Ripe Brings Old School DeFi Farming to Robinhood Chain

In recent days, Robinhood Chain’s metrics are up and to the right. Transactions, volume, revenue, deploys, you name it.

Helping this surge is a growing field of native apps like Pons, Index, and Stocknet, all of which can be, or are explicitly designed to be, used with the L2’s blooming cast of tokenized stocks, e.g. NVDA, AAPL, SPCX, GOOGL, etc.

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Among these, one particular project making big waves today is letting users put their Robinhood Chain ecosystem tokens (both app and stock tokens) to work in old school DeFi yield farms that are reminiscent of 2020’s Yam Finance.

The project? Ripe Protocol. It’s a classic degen opp, and early on, so tread cautiously if you do explore. But even if you don’t, Ripe might revitalize Yam’s “food farms” style again, so it’s worth catching up on the basics in any case.

The Ripe 101

Ripe is a multi-collateral borrowing protocol.

Instead of siloed vaults per asset (i.e. the Maker model where 5 assets means 5 separate loans + 5 separate liquidation risks), Ripe is designed to let you deposit your whole portfolio, ETH, stablecoins, tokenized stocks, etc., and then borrow a single stablecoin, GREEN, against all of it at once.

Naturally, GREEN targets a $1 peg and burns on every repayment, while its yield-bearing version, sGREEN, auto-compounds protocol revenue for anyone who’d rather hold than actively manage a loan.

As for supported collateral types, Ripe currently accepts WETH plus the Robinhood-issued tokenized stocks NVDA, AAPL, SPCX, GOOGL, TSLA, and GME, each at a flat 70% loan-to-value and 7% borrow rate.

For example, you could deposit tokenized GME, borrow GREEN against it, and keep the stock’s upside without selling. This is precisely the sort of programmable finance around stocks that Robinhood Chain was built for.

Digging into the farms

Along with the borrowing side of things, Ripe is currently running RIPE token distributions across a set of protocol vaults and community farms, i.e. traditional liquidity mining.

You can find these farms on Ripe’s Earn page or alternatively, if you prefer a more nostalgic and detailed setup, through the new vfat.tools Ripe dashboard.

Many of the stated yields here are extremely juicy right now, but these APYs/APRs will fluctuate with the volatility of the RIPE price, so don’t consider the rates you see as ironclad at any given time.

The farms themselves are divided into two categories, protocol vaults and community farms.

Per vfat, the RIPE/NVDA LP (a.k.a. UNI-V2) farm and the RIPE farm are the highest yielding protocol vaults at the moment, nominally offering ~23,669% APR and ~8,423% APR respectively at the time of writing.

As for the community farms, these opps are where you can make single-sided deposits of popular Robinhood ecosystem assets like PONS, CASHCAT, STONKBROKER, etc. For instance, the sNET farm is presently offering ~3,211% APR with a nearly $5M TVL.

Of course, these are eye-popping rates that can’t stay this elevated forever, or can even effectively collapse overnight from a protocol bug as we saw with Yam back in the day.

As such, don’t treat these yields as a sure thing, and as always never deposit more than you can afford to lose. But if you’re feeling nostalgic for a new burst of classic DeFi liquidity mining on Robinhood Chain specifically, or if just want to stay current with the latest thing that’s catching fire on the L2 this week, these farms are hotspots to consider.