Plaza has partnered with Aerodrome to enable independent price discovery of bondETH and levETH via trading on Aerodrome. As part of Season 2 rewards, Plaza is incentivizing providing liquidity to the bondETH/USDC and levETH/USDC pools on Aerodrome with 20 Plaza Points per $ of liquidity per day.

• levETH/USDC: https://aerodrome.finance/deposit?token0=0x091a5a1e3aa8b96ab0fb0bc217f5e60ec4c611a0&token1=0x833589fcd6edb6e08f4c7c32d4f71b54bda02913&type=100&chain0=8453&chain1=8453&factory=0x5e7BB104d84c7CB9B682AaC2F3d509f5F406809A

• bondETH/USDC: https://aerodrome.finance/deposit?token0=0x091a5abe6616e26268e5eecff256c2212fce2707&token1=0x833589fcd6edb6e08f4c7c32d4f71b54bda02913&type=50&chain0=8453&chain1=8453&factory=0x5e7BB104d84c7CB9B682AaC2F3d509f5F406809A

Here is a guide outlining the steps, considerations, and risks of LPing bondETH and levETH on Aerodrome.

What is Liquidity Providing (LPing) and Concentrated Liquidity?

Liquidity providing (LPing) is lending your tokens to help others trade. When you do this, you earn trading fees as a reward.

Concentrated liquidity is providing token liquidity only within a specific price range, allowing you to earn higher fees for trading volume in that range compared to general liquidity pools.

The Plaza incentivized pools on Aerodrome are concentrated liquidity pools.

Manual vs Automated

Monitoring and managing liquidity positions is an active job. For many liquidity providers, it is easier to use automated tools to ensure their liquidity stays in range. These tools generally charge a small fee.

The Automated Approach offers less precision for advanced users and introduces fees and contract risk to a third-party automation provider.

The Manual Approach requires active management and more steps, but offers more control and lower fees.

Either approach is great, and choose what is right for you.

The Automated Approach

We recommend vfat.io, but there are other tools available. You can simply search for “bondETH” or “levETH” on the Yield tab (ensure it’s the correct incentivized Plaza Pool), choose any deposit token, set a range, and select “Automate Rebalancing” to get the most out of your liquidity position.

VFAT users who provide liquidity to the levETH/USDC and bondETH/USDC pools on Aerodrome are eligible for 20 Plaza Points per $ per day.

Be mindful when setting the Max Slippage for rebalances. If you set it too low, your liquidity may not rebalance. If you set it too high, you can suffer significant losses during a rebalance. We recommend 0.5%.

The Manual Approach

Step 1: Choose Your Plaza Token (bondETH or levETH)

To provide liquidity to the bondETH/USDC and levETH/USDC pools on Aerodrome, you need both the Plaza token (bondETH or levETH) and USDC on Base. You are exposed to both the Plaza asset and USDC, so choose the Plaza asset that is best suited to your investment style and risk tolerance.

• bondETH is a high-yield bond backed by ETH that earns stable USDC yield. bondETH is generally less volatile than ETH and offers steadier returns.

• levETH is levered ETH without the risk of liquidation. levETH is generally more volatile than ETH with more potential upside.

Step 2: Get Your Plaza Token and USDC on Base

You can purchase bondETH and levETH on Aerodrome or Plaza using assets on Base. Reserve some ETH (~$1) for gas. Gas on Base is generally <$0.03 per transaction.

If you don’t have assets on Base, you can bridge ETH and other assets to Base via Stargate or Jumper.

Step 3: Know the Risks

Providing liquidity has some risks:

• Impermanent Loss: If the prices of tokens change significantly compared to each other, you might earn less than if you just held the tokens.

• Market Risk: Token prices can rise or fall quickly, affecting the value of your tokens.

Step 4: Set Your Concentrated Range

In concentrated liquidity pools, you select a specific price range:

• Wide Range: Your liquidity stays active longer, but you earn smaller fees per trade.

• Narrow Range: You earn higher fees per trade, but your liquidity may become inactive if prices move outside your range quickly.

Tip: Choose a narrower range (+/- 2%) if you think token prices will stay steady (like for bondETH). Choose a wider range (+/- 5%) if you expect more price movement (like for levETH).

Step 6: Staking Your LP vs. Leaving Your LP Unstaked

After providing liquidity, you have two choices:

• Staking: Locks your tokens to earn Aerodrome emissions. On Aerodrome, veAERO holders can vote (bribe) to direct AERO token emissions to liquidity pools. If there is an active bribe, you can stake to earn these emissions. You give up the majority of trading fees if you stake, so consider your expectations of trading volumes and fees versus the AERO emissions rate if staking is available.

• Unstaked: You earn trading fees every time someone trades against the pool while in your liquidity range.

