My first 24 hours on MaxFi
I'm just a beginner at this and barely know what I'm doing, and I'm already getting 500% APY. This appears to be a very limited-time opportunity, and I'm going to walk through exactly what actions I took today, in real time, to set up my portfolio and get these earnings. This is literally my first 24 hours on MaxFi, not even knowing what I'm doing, and there's much more potential than this. These are my actual positions, and I didn't even set them up very well. I just took USDG, which is a stablecoin on Robinhood chain, and threw it into some random pairs. Some of my positions keep slipping out of range, where they're not earning, so today I'm following a bit better process. There are some better opportunities out there, and I'm going to show how I dive into those.
Even with my pretty newbie approach and being brand new to this, I still have, for example, a $100 position that is earning $3.88 a day. Incredible. And that's on a meme coin. Another position is earning a bit less, but it's on a much more stable pair, wrapped ETH and USDG. Another one is earning higher. I'm looking and learning through all of this and documenting it every day, so if you want to make some money with DeFi on crypto, I'm sharing exactly how I'm doing it here.
What I want to do is create a new position, but first, a look at my Base positions too. Right now I have positions on Base, Arbitrum, and Robinhood. My Base positions are not earning nearly as much, and again, that is significantly a function of the pairs I set up. I'm going to need to swap some of these pairs out. Every time you go in and out of a pair, you have to pay Ethereum fees, which are significant on Robinhood, so picking the right pairs to go into and setting them up the right way is the big learning curve with this. That's why I'm documenting this every day and sharing what I'm learning.
Take my wrapped ETH/USDC pair: the price has fallen nicely into the middle of the range, so there's a good APR on it. On my Solana/USDC pair, Solana dropped when I put the USDC in at $100, so it's actually performing pretty nicely right in the middle, and I'm getting good earnings. My USDC/VVV position is working, the LINK pair is working, and my Zora position slipped out yesterday, but it's printing today. So there are a couple of positions that have slipped out of range and slowed me down, but here's what I'm doing today.
Setting up a Dell stock pool on Robinhood chain
I'm going to set up a new position. Right now I hear that Dell is hot, and what's really unique on Robinhood is that you can set up a position with stocks against crypto or stablecoins. Robinhood, to me, seems to be the very hot chain right now. There's also a Discord server for MaxFi. If you want to join MaxFi, you can use my referral link at jerrybanfield.com/maxfi. I do get a 3% commission, which comes out of MaxFi's percentage, not yours. I really appreciate that, and it helps me make these videos.
What I wanted to find was where the Dell stock is, so I searched for Dell, and there's a single USDG-Dell pool. I want to get in on this Dell pool, so I picked it and scrolled all the way down to the bottom. What I want to do this time is put two sides in. In the past, I was just putting in one side. If I want to put in, say, a 100 USDG position, I'm going to need enough Dell to match it, and I don't actually have any Dell in my wallet, so I'd need to swap for some Dell myself first, about $100 worth, in order to set this up. With a stock, I can get away with putting in a more aggressive, tight range, and then I can put a rebalance delay on it as well to jump back into range if I want.
So first I needed to buy some Dell. I went into the wallet, picked my USDG, and picked Dell, which is exactly how the fees are actually being earned here, making sure to select Robinhood Dell so I was buying the right thing. I put $100 in, and the swap isn't even available in my region, which is ridiculous. That's what's "nice" about something that says it's DeFi but then isn't actually available in my region: it's filtering me based on being in the US. I'd need to use a VPN in MetaMask to even make this swap.
What I can do instead is a single-sided position on this: put in a hundred, set it to aggressive, and use a close range width so it starts very close to the price. Then as soon as the price moves, it swaps back and forth a little, and I can rebalance it to move closer and closer to the price if it's further away, and that will adjust. So I'm starting off this way, and I'll have to figure out how to swap, or use a VPN or something, later. That's also why there's a big opportunity here: people who want to buy Dell can't even do it in the US, which is ridiculous, and that's why these fees are getting earned. I set a 2% range width with a rebalance delay of about three hours and just threw a hundred into this. It would be much better to have it two-sided with both tokens, because then you can just kind of stay in the middle of the range and move around with each of them, but I started with this aggressive 2% width to get really close to the price and rebalance if it's off.
Approvals, spending caps, and network fees
I clicked the Approve button, and it cost 23 cents to approve the token. I set a spending cap of a thousand so I don't have to keep paying the network fees over and over again; you have to approve the token, so I put a higher spending cap on it. It is better to do bigger positions if you can, because small positions get wrecked by having to pay fees repeatedly. So I bumped my Dell position up to 200, because when I deposit this, I'm going to have to pay a $3.20 ETH fee. The fees are high right now, which is just ridiculous. It really made sense to put in an even larger position, because I'm literally losing 1% just putting this in. But with the 2% range width, I'll be pretty close to the price and I should get to earning. What's cool is that I can withdraw from a position later and pull that out, but the network fees are high right now, so it's ideal to try and set up your pools when they're low. The network fees were much, much lower yesterday when I set all this up, like 30 or 40 cents. It goes back and forth based on whatever Robinhood chain is doing.
So I cancelled that transaction and put an even bigger position in, 300, given the fees. Every time you get in and get out, you rack up fees, so you don't want to be getting in and out repeatedly. I clicked Deposit and Earn again, and this time it would take out 300 with a network fee of $2.84. Basically, you're just stuck paying all of this right now if you want to do anything. I clicked Confirm, even though this fee is a little ridiculous. What I'll do going forward is wait until the fees are lower, because when the fees are lower you can test out a lot of different positions and different swaps, and when the fees are higher you can't.
