Good day! Market has been boring last couple days, and looks like we will have a choppy week ahead going into Jackson Hole on the 26th. I just put a sticky note on my monitor saying “DONT OVER TRADE!!!” to remind myself don’t do anything stupid. Meanwhile, I have been comfortably farming in PERP and CANTO and today I will focus on the latter. Interested in earning 600%+ APR on your stablecoins? Keep reading.
Originally a fork of EVMOS, CANTO is an EVM compatible layer 1 built in Cosmos SDK. It claims to be a fully decentralized blockchain with no presale, no foundation, no vesting and no VCs. The project is lead by a group of contributors including DeFi OGs like @scott_lew_is who is also the co-founder of Defipulse and Slingshot. You can read more about CANTO here.
Before we continue, let me make this clear, trying a new chain is very risky, CANTO and its infrastructures haven’t been battle tested, and I am not trying to shill $CANTO here(I do own a very small amount), it is a micro cap, and liquidity is thin at the moment. However, there are some juicy yield farming opportunities and I do find the idea of offering core DeFi primitives as Free Public Infrastructure is experimental but an interesting idea.
Instead of relying on third party builders, CANTO has built the three fundamental DeFi primitives: Decentralized Exchange, Canto Lending Market and Canto Unit of Count($NOTE). CANTO is offering these services to its users for basically free, and none of these products will ever issue any governance token or charge fees.
Where existing protocols serve their community more similarly to a pay-by-hour private parking garage, Canto’s FPI intends to provide for its community in a manner more akin to free parking on a city street.
More detailed information can be found on their docs here, but I won’t get into much more technical aspects of CANTO, let’s bridge some fund over.
- Bridge
Right now you can bridge USDC, USDT or WETH from Ethereum Mainnet using CANTO’s own bridge interface or bridge ATOM to CANTO via IBC transfer(instructions can be found here). Before you start, ask your friend some $CANTO for gas or join CANTO discord, I am sure one of the community member willing to help. A simple swap usually costs you 0.05 $CANTO which is around 1.5 cents.
Since I don’t have much free capital on ETH mainnet, what I did was bridging from Arbitrum using across.io and then bridged WETH from mainnet to CANTO, here are the steps:
Before bridging assets to Canto, you will be prompted to generate a Canto public key for your Metamask wallet address. You will only need to do this once, per wallet address. This is so you can sign Cosmos transactions from that Metamask address. There is no interaction with private keys.
Select the token you would like to bridge and input the quantity. Quantities less than 1 must include a 0 in the ones place value (e.g.
0.99
).Confirm the approval transaction in your wallet to approve transfer of the asset to the bridge.
Sign the message in your wallet to confirm the transfer.
After successfully bridge to CANTO, you need to convert CANTO native assets into CANTO EVM assets in order to use all the dapps. It can be done via the convert page here. This entire bridging guide can also be found in the official doc here.
- DEX & Farming
To swap to other tokens, you have to use Slingshot for now, have to say the chat room on the swap page is pretty funny. After getting some other tokens, you can add LP here.
After adding LP, to start earning $CANTO rewards, you have to navigate to the lending page. Approve the LP pair, and stake your LP tokens. Once you finish that, on the up right corner you will find a button says “claim LM rewards”, that’s where your rewards will show, click on it and you will find a detailed breakdown, and also a button to claim your rewards. Here are the current APRs paid in $CANTO on Aug 21st:
CANTO/ATOM: 1,817%
CANTO/ETH: 1,687%
CANTO/NOTE: 1,259%
NOTE/USDC: 622%
NOTE/USDT: 629%
USDC: 9.33%
USDT: 19.6%
Couple things to keep in mind. NOTE token is an over-collateralized ERC-20 token soft pegged to $1 USD. It can only be borrowed from the lending market by depositing USDT, USDC and NOTE. The price of NOTE has been fluctuating since launch, as much as 30% above peg. Before buying, borrowing or LPing NOTE token, please consider the risk of depeg.
My current strategy on CANTO is farming the NOTE/USDT pair with a very small percentage of my portfolio, and then rotate the $CANTO rewards into the CANTO/ETH(or CANTO/NOTE if you don’t want to deal with ETH pa) farm.
I do think $CANTO might have some upside short term despite being super inflationary(but I still prefer farming $CANTO instead of buying big chunks). Even with 4 digits APRs, current TVL on CANTO is just a bit over $20M(growing fast tho). According to DUNE dashboard, only about 1,500 users bridged to CANTO from ETH mainnet, with more builders rapidly shipping products on CANTO, I can see this number easily 2x or 3x in a short period of time.
One project I am keeping a close eye on is FORTE, a modified Solidly fork developed by @0xfoobar, a well respected dev.
@cantoquant also did a thread on projects launching on CANTO, we are super early and a lot of thees are meme coins, many of them will rug(rip cantopepe), so please be very very cautious on where you put your hard earned $CANTO into. The best way to find new projects is by joining CANTO discord and check out the “canto native projects” channel.
I don’t think CANTO is anything groundbreaking, and I don’t think $CANTO will just 10x, not when ETH just dropped 25% last week. However, the yield farming opportunities here is too good for a degen to pass.