The Optimist #55
Discover DEFI on the Superchain => 🔵Base, 🟣Ink, 💿Soneium, 🔴OP Mainnet & more.
Thank you fellow readers to continue reading my research about Defi on the Optimism Superchain.
If you missed the previous newsletter, it’s just one click away from you HERE.
————— This Week Menu —————
🦸♂️ Weekly news on the Superchain
📈 Superchain Stats
🔵 Tokenized stablecoin yield products
Management funds like Blackrock or Franklin Templeton have been tokenizing their funds. You buy their token onchain in order to get exposed to the underlying strategy managed by these funds. Let’s discover how Midas, backed by Coinbase, tokenized stablecoin strategy accessible onchain.
🧠 Smart Money tracking with Nansen
🏈 Post of the Week
🦸♂️ Weekly News on the Superchain
🟠 BOB launched a 750k OP Grant campaign named BOB Rise Campaign, and just launched HybridBTC.pendle vault where user can earn BTC yield on Ethereum, built in partnership with @veda_labs
© Coinbase Ventures is launching the Base Ecosystem Group onchain on Echo.xyz created by Cobie (famous CT character). This group will allow public to access investment deal like the Base Eco System has been doing since inception
🔴 Moonwell & Morpho launched the 1st Optimized USDC vault on OP Mainnet, with the integration of Bridge (payment platform) & Optimism foundation. Users can use Moonwell Virtual Accounts to receive US Payment with Zero fees which can be directly deposited in this vault
🔵 Coinbase introduced “Verified Pools” using Uniswap V4 stack, built on Base. User who KYC, can access these whitelisted pools to trade onchain
💿 Line, the most famous messaging App in Japan with 200 million active users, is deploying 4x mini-Apps on Soneium (Sleepagotchi, Farm Frens, Moonveil, Pocket Mob)
🛢 Crude Oil ($WTI) is now available to trade onchain, on Avantis
🆔 Razer & Worldcoin partnered to deploy “Razer ID verified by World ID”, a secure, single sign-on, proof of human technology that will verify real human gamers for Razer ID
🟡 AAVE V3 is now live on CELO
💪 Zora is launching its $ ZORA coin in Spring 2025
💜 Bridging to INK & SONEIUM chains is now available on Jumper Exchange
Superchain Stats - 7D TVL growth Leaderboard
Very interesting top 5, and this is where the most interesting announcements have been made recently.
Source: https://defillama.com/chains/Superchain?minTvl=1000000&maxTvl=
🔵Tokenized stablecoin yield products
This week, I want to highlight a DeFi project I’ve been following since its inception: MIDAS. No affiliations, no hidden incentives—just sharing solid yield opportunities with you, as part of my eductional journey on Base & Ethereum.
1. What is Midas?
1.1 Introduction
Midas is a DeFi protocol on Ethereum & Base, designed to tokenize stablecoin yield products. The goal? Make financial products—typically reserved for institutional players—accessible to everyone.
Launched in March 2024 with an $8.75M funding round led by Framework & Blocktower, Midas introduced its first product: $mTBILL. This offers:
Exposure to US Treasury yields via $BUILD (Blackrock)
Regulatory-compliant yield distribution
Institutional-grade security
Full DeFi composability
Notably, Coinbase Ventures was also part of the investment round.
1.2 TVL
Midas has $32M TVL, with 80% on Ethereum mainnet. Growth has been organic, with no token incentives—always a good sign.
1.3 Product Line
Until February 2025, Midas had 3 main products (Ethereum & Base) with $18M TVL:
mTBILL → US Treasury yield exposure (like Blackrock’s $BUILD)
mBASIS → Crypto-denominated arbitrage via funding rates
mBTC → BTC lending rate access
In February, Midas introduced three new vaults (Ethereum-only), tracking delta-neutral DeFi crypto yields:
The following 3 products track delta-neutral DeFi crypto yields, but each of them use specific assets, protocols, risk level.
These vaults are professionally managed, with a proven track record in DeFi risk strategies.
mMEV: MEV Capital
MEV Capital is an on-chain liquidity provider and DeFi risk management firm, extracting value from decentralized markets since 2020.
mEDGE: EDGE Capital
Edge Capital is a leading market-neutral hedge fund and one of DeFi’s largest liquidity providers, managing capital for major institutional investors and crypto foundations
mRE7YIELD: RE7 Labs
Re7 Capital is an award-winning research-driven digital asset investment firm specialising in DeFi, alpha generation and risk management
2. Liquid Yield Token
$mMEV, $mEDGE & $mRE7YIELD are Liquid Yield Tokens (LYT)—fully transferable yield-bearing ERC-20 tokens.
By tokenizing yield strategies, Midas allows them to be used across DeFi, generating extra yield via lending/borrowing protocols.
Tokenization: mMEV gives you access to the underlying vault yield + ca nbe used in other Defi protocols such as lending/borrowing protocols 👇
Transparency: Fully on-chain, verifiable at any time
Redemption: 10% of vault assets remain liquid for redemptions at all times
Let’s look in details at the mMEV LYT.
3. mMEV in details
Link: https://midas.app/mmev
$mMEV is Midas' Liquid Yield Token managed by MEV Capital. It currently offers a 14-day average APY of 14.2%.
