I Tried 149 Yield Farming Pools with Optimism: Here’s What I Learned

Can you find good yielding farms on Optimism? This is what I discovered during my research

This article is the culmination of my in-depth analysis and hands-on experiences in testing, trading, and yield farming within the Optimism ecosystem. It aims to highlight the nuances, strengths and potential pitfalls of various return opportunities.

From hidden gems to widely recognized pools, this journey has revealed an array of opportunities and challenges that are essential for anyone looking to navigate the Optimism DeFi landscape.

Optimism is a layer 2 (L2) blockchain built on Ethereum. Here’s a detailed explanation of how Optimism works, but essentially it’s used to improve the scalability and efficiency of Ethereum, enabling faster and cheaper transactions. As one of the most active L2s with a robust and thriving DeFi ecosystem, Optimism currently offers many attractive yield opportunities.

Uniswap v3 (Optimism) dominates the Optimism playing field in terms of trading volume market share, which is not surprising due to Uniswap’s DeFi dominance in general. Other notable multichain DEXs that run on Optimism include KyberSwap Elastic and Curve, then there are Optimism’s native DEXs Velodrome and Beethoven X. That’s not all, but we’ll come back to farming strategies later more advanced performance.

We will primarily focus on the Optimism Network’s yield opportunities on Uniswap v3 to familiarize ourselves with popular pairs, and then look at some higher risk/reward opportunities on other protocols.

As mentioned above, Uniswap is the dominant protocol on Optimism with significantly higher trading volume than its competitors and over $80 million in TVL. This makes it an ideal starting point.