Farming and dumping is a race to the bottom for most LPs, particularly the retail trader who wants to find new farms with excessive emissions and absurdly high APRs. These types of farms get diluted within a week, at best, or rug your funds, at worst.

I’m sharing a simple framework and checklist for allocating your capital effectively to earn good tokens and yield:

• Ecosystem - An ecosystem that is well capitalized, has a treasury for grants/developer growth, wallet infrastructure, and easy access to fiat will likely grow and sustain momentum in a world overloaded by way too many blockchains.

• Security - Thoroughly audited and battle tested contracts are out there, and while exploits still occur, it’s far less frequent and there are plenty of resources available to avoid losing your funds to rogue devs or bad actors.

• Team - All teams should make themselves available to questions, should be transparent about their strategy for growth, and have a vision for what they are building and why their token is needed.

• Token - Why are you risking your capital to earn a token that is literally valueless? I am only farming points or tokens that I believe have a sustainable advantage or viable business model. Value comes from two primary things, in my opinion.

  • Token value capture from protocol fees

  • Combination of product market fit, a moat, and growth

Applying this framework can dramatically increase odds of success across all time frames. The highest upside can be from earning tokens from budding unicorns as those projects return ongoing rewards that continue to grow.

Here’s what I’m farming:

HyperEVM

• Kittenswap is a ve3,3 on HyperEVM where you can earn points that will lead to a veKITTEN airdrop. Combined with the loopedHype pool, you can earn double rewards.

• Stakedhype is a liquid staking protocol that you can combine with Hypurrfinance for double rewards (expected).

• Looped Hype allows depositors to max lend/borrow (loop) hype using Hyperliquid lending markets (see below).

• HypurrFinance is the first lending protocol on the HyperEVM and will likely do a retrospective airdrop.

Base

• Aerodrome is the most efficient and productive DEX in DeFi and the token can still be farmed by liquidity providers. 4/5 digit APRs in AERO are available for expert LPs (concentrated liquidity pools), and several full range pools are still offering attractive yields. The best part is the AERO token provides 4 years of capitalized protocol revenues for those that lock it and regularly vote each weekly epoch.

• Moonwell is a S-tier lending market where lenders and borrowers get paid in WELL. There is very good liquidity if you need leverage or would prefer to borrow assets for farming. Looping is also an option should you want to accumulate WELL faster.

• Arma by Giza is a stablecoin farming AI agent that automatically rotates capital across Base lending markets (Morpho, Seamless, Moonwell, Compound, Fluid, etc). They are offering a points program now, and will be releasing a governance token in the near future.

• 40Acres is a new veAERO and veVELO lending market. Users can borrow up to 15% of the value of their locked AERO or VELO and the loan will repay itself through voting rewards. Lenders can receive very good APRs on stablecoins based on the demand of the borrowers (as high as 45%).

Soneium

• ACS campaign - ASTR token is very valuable now as a farming token, but I am not going to want to bag hold this after the ACS campaign is over. Astar is giving away ~$3m in ASTR rewards for liquidity providers across various DeFi protocols on Soneium.

• Farms:

  • Velodrome is the top DEX on the Superchain in terms of product, swap efficiency, and token value capture. Earn VELO and ACS points in several pools.

  • Sonus is a Soneium specific ve3,3 that has upside. The product features with their rollout are decent and this seems worth a punt via farming tokens.

Berachain

• Earn BGT by providing liquidity in one of the many farms. BGT is the soulbound governance token that can be delegated (boosted) to a validator. Validators receive bribes from the various protocols to direct BGT emissions to the various protocol pools. Any BGT holder would receive a portion of these bribes. This is similar to ve3,3 with a ‘middleman’ (validator) deciding how to vote. There should be a lot of different ways to earn BGT in the near term, but currently you can only provide liquidity in the BEX.

• Swap on Ooga Booga for the best rates across the Berachain liquidity pools, and likely get an airdrop later.

Sonic

• I’m not farming anything, but have heard interesting things about Shadow, and Andre Cronje is back promoting DeFi experimentation. There’s also a new token airdrop coming for liquidity providers in the ecosystem.