out daily events such as social, gaming, etc. Meanwhile, they could experience DeFi and NFT functions with their own avatars such as trading, staking, NFT exhibitions or Gamefi, etc.

BurgerCities

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that is able to take real-world data and supply it to on-chain applications, while also connecting APIs to smart-contracts to facilitate the exchange of information between on-chain and off-chain data sources.

By supplying reputable, verifiable real-world data to blockchains, Band Protocol unlocks a range of new use cases for developers to explore — since they can now use any type of real-world data as part of their decentralized application (DApp) logic, including sports, weather, random numbers, price feed data and more.

Band Protocol initially launched as an ERC-20 project on the Ethereum blockchain in September 2019, but transitioned to the Cosmos network in June 2020 with the release of Band Protocol 2.0. The new protocol is built on BandChain using the Cosmos SDK. Oracle nodes on BandChain not only relay data but are also involved in block production/validation, giving them a dual role.

BAND is the native token of the Band Protocol ecosystem and is used as collateral by validators involved in fulfilling data requests, as well as the main medium of exchange on BandChain — being used to paying for private data.

Band Protocol

Convex Finance is a DeFi protocol that allows Curve liquidity providersto earn a share of trading fees on Curve without staking liquidity there. Instead, LPs can stake with Convex and receive boosted CRV and liquidity mining rewards. This provides CRV stakers with better capital efficiency and positions Convex Finance as an important player in the Curve wars.

Convex has entered a competitive race to obtain as much control as possible of the Curve Finance stablecoin exchange. The more CRV tokens a protocol has, the more influence it has over interest rates on Curve, which is the largest DEX in the world by TVL. Consequently, the “Curve wars” are an ongoing race for influence over what is probably the most important protocol in DeFi.

Convex Finance

Bella Protocol is a platform that provides a suite of DeFi products designed to make crypto banking simpler and more accessible. The protocol aims to create a better user experience by eliminating the high fee and slow transaction issues that can affect some blockchain platforms — while simultaneously improving the user experience through its simplified DeFi smart portal.

Bella's smart pool feature allows users to access the best yields available in the DeFi market, while benefiting from nearly zero gas fees — since these are directly subsidized by the platform.

The project launched in September 2020 as the first project distributed via Binance’s Launchpool platform, and has secured investments from several prominent firms, including Arrington XRP Capital and Ledger Capital.

The protocol was built by the ARPA team, a blockchain-based layer 2 solution for privacy-preserving computation. The BEL token is an essential component of the Bella Protocol ecosystem and serves as both a reward token that allows holders to participate in the governance of the platform.

BEL can be used to farm fee rewards from the network, get exclusive discounts on Bella protocol products (such as its robo-advisor tool), and for earning staking rewards.