Regardless of whether you leave your liquidity staked or unstaked, you will receive Plaza incentives for providing liquidity. You will see your Plaza Points on the Plaza UI.

Step 7: Monitor and Rebalance Your Liquidity

As market prices for bondETH and levETH move, your liquidity may move out of range. You should frequently monitor your liquidity position to ensure it is in range and you are earning trading fees or AERO emissions.

If your liquidity moves out of range, simply withdraw your liquidity, rebalance your position between bondETH/levETH and USDC via a swap against the pool, and deposit your liquidity in a new range.

Happy Yield Farming! Open a Support Ticket on Discord if you have any questions or comments about providing liquidity for Plaza assets on Aerodrome.

Stay Connected

• Website: plaza.finance

• Docs: docs.plaza.finance

• Twitter/X: @plaza_finance

• Discord: discord.gg/plazafinance

Plaza’s mission is to create a free, fair, and efficient financial system owned and governed by the people, where no one has to trust banks and institution to access high-quality investment products. Here is how we’re getting there…

Launch of Plaza Core Protocol on Base (April 28, 2025 @ 12 pm ET)

Plaza’s novel core protocol launches on April 28th, 2025, introducing ETH Programmable Derivatives:

• bondETH: A high-yield, stable asset offering USDC yield, ideal for risk-averse investors.

• levETH: Liquidation-free leveraged ETH exposure, perfect for long-term ETH believers.

This is an evolution of staking and restaking: the underlying ETH assets are staked and restaked to provide economic security to ETH and applications, and users get liquid tokens to use across DeFi. Programmable derivatives offer all of the benefits of liquid staking and liquid restaking protocols, with the added benefit of better return profiles tailored to investors’ needs.

This is the culmination of months of building and testing, and is an important milestone for Plaza and the decentralized financial system. Humans everywhere will be able to permissionlessly access high-quality decentralized assets for preserving and growing their wealth, without having to trust banks or institutions, all while earning returns for providing economic security to Ethereum and the applications built on top of it.

Seamless Cross-Chain Expansion with LayerZero (Q2 2025)

The next step for Plaza is to take bondETH and levETH everywhere. We achieve this through our partnership with Layer Zero. There remains a single pool of ETH LSTs and LRTs on Base backing all of the bondETH and levETH in existence, and bondETH and levETH can be bridged to or swapped on any chain and used across DeFi.

Over the remainder of Q2 2025, Plaza will roll out in stages the ability to bridge bondETH and levETH to chains beyond Base. Your assets should not be constrained to a single chain or platform, they should be free to move everywhere.

With each chain Plaza adds support for, bondETH and levETH holders accrue value through added utility - the ability to further refine their target risk-return profile by using bondETH and levETH in other DeFi applications, the ability to earn incentives from other applications and ecosystems, and an expanded holder base with deeper liquidity.

You can expect to see a continuous flow of announcements throughout Q2 of new chains supported and new DeFi integrations with bondETH and levETH. The first chains Plaza will add support for are Arbitrum, Ethereum Mainnet, and Optimism.

Bitcoin Programmable Derivatives: The Best Structures on the Best Asset (Late Q2/Early Q3 2025)

Bitcoin is the benchmark asset for the decentralized financial system: it has the highest market capitalization, the widest holder base, and the most institutional adoption. Bitcoin has truly become digital gold. Bitcoin DeFi is growing quickly and is under-penetrated relative to the murky but deeply traded Bitcoin derivatives that trade over the counter between banks and institutions. Humans everywhere deserve the ability to refine their BTC exposure while continuing to support BTC-secured applications. Bitcoin is the best asset for creating programmable derivatives and is the next big frontier for Plaza. This expands the Plaza ecosystem with a new wave of partnerships and integrations.

Plaza will launch bondBTC and levBTC to expand the on-chain utility of BTC and democratize access to better risk-reward profiles on BTC. BTC programmable derivatives will expand the economic security of applications in the BTC ecosystem and will be asset-backed and cross-chain composable.

Plaza Token Launch: Empowering Community Ownership (Q3 2025)

Plaza is committed to true decentralization and community governance. Plaza will distribute tokens to those who contributed to the development of the platform: developers, investors, testers, depositors, traders, holders, and other stakeholders. The Plaza Token will further decentralize the Plaza core protocol and establish a foundation for disintermediating the global investment banks from risk structuring.

Plaza will release full tokenomics before the token distribution. The benchmark is the biggest community distribution ever done.

Core Protocol v2: Disintermediating Banks from Risk Structuring (Q4 2025)

Programmable derivatives can be expanded to create any risk-reward profile on any asset without fragmenting liquidity, and while maintaining composability with the broader decentralized financial system. Plaza is working on v2 of the core protocol to expand the array of risk-return profiles available in the decentralized financial system.

