Providing liquidity for stablecoin pairs is one of the best ways to generate real yield in DeFi today. But less volatility also means less opportunity.
Spot is a low volatility store of value that works by perpetual tranching. It was born out of the belief that a sufficiently stable decentralized flatcoin could eliminate inflation. The SPOT:USDC
LP position on Uniswap V3 exposes holders to limited volatility in exchange for higher sustainable yields. The pair outperforms over medium and long time horizons.
Period | APY | Volatility |
---|---|---|
180 days | N/A | N/A |
90 days | N/A | N/A |
60 days | N/A | N/A |
30 days | N/A | N/A |
14 days | N/A | N/A |
7 days | N/A | N/A |
Trading fees. Spot is a mean-reverting asset with a wider price distribution than dollar-pegged stablecoins. For this reason, providing SPOT/USDC liquidity generates much higher trading fees through arbitrage, resulting in higher APY’s.
A wider price distribution means there's more margin for gain when users buy under the mean and sell over the mean. Spot's average mean reversion cycle is 30 days.
Typically, high-yield stablecoin programs rely on demand for leverage to deliver yields. Borrowers pay interest on their loans and this interest is passed over to lenders. But demand for leverage disappears in bear markets, causing yields to disappear. Because Spot's liquidity provisioning yield is harvested from price volatility it can persist through sideways markets.
Spot's fees deliver through sideways markets because they are generated from natural volatility. Fees generated by lending only deliver high yields in "up-only" markets.
Spot features a "bend don't break" design. That is to say, when faced with extreme market conditions, the system becomes temporarily more volatile rather than triggering bank-runs, death-spiral-minting, insolvency, or cascading liquidations.
Spot becomes temporarily more volatile in extreme market conditions, "bending" rather than "breaking"
Spot has been live for ~2 years and has functioned properly through heavy market conditions including 1) the unprecedented flash crash triggered by Trump's tariff announcements and 2) the period of persistant collateral asset selling through FTX's bankrupcy liquidations in 2024.
For an overview of the system read the SPOT primer.