xToken.market update and performance - 1st March 2021
A brief review of xAAVEa and xSNXa performance and a recap of xToken news.
Introduction
I’m a big fan of xToken.market products. Robo management of tokens that require active staking. They save me time, mental energy and gas.
I did a blog introducing them a month ago, but there has been lots of activity down in xToken land:
The oldest values (xKNCa/b) migrated to new homes (With a gas subsidy).
A new portal was launched for the mandated voting in the underlying tokens
x1Inch a/b was launched with liquidity on 1Inch.
A new mascot was launched (mech soon)
$XTK was launched as the protocol governance token, with a retroactive dispersion to xToken users / LP’s and it’s already on coingecko.
Liquidity mining was launched on 7 pool 1’s and a single pool 2.
All this activity has resulted in impressive growth in AUM (Oh we also got a new Dune dashboard from @donkhali and a vfat has added xToken the farming calculator):
Fund performance
AAVE
I’ve been tracking the coingecko prices of (the available) xSNXa and xAAVEa/c for a while so I thought I would share my insights (no prices on the other xTokens yet).
xAAVA a/b has been running since early December and the chart looks like this:
Overall, the vaults appear to have lagged the native token, which shouldn’t really be the case. I think that this is simply an artefact of the thin markets on the balancer pools which means that the recorded price can drift away from the issue / redeem values (see my last blog for more discussion)
When we look at the last month’s data (when we should have more liquidity / trade volume), we see a slight positive effect of the vault compared to holding the native token.
So, for the moment I’m happy that xAAVE is doing what I want it to do i.e. generate extra income compared to holding AAVE.
SNX
SNX has been running since October and as the staking of SNX is much more involved the strategy is also more complex (Stake SNC, mint sUSD, Hedge with ETH and Robo tokenset, manage debt ratio weekly…). This means it’s been the most popular xToken vault with over $5 M AUV.
Since its inception, the comparison with native SNX and aSNX looks like this with xSNXa generating an impressive +26% yield compared to Hodl in 4 months. This is higher than expected from pure SNX staking yield and is a result of the hedging turning a profit.
Note, that as with the xAAVE tokens, aSNX price data is limited as most users interact with the AAVE contracts directly, so aavescan.com or app.aave.com showing ~1.8% over the last 30 days may be a better metric for lending SNX.
Over 30 days, both the xSNXa and aSNX show a slight improvement over the native token, which is exactly what we would expect.
Final Thoughts
I like the passive hands-off nature of using xTokens, I don’t think I’ll ever hold enough SNX to make it worth my while to learn how to (and pay gas for) staking. For the other products the frequent harvesting to auto compound the staking rewards is a bonus compared to self staking and the need to complete the required transactions.
The recent $XTK farming of the LP tokens makes holding xTokens an obvious way to have exposure to the governance tokens (and ETH) and generate some income. However, I think even after the liquidity mining ends, there will be a few people sticking around to enjoy effortless staking.
Disclosure and Disclaimer
I’m a long term investor in crypto currencies including DeFi. I am an active member of the INDEXcoop which manages the $DPI fund. I have been holding a number of xToken products and $XTK.
This is not financial advice, all investments are risky, crypto investments are riskier than most. Do your own research. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose.
@over-analyser on twitter