Banks earn billions in fees every year for being the middlemen who structure asset-backed securities on trillions of assets per year. They gate-keep structured finance to only the largest asset holders and originators through fees and access, while providing no fundamental value: the real value is created by asset creators and investors. This is unacceptable, and the people deserve a free and fair system without extractive middlemen.

The next iteration of the Plaza protocol will enable anyone to create any structure on any asset and get paid through fee redistribution, rather than pay an investment bank. This inverts the dynamic between asset originators, investors, and the banks. Why would anyone pay a bank to structure risk when they can get paid to have their risk structured on a permissionless protocol?

Plaza is shooting the first arrow in the war against extractive middlemen in the global financial system.

The Financial System Humans Deserve (2026 and Beyond)

Decentralized assets that provide stability and yield, like bondETH and bondBTC, provide a foundation for things like decentralized insurance, where insurance providers need income-producing assets to hold against their liabilities. Decentralized assets that provide safer capital appreciation, like levETH and levBTC, enable wealth creation, democratizing access to growth. They bring us closer to the financial system we deserve: efficient, fair, transparent, by the people and for the people.

Plaza will continue to launch products that bring us closer to the financial system humans deserve. Core protocol launch, cross-chain support, BTC derivatives, token launch, and protocol expansion are not the endgame for Plaza, but rather the beginning. We’re just getting started.

Stay Connected

• Website: plaza.finance

• Docs: docs.plaza.finance

• Twitter/X: @plaza_finance

• Discord: discord.gg/plazafinance

Introduction

The world deserves a highly functional decentralized financial system for fair and transparent global commerce, and to absorb liquidity and preserve capital when governments and institutions make decisions that are adverse to public interest. Today, users of the decentralized financial system are forced into a limited array of products that don’t perfectly meet their idiosyncratic risk-return profile and limit the free movement of their funds. The limited scope of available investment products and lack of composability in decentralized finance limits the involvement of a large group of retail and institutional investors.

Programmable derivatives unlock the ability to introduce a wide array of tailored products backed by any asset, including decentralized bonds that pay stablecoin yields (bondETH) and liquidation-proof leverage on decentralized assets (levETH), without sacrificing composability with the broader decentralized financial system.

Plaza is the first platform for programmable derivatives - tokenized vault structures that enable any risk-reward profile on any asset without sacrificing cross-chain composability. bondETH (a high yield bond that pays USDC yield) and levETH (liquidation free leverage) are the first programmable derivatives.

The Problem: Limited Choice, Short Term Focus, & Trapped Funds

1. DeFi Lacks the Full Spectrum of Investment Products

• The products available in DeFi are heavily skewed towards various forms of leveraged trading: perpetuals, power perpetuals, options, etc. Cryptocurrencies are still in the early adoption phase, and thus the user base is skewed towards investors with a high risk tolerance. Naturally, the DeFi products that have thrived, most notably perpetual futures, are geared toward these risk-seeking investors.

• Traditional financial markets have a wider array of products appealing to a broader set of investors: corporate bonds, structured products, commodities, portfolios combining many forms of assets, and more. If the DeFi ecosystem is to expand beyond the current investor-base of predominantly high-risk-seeking investors, new liquid products need to be introduced to match the composition of available products in the traditional financial system. Because of innovations surrounding liquidity pool architecture and blockchain design, the decentralized financial system can exceed the capabilities of the traditional financial system through programmable derivatives with unified liquidity.

2. Existing Leverage Products Are Short-Term Focused and Trap You in a Walled Garden

• The existing DeFi user-based is currently dominated by investors who fundamentally believe in the underlying blockchain technology and thus often want leveraged exposure to the growth of the technology. As a result, leverage is one of the few products that has found significant product market fit within DeFi, despite the limitations of the existing offerings.

• Perpetual futures are a great product for users seeking high amounts of leverage to trade cryptocurrencies over short time horizons, but they are not well suited for long-term investors.

  • Many investors would like long-term levered exposure to cryptocurrencies but don’t want to or are unable to stare at 5-minute candles all day to avoid liquidation. Platforms have an incentive to push users towards high levels of leverage that cause them to get liquidated under regular market volatility to drive volumes and fees. Investors who trade with 30x leverage on assets with 5% daily volatility are likely to get liquidated within a few days even if their trade is directionally right over a 1-week horizon.

  • In bull markets, funding rates are 60%+ for even “blue-chip” cryptocurrencies, because platforms need to match an equal number of buyers and sellers, and sellers need to be compensated highly to take a position against market momentum.

  • Further, perpetual futures offer decelerating gains as prices move with investors’ positions, and accelerating losses as prices move against investors’ positions. This wrong-way convexity is unattractive, especially when there is significant market volatility.