Using Nansen, we see that 80% of all $mMEV is held by just 5 wallets:
#1 → Liquidity deposited on Euler Finance
#3 → Deposited on Morpho Labs
1 private wallet holding 7% (also holds $750K mEDGE, both bought at vault launch)
3.1 Tokenization
You can buy mMEV on Ethereum Mainnet using $USDC, $USDT or $DAI. Currently $mMEV = 1.0132 $USDC. Gas fees on mainnet is quite cheap, so you can easily transact for less than 1$, especially during the week-end.
Rewards from the vaults are automatically compounded in your position on a weekly basis.
But what are the fees?
Management Fee: 0%
Performance Fee: 10% (currently waived)
Issuance Fee: 0%
Redemption Fee: 0.5% => So at 14.2% APY (or 13.3% APR), you need approximately 14 days of yield to break even (rewards = redemption fee)
3.2 Transparency
This will answer your main questions: Where are my funds being deposited? Is it safe?
On Midas website, you can access the wallet holding the funds deposited in the mMEV vault: https://debank.com/profile/0x8d4d699abf3044306008c6bea8e78632f999c281
And you can see where the funds are being split:
3.3 Redemption:
As explained above, 10% should be immediately available for redemption. So on a 10m$ TVL vault, there should be 1m$ available. But as shown on MIDAS screen, it seems that only 5% is available.
4. Defi composability
mMEV can be used on other Defi protocols such as:
4.1 Euler Finance
$mMEV is currently available on Euler Finance as seen previously, and you can do like this whale (Looping):
4.2 Morpho Labs
MEV Capital just launched its own pool mMEV/USDC:
4.3 Underlying risk
Like any DeFi product, $mMEV is not risk-free. You should consider:
Protocols exploits
Depeg risks
Hopefully, MEV Capital set the following risk mitigations:
Internal monitoring systems
Automated risk management
Direct communication with deployed protocols
Strategic partnerships for enhanced efficiency
And finally, in order to de-risk from Midas dependency, $mMEV is hard pegged at $1 but can be manually adjusted by MEV Capital
4.3 Midas USDC Vault
For lower-risk exposure, check the Midas $USDC Vault on Morpho.
Curated by Gauntlet → Optimizes yield via Midas collateral markets
Current TVL: $1M (with only $28K available liquidity)
10.3% APY (no $MORPHO incentives)
Conclusion
Stablecoin market cap continues to rise, even as the broader crypto market corrects.
RWA adoption is growing, with institutions hunting for higher yields than bonds.
Midas is positioning itself as a key player, combining compliance, transparency, and high-yield strategies.
By partnering with MEV Capital, Midas offers a higher-than-average stablecoin yield with institutional-grade risk management—accessible in just one click.
And remember: The higher the TVL, the more diversified and lower-risk these strategies become.
Stay Safu!
🤓 Smart Money tracking with Nansen
DACM is a liquid investment fund created in 2017. You can access more info about them here: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/digital-asset-capital-management#overview
DACM currently holds 30m$ worth of assets onchain, following all their wallets tracked by Nansen:
On 06/03 they received almost 23m $OX, valued now at around 190k$. DACM used Amber platform, a market making firm to twap $OX by block of 200$. Very interesting to see that this is the 2nd consecutive time we see this behavior of twapping low amount, but very often to accumulate a bag.
By using the “wallet profiler for token”, you can easily see when they buy, and what was their average price:
The small green dots are the buys
The bigger orange dot is when Amber sent the token back to DACM
Average buy price was around 0.008$, with an unrealized loss of 42%…ouch 🚑!
This fund holds 10m$ of $AAVE, 12m$ of stables, and is buying $OX…weird, no?
What is $OX?
$OX is the governance token of OX.fun, a Perp protocol built on Base, where you can trade pretty much everything (around 300 listed tokens, and 650 accepted colaterral asset).
Market cap (100% in circulation): 15m$
Open Interest: 9m$
Token available on 8 chains (Solana, Ethereum, Arbitrum, etc…)
Funny to see that their pinned tweet is about Zhu Su telling that he has a stake in this project and has now taken the Lead of OX.Fun. Observe the tweet date… it is matching the day when DACM bought $OX 🤣 Shu Zu acting as a perfect KOL!
The protocol business model is however very interesting, and reminds me the one from Rollbit, while being much more onchain aligned:
And already 30% of the total supply is already burnt:
Finally, using the PNL Leaderboard, it’s very interesting to see that the majority of holders who were in profit took 100% profit, while people with unrealized profit are in fact in unrealized loss:
Here are the list of people involved in this project I find on X:
Zhu Su: ex-funder of liquidated Three Arrow Capital (3AC)
Kyle Davies: ex-funder of liquidated Three Arrow Capital (3AC)
NFA, stay Safu!
The above analysis was made using Nansen platform that gives you unique data about onchain activities on EVM & Solana chains.
Save 10% by subscribing to a PIONEER plan using my referral link: http://nsn.ai/Subli
🏈 Post of the Week:
Remember that no matter the yield, it’ll never cover the price loss of an asset, never.
Disclaimer: Nothing in this content is financial advice. I may have some positions on the presented projects, however these articles are written in a non biais way so that you can make you own opinion out of it.
Do your own research before investing, and remember that Crypto is extremely volatile and risky. Be ready to loose everything you invest in.