Disclaimer: This is not financial advice, and you should always do your own research before investing

With the broader market on a downtrend, there has been opportunity to identify strong themes and tokens which have shown strength amidst the sea of red. Today I’ll discuss two strong DeFi tokens that have held up relatively well: $VADER & The Redacted Cartel’s $BTRFLY.

$VADER

Vader is a liquidity protocol that uses synthetic assets and their native stablecoin USDV to power their automated market maker (AMM). Many on crypto twitter have begun accumulating VADER over the past two weeks, and for good reason. This protocol brings about a huge paradigm shift to the value of AMM governance tokens and the ownership of liquidity.

There are existing AMM governance tokens like $UNI or $DyDx, but their value is almost purely speculative. There isn’t a clear way for value generated by these protocols to flow back into their respective governance tokens, because these protocols operate on rented liquidity from liquidity providers (LPs). These LPs, not the governance token owners, rake in all of the revenue made by the protocol trading fees.

OlympusDAO has popularized the idea of protocol-owned liquidity (POL). This prevents market downturns from causing LPs to simply remove their liquidity, causing more volatility. But Vader combines this idea of POL with the revenue generating model of an AMM. This is game changing since $VADER holders can not only vote on protocol features, but also share the protocol’s revenue directly as opposed to something like $UNI.

$BTRFLY

BTRFLY is an Olympus fork but not with the same premise. $OHM seeks to create a DeFi reserve bank that represents a store of value, while $BTRFLY is creating a yield aggregation DAO built on the Curve ecosystem. This is a more speculative play than $VADER, but one you can stake for much higher APY which reduces the risk over time.

This isn’t just another low-effort OHM fork with insane APY. They seek to become a voting-efficiency-as-service token with all the CRV governance tokens in their treasury, aiming to compete in the Curve wars. Curve is the largest liquidity ecosystem in DeFi with a long-lasting, effective governance system. On a side note, I’ll be picking up $CVX as an associated long-term DeFi play alongside $BTRFLY.

$VADER Links

Website: https://www.vaderprotocol.io/

Chart:https://www.defined.fi/eth/0x452c60e1e3ae0965cd27db1c7b3a525d197ca0aa?cache=cdcd9

$BTRFLY Links

Website: https://www.redactedcartel.xyz/

Chart: https://www.dextools.io/app/ether/pair-explorer/0xdf9ab3c649005ebfdf682d2302ca1f673e0d37a2

Gitbook: https://redacted-cartel.gitbook.io/redacted/welcome-to-the-cartel/perennial-usdbtrfly-thesis (edited)