  • Perpetual futures are entirely synthetic and not backed by hard assets, which makes it impossible for platforms to represent perpetual futures positions as tokens to use across DeFi. This ties the hands of users - they don’t have the flexibility to do more with their perps positions outside of what the exchange offers.

• Borrowing on lending platform for levered exposure has the same constraints as perpetual futures.

3. Yield in DeFi Lacks True Price Discovery and Composability

• The most common yield product in crypto is lending on a lending market. The utilization of these lending markets programmatically drives the yield paid to lenders. The market is unable to find true price/yield discovery if the same utilization rate of lending market should demand a higher or lower yield based on the other factors at play in the broader financial system.

  • This limits users into a “yes or no” binary decision when choosing to participate in lending markets, and the inability to speculate on future yields or get compensated if yields are lower in the future than they are today.

• Lending platforms and yield generating vaults typically suffer from the same composability problem as perpetual futures exchanges - your assets are trapped on a single venue without the flexibility to do more with your position.

The Plaza Solution: Programmable Derivatives

Programmable derivatives are tokenized, structured-asset vaults that split and repackage the total return of any underlying (ETH, BTC, SOL, or eventually real-world assets) into easily tradable ERC20 tokens.

1. Asset-Backed

   All Plaza derivatives are redeemable for the actual vault asset—giving them deep liquidity inherited from the spot markets, rather than from a thin synthetic futures pool.

2. Infinite Customization

   A single vault can produce multiple tokens—bonds, leveraged tokens, or any structure that suits a specific risk-return preference.

3. Composability

   These tokens can be moved across chains via existing bridging infrastructure, deposited into lending markets, or even parked in cold storage.

4. Unified Liquidity

   The capital for all these derivatives comes from a single, aggregated vault, preventing the liquidity from fracturing across dozens of one-off markets.

5. Price Discovery

   Programmable derivatives can find a market-clearing price, allowing for true price discovery in leverage and yield markets.

Plaza’s First Products: bondETH & levETH

Right now, Plaza Finance offers bondETH (an on-chain USDC-paying bond) and levETH (liquidation-proof, levered exposure to ETH). Both are backed by a shared pool of ETH liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and liquid restaking tokens (LRTs).

1. bondETH - built for investors seeking stability and USDC yield.

   • USDC Yield: bondETH holders earn quarterly stablecoin coupons, paid by an auction mechanism that swaps part of the vault’s ETH LSTs/LRTs for USDC.

   • Overcollateralized: It’s like holding a bond that’s constantly secured by a pool of ETH derivatives—no margin calls, no forced sales.

   • Composable: bondETH can be bridged anywhere and used across DeFi.

2. levETH - built for investors seeking long-term leverage.

   • Liquidation-Free Leverage: levETH gets the “upside” leftover once bondETH’s coupons are paid, effectively creating a leveraged position on ETH without the usual risk of liquidation.

   • Dynamic, “Right-Way” Convexity: As ETH prices rise, more capital is expected to flow into bondETH, indirectly boosting levETH’s leverage. If ETH falls, less capital is expected to flow into bondETH, indirectly deleveraging levETH.

   • Composable: levETH can be bridged anywhere and used across DeFi.

Beyond ETH: BTC, SOL, and RWA

Plaza started with ETH, the most liquid and developer-friendly network. But the vision is much broader:

• Decentralized Asset: After launching bondETH and levETH, the next frontier for Plaza is BTC and SOL programmable derivatives, and programmable derivatives on any token that trades in the decentralized financial system.

• Real-World Assets (RWA): Tokenized treasuries, real estate, music royalties—over time, Plaza can incorporate any on-chain asset, offering sophisticated yield or leveraged structures that rival traditional investment banks but with global accessibility and liquidity.

The Bigger Mission: Disintermediating Global Investment Banks

Plaza’s vision goes beyond just DeFi. Programmable derivatives are the next wave of global capital markets infrastructure, replacing the multi-million-dollar fees and opaque processes of broker-dealers with open, permissionless protocols. In the same way that mortgage-backed securities helped scale the U.S. housing market, on-chain derivatives could scale and democratize access to everything from small business loans to global bond markets.

1. No More Rent-Seeking Intermediaries

   Banks and underwriters that once took huge fees can be replaced by trustless smart contracts that distribute risk fairly and transparently.

2. Open Access

   Any retail investor can hold the on-chain bond or leverage token, and any institution can deposit capital directly without gatekeepers.

3. Global Liquidity

   Once a derivative is tokenized, it can be traded or used as collateral around the world—in minutes, not months.

4. Incentive Aligned Fee Markets

   Instead of paying ongoing servicing and management fees, asset issuers can share in the fees generated for creating asset-backed structures.

We’re just getting started.

Stay Connected

• Website: plaza.finance

• Docs: docs.plaza.finance

• Twitter/X: @plaza_finance

• Discord: discord.gg/plazafinance