Yield farming app accumulates $12M TVL 2 weeks after launch

A new yield farm­ing app called Ori­gin Ether has accu­mu­lat­ed over $12 mil­lion in total val­ue locked (TVL) just 14 days after launch, accord­ing to data from blockchain ana­lyt­ics plat­form DefiLla­ma. TVL is a met­ric that mea­sures the dol­lar val­ue of assets inside an app’s smart contracts.

The app was launched on May 16, accord­ing to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the devel­op­ment team. DefiLla­ma data shows the app already had $793,000 locked inside its con­tracts before the launch, which team mem­bers or oth­er ear­ly part­ners may have supplied.

Once the pub­lic launch occurred on May 16, deposits to Ori­gin Ether (OETH) rapid­ly accu­mu­lat­ed, lead­ing to a TVL of over $13 mil­lion by May 30. This is a gain of approx­i­mate­ly $12.6 mil­lion over 14 days.

Accord­ing to the app’s offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion, Ori­gin Ether gen­er­ates yield from Ether (ETH) by deposit­ing it into mul­ti­ple liq­uid stak­ing and decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) pro­to­cols. Specif­i­cal­ly, it uti­lizes an algo­rith­mic mar­ket oper­a­tions strat­e­gy on Curve and Con­vex to max­i­mize returns. Before being deposit­ed to Curve and Con­vex, some of the ETH is con­vert­ed into liq­uid stak­ing deriv­a­tives, includ­ing Lido Staked Ether (stETH), Rock­et Pool Ether (rETH) and Frax Staked Ether (sfrx­ETH). The protocol’s doc­u­men­ta­tion states that this allows users to gain addi­tion­al farm­ing rewards from these providers.

Relat­ed: Cel­sius adds over 428K stETH to Lido’s length­en­ing with­draw­al queue

Ether liq­uid stak­ing pro­to­cols allow ETH hold­ers to stake their coins with a net­work of providers in exchange for tokens rep­re­sent­ing those deposits. They have become more pop­u­lar as Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake con­sen­sus and enabled withdrawals. 

On May 1, DefiLla­ma report­ed that liq­uid stak­ing pro­to­cols had become the top DeFi cat­e­go­ry, sur­pass­ing the TVL of decen­tral­ized exchanges. On May 30, cross-chain bridg­ing pro­to­col Lay­erZe­ro part­nered with the Tenet net­work to increase the use of liq­uid stak­ing in the Cos­mos ecosystem.