Convex Finance | Stake DAO | Pendle

• Convex Finance is a yield optimizer built for users of Curve Finance, one of DeFi's largest decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Users can lock CRV, Curve's native token, to receive fees from the protocol, access voting rights, and boost the rewards sent to the platform's trading pools. In July, there was a big increase in the amount of CRV locked by Convex Finance, but in the last few months, this number has remained relatively steady now at 416M. Even though this number did not go up a lot the total share of CRV locked through Convex increased, as the overall amount of CRV locked decreased. The total share increased to 45.6%, approaching the high in August 2022 when the share was at 48.9%.

• Like locked CRV, locked CVX, Convex's native token, offers boosted rewards. Although the CRV locked did not increase much, the amount of locked CVX decreased, caused by users move to stake CVX instead (staked CVX confers lesser rewards than locked CVX, but comes with the flexibility of being able to unstake at any time). This caused the number of CRV locked per CVX locked to increase to high of 9.8. Recently the number of CVX locked seems to be increasing again, current value is at 9.18.

• Looking at the total value locked (TVL) of Convex Finance, there's been a large drop from the $20B high in 2022, but still the protocol accounts for $1.16B in TVL, across multiple chains, remaining one of the top DeFi protocols on Ethereum, according to DefiLlama.

• While the yield aggregators building on top of Curve fight to accumulate as much veCRV boost as possible, the market saw a major update as Stake DAO allowed veCRV holders to delegate their boost to Stake DAO in exchange for revenue sharing. This lead to Curve's founder, Michael Egorov, delegating 50M veCRV boost to Stake DAO, allowing the platform to exceed 20% market share in the veCRV boost market, and therefore increasing the competitiveness of the yields available on the platform.

• Stake DAO then updated its OnlyBoost formula to account for new market conditions. Thanks to this update, OnlyBoost pools aggregate boosts of Stake DAO, Convex, and Egorov, therefore leveraging 70% of the boost supply and providing yields 20-40% higher than anywhere else on average for Curve liquidity providers (LPs).

• As a result of this update, OnlyBoost successfully manages to achieve the best APY while providing liquidity on Curve pools. This is done by design since the OnlyBoost contract deposits using either Stake DAO and Michael's boost, or via Convex, based on which is the most efficient.

• Pendle is a yield trading protocol which, at nearly $4B in TVL, leads DeFiLlama's yield protocol rankings. Pendle's yield rate on Ethereum shows significant volatility, with the average implied APY ranging from around 4% to over 36% over the past year. The yield rate has dropped by 13% in the past 12 days.

• Pendle's user count on Ethereum reached a monthly high of 8.3K earlier this year and has been in a downtrend since then.