Wiretap Wednesday: How to turn your BTC into a productive asset

Using RenBridge & renBTC to earn passive yield in DeFi

Sep 9, 2020

Take one step closer to sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:

DeFi Slate Family:

The Bitcoin maximalist vs. Etherean wars have only just begun.

For us neutral parties, its clear that the battle is not BTC vs. ETH its us vs. the banks. Why fight internally when we can collab for the betterment of the entire community?

Regardless of what the maxi’s say, Ethereum is literally swallowing Bitcoin daily (see graph below).

Introducing: RenBridge.

The go-to protocol to take your dormant BTC and turn it into renBTC, an ERC-20 token pegged to the price of BTC.

Lets dive into the where, why, and the how to turn your BTC into a productive, yield generating asset.

Giddy on up farmers.

- Andy

📈 Shoutout To Our Partner: MCDEX— trade the first ever decentralized ETH & LINK perp swap contracts on MCDEX.

🙏 New To Yield Farming? Use Akropolis to lend, borrow, and dollar-cost-average in the simplest way possible with their new Delphi mainnet launch!

👨🏽‍🌾Earn Interest & Leverage Your Assets with Aave, a non-custodial money market protocol leading the #DeFi charge.

ALPHA LEAK: Deposit LINK tokens into Aave to get aLINK, then head over to Yearn to put your aLINK into the yaLINK vault for extra yield (40%+ APY currently). It all starts here with Aave!

Wiretap Wednesday: How to turn your BTC into a productive asset

Since its inception Bitcoin has been the store of value (SOV) that the crypto ecosystem has needed. Being the best performing asset of the last decade, Bitcoin has lead to a world of flourishing companies, protocols, interfaces, tokens and much more.

But, Bitcoin has always just been well, Bitcoin.

The only way to get it without buying is to mine it, which is very expensive. Use cases aside being a SOV are fairly low…until now.

With the explosion of DeFi center-stage, the rise of productive assets has been exponential. And while we’ve seen the BTC maxi vs. Ethereans debates, there’s no question that BTC is front and center in DeFi.

A whopping 75,6000 BTC ($778,741,800) on Ethereum as of September 9th, 2020.

It all starts with taking your BTC and doing the dirty…moving it to Ethereum.

Let’s do it:

Step 1: Download MetaMask wallet, get some Bitcoin through an exchange of your choice (Coinbase, Binance, CashApp, Bitfinex, Gemini, etc etc) & head over to RenBridge.

Step 2: Follow steps outlined in video below before continuing on the tutorial!

Now that you have renBTC in your MetaMask, its time to earn some yield!

Brief FYI: We recommend only using this strategy if you have upwards of $3k in BTC holdings, otherwise the gas fees could mitigate all your gains.

Using Yearn Vaults to earn yield

First, head over to Curve sBTC Deposit! Connect your MetaMask wallet. Then, enter the amount you’d like to stake & press ‘Deposit’. (PSA: Not Deposit & Stake - just Deposit). Approve the MetaMask transactions - one approving the spend, and the second depositing the funds into Curve sBTC LP tokens.

Then, head over to the Yearn Finance Vaults. Scroll down and find the curve.fi/sbtc LP fault which is currently earning 48.14%. Then, choose the amount of funds you’d like to deposit (in my case it says 0 crvBTC, but if you deposited it will show the same amount you deposited). Press ‘Deposit’ and approve the MetaMask transactions & you’re set!

When you go to withdraw, you will have more sBTC than you initially deposited as the Yearn Vaults accumulate more for you. When you want to exit, just return back to Yearn and press ‘Withdraw All’.

Once you are done with the renBTC or sBTC Curve LP tokens, go to the Curve sBTC Withdraw page & you withdraw your tokens back to renBTC, wBTC or sBTC. We recommend choosing to withdraw to only one of the three assets only so you don’t have to pay extra gas fees.

These are all synthetic versions of BTC. They achieve the same result: Keeping your upside (or downside) exposure to BTC while allowing you to earn yield.

Once you withdraw, you’ll see the ren, s or wBTC in your MetaMask wallet.

Turning Bitcoin into a productive asset comes with smart contract risks of course, but it is a great way to earn passive yield on your BTC holdings. If you hold some BTC on a cold wallet or Ledger, we definitely recommend giving this a try!

Any questions? DM us on Twitter!