Ape, meet BadgerDAO

So I knew today was going to be a bloodbath, as Bitcoin and Ethereum continued a twenty percent pullback that started two days ago. Everything was a sea of red across the board, and I’m actually pretty pleased with myself for not panicking. I threw all my cash at it, and ran out of dry powder yesterday, so I wound up making a trade on Missus’s BlockFi account, out of her DCA funds. Gotta BTFD, man. The price has already started recovering.

Friday night I was made aware of a newer DeFi project called BadgerDAO. It’s similar to other yield farm pools, such as SushiSwap or Harvest, but its focus is on wBTC. I spent about two hundred dollars in ETH gas fees, wrapping BTC, pulling funds out of Yearn’s wBTC vault and aping them into Badger.

My Ether Wallets, about half the size of my total BTC holdings.

As usual, I purchased first and tried to learn after. I put a small percentage into the pool before I pulled funds out of Yearn. Besides having to get my hands on wBTC, I had to add liquidity to the wBTC/BADGER Uniswap pool (via Zapper,) then stake the LP tokens in the Badger pool. Then I had to stake the Badger LP tokens to start earning BADGER itself. The APY is close to 500%. Once I saw that everything was working as planned, I went ahead and pulled a quarter of my Yearn position out and went in on the wBTC/BADGER Sushiswap pool. The APY is a bit less, but there seem to be some advantages to the Sushi pool that will come in handy later.

There’s a couple more things to mention about the Badger project. The LP mining pools, called Setts, are only about five weeks old. There’s a new product, called DIGG, that is some sort of rebasing token tied to the value of BTC. There’s only going to be a few hundred of them apparently, and they’re going to be issued based on a number of factors around BADGER staking.

I almosted aped my entire Yearn balance into Badger Saturday. The interest would be enough to replace my work salary, and I was very tempted to hop in. I managed to temper myself a bit before I did so, and this quarter position is a bit of a conservative position, if one can call degen yield farming “conservative”. If all goes well, I’ll probably liquidate my Yearn wBTC position completely and go all in.

The Badger contracts have been audited, they also have a $500,000 dev bounty as well. They’ve already got $600m AUM, and the devs aren’t anon, which is good. What I’ve seen so far is very positive. Still, there are black swans, and one thing that the Badger team has done is established an insurance fund with Nexus Mutual. Now one of the big concerns I’ve had with any third party service in crypto, such as BlockFi, is the risk of black swan events. What Nexus Mutual does is provides insurance policies. One takes out a policy, specifying the amount of ETH one needs coverage for, as well as the amount of time one needs the policy for. The policies are funded using Nexus’s token, with holders staking the other side of the cover. It’s pretty ingenious. One can buy policies for various defi projects including Badger, BlockFi, Celcius, and others.

Gas costs have been completely insane lately, especially last night when prices were plummeting. It’s put the brakes on some of what I wanted to do. Sixty dollars on a vault withdrawal is enough to make me pause, one-twenty is a hard no. Still, it probably would have been worth it to cash out from the bUSD vault into ETH when it was $900, but I just couldn’t bear to do it. I may reconsider if gas drops down to forty again. There’s going to be slippage issues if I don’t do it right.