Now I've got a position. For some reason it put the price way up at 438, even though I set the range at 2%. It will automatically rebalance in three hours if the price is still further away and move the range in there, and if the price of Dell drops a little, it will move into range. Maybe I didn't articulate that perfectly, but whatever, I've got the position set up now. If you want to change things like this, the fees are usually pretty cheap. I could change my range, but every single change is a transaction, and with fees high right now it's 10 cents just to change your range, so keep that in mind with each of these. If you want to talk through any of this with me, you can chat with me.
What is amazing, though, is that MaxFi pays the automatic rebalancing fees, which is spectacular, because those fees, especially at a time like this, can add up dramatically. That's one of the reasons I use MaxFi. And when they do rebalance, they have a nice system set up so that you don't lose as much to impermanent loss. It's pretty amazing how much this is printing right now: $12 in earnings, more than a single percent in a single day, even with a pretty newbie setup. For the next video, I'm going to need to go in and show how I actually buy some of these.
Swapping into wrapped ETH for a meme coin pair
If you are able to get in range, what's cool is you can then accumulate some of these tokens just by providing liquidity. If the price moves down, you'll just start loading up on them, and then you can withdraw. For example, I didn't have any wrapped ETH, so I was able to swap it out of my existing positions. There are meme coins on here that can print a lot of money as well. Under Earn, there's a meme coin called CashCat that's been printing pretty well, and it's only available as a wrapped ETH pair. So in order to get into this, I would need to buy both CashCat and wrapped ETH. On Robinhood, I'd probably need to first go from USDG into WETH, watching to select the Robinhood version of the token. I could buy about a hundred dollars in wrapped ETH, but I'm going to lose at least a percent on the slippage on this.
Buying wrapped ETH and CashCat
Plus, I then have to pay the transaction fees on that swap as well. So I might buy maybe $300 worth of wrapped ETH and lose a few dollars in fees. I turned the slippage down a little bit, because I don't want to slip that much, and there was only a tiny amount of price impact, so I can get this wrapped ETH. Let's try it today: I'm setting up some wrapped ETH positions. I know Blockchain Pill has been printing on CashCat, so I'm going to give that a try. I went through and did the swap, the USDG went out, and the wrapped ETH landed in my account a second later. Then I can go ahead and swap the wrapped ETH. Once I have the wrapped ETH on Robinhood chain, I can filter the wallet to just Robinhood so I don't have to see the other chains.
With the wrapped ETH in hand, I went to CashCat. Now, this is a meme coin, so this is certainly going to be more risky. I meant to take a hundred dollars, and whoops, my first entry was a lot of wrapped ETH. That's a lot of wrapped ETH. I put the slippage tolerance down, because I don't want to slip that much, and I had to enter the amount in terms of ETH, so I made it about 0.045 ETH, or 0.044, to see if I could get about a hundred dollars or so in CashCat. There's a little bit of slippage on it that I lose, about 0.5%, and then I swapped. Then I'll be able to set up my wrapped ETH/CashCat position. Notice, though, that I am losing money every single time I swap, which is why I tried to get into some of these pools single-sided: if I can just slip in that way, I don't have to deal with the swap losses, but then I'm not earning nearly as many fees.
Setting the CashCat range and rebalance delay
Now I've got the CashCat and the wrapped ETH. I refreshed the page, went back, and found CashCat again. I'm using the 0.3% fee pool here, although the 1% pool is going to make a lot more. I set it to max CashCat, which puts my wrapped ETH in too, and for the range on this one I could go aggressive. For the rebalance delay, I first put it down to four hours. If you go out of range, every time you rebalance you can lose some, but if you're not in range, you're not earning. Since this one is a meme coin, maybe a 5% range would be a little better, with 24 hours. That way, if it gets nuts, the longer your rebalance delay, the more time you have to decide whether this is what you want to do. If the meme coin suddenly goes to zero and you don't rebalance right away, that could help you get out of a bad position. In the end, I'm going to try aggressive on this one, with a 2% range width and a rebalance delay of about four hours, so I get back in position quickly.
I clicked Deposit and Earn, expecting to pay a big fee again, and it was only 82 cents on this one, which is interesting. The fees had dropped significantly lower on that transaction. Then I went up to my positions. My USDG position is in there at 300, sitting out of range, which is not ideal. And then the CashCat position. Dang. What is happening with this thing? My CashCat position is already moving. I just put the CashCat in right now, and it has already started earning fees immediately. This is what's nice: if you jump right into the middle of the pool, you can earn fees right away, and it's earning a lot. Whereas with the Dell position, where I'm just sitting out of range, I'm not earning any fees.
If I do want to withdraw that Dell position, I only have to pay about 36 cents to pull it out. Then I may need to get on a VPN to swap for Dell and drop the Dell in there to get the two-sided position, or use something besides MetaMask to swap Dell. Maybe I could send it to Uniswap or something to swap for Dell directly. I'll do that in a future video in my Crypto Reviews playlist, but for now, these are my positions.
Watching the portfolio yield jump
Right now the portfolio yield is based on what I'm currently earning, and I just jumped into that CashCat position, so that's cranked up my earnings. I've literally made one cent already while I've been talking. That's really fast. This is set up right now to make a little less than 10%, maybe 7 or 8%, of my entire position value literally in a day. That's crazy. So you've got to find the best pools that are really getting swapped hard on here, and once you do that, in my experience you can make some serious money. If you want to talk through how to set all this up, you can schedule a call with me.
Then I looked at the portfolio yield off CashCat again. Dude, this is so crazy. Holy crap, I've literally made seven cents while I've been talking. CashCat alone has skyrocketed my entire portfolio up.
So the last thing to conclude from here: if you have positions that aren't doing much, pull those positions out, because they're essentially wasting your liquidity, and then get into positions that are maximizing your liquidity. This is day one of my journey with MaxFi, and I'm going to keep documenting this and see how it goes from here.