When the market is down, take a look at Plasma mining—how to mine it properly

On September 25, the highly anticipated native token of Plasma, XPL, was launched. After opening, the price once soared to $1.6, and early depositors received a large amount of airdrop rewards. Combined with airdrop campaigns from major trading platforms, and even Binance Alpha’s airdrop offering about $220 worth of $XPL, it can be said that everyone benefited.

Almost immediately after its launch, the generous Plasma project kicked off a large-scale liquidity incentive program lasting 7 days, running until October 2. This campaign covers major protocols such as Aave, Euler, Fluid, Curve, and Veda. Users can deposit stablecoins into these protocols or hold related tokens to receive XPL rewards as well.

If you missed the deposit window or the on-chain arbitrage opportunities, you still shouldn’t miss out on the yield farming opportunities. BlockBeats has compiled five mainstream mining pools, some of which offer APRs exceeding 35%.

Preparation Before Mining

Before starting mining, you need to prepare your assets. Some protocols require you to use Stargate to bridge mainnet USDT to Plasma, obtaining an equivalent amount of USDT0. You’ll also need a small amount of XPL to cover transaction gas fees (EVM-based chains are generally supported).

This Plasma campaign is basically all in collaboration with Merkl. You can log in to Merkl’s Dashboard at any time to track your rewards. The Merkl platform automatically calculates rewards based on your deposit size and duration, and users just need to claim them manually on a regular basis.

Which Pools Are Best for Mining?

PlasmaUSD Vault

This campaign is initiated by the Plasma official team. Under the Veda protocol, the PlasmaUSD Vault distributes WXPL through token holding mining. Currently, only the Lending Vault is open, but a Basis Trade Vault will be available in the future.

The operation is quite simple: just click Deposit to deposit USDT0/USDT and hold shares of the Vault. Whether on the mainnet or Plasma chain, you can receive WXPL rewards, which can be claimed every 8 hours. However, after borrowing, USDT0 has a 48-hour withdrawal cooldown period.

The current annualized yield is about 34.36%, with daily rewards reaching as high as $1.4 million. It’s worth noting that the main prize pool of $1 million will only last for 3 days, ending on September 29. It’s unclear whether the official team will continue the incentives afterward.

Aave USDT0

Similar to Plasma’s lending Vault, depositing USDT0 into Aave also earns WXPL rewards. Currently, $1.7 billion has been deposited into the protocol, with an annualized yield of about 21.33% (the protocol’s own APY is about 3.19%, and WXPL offers 18.15% APY). The daily reward is about $700,000 worth of XPL.
Compared to Plasma, its advantage is that withdrawals can be made at any time, but you must provide USDT0 without holding any USDT0 or USDe debt, meaning you cannot use looped lending to increase utilization.

Euler K3 Capital USDT0 Vault

In Plasma’s Euler protocol, the USDT0 Vault managed by K3 Capital currently offers an annualized yield of about 27%, with daily incentive distribution of about $55,000 worth of WXPL.

Users only need to deposit USDT0 on the Plasma mainnet and supply it to the Vault to start mining.

Euler Re7 Core USDT0 Vault

Also under the Euler protocol, the Re7 Core USDT0 Vault adopts a lossless flexible lending model. Users can participate by depositing USDT0 into the Vault. This pool currently offers an annualized yield of about 30.43%, with daily rewards of about $35,000 worth of XPL. Although Euler’s pools have relatively low TVL, the yield and reward levels are still considerable, making them suitable for retail investors to diversify their allocation.

Fluid fUSDT0 Vault

The fUSDT0 Vault of the Fluid protocol provides rewards for users who deposit USDT0, USDe, or ETH into the lending Vault, as well as rewards for borrowing USDT0 using USDai and USDTO as collateral. This means you can first collateralize USDai and USDT0 to borrow USDT0 and earn about 24% annualized yield.

Then, by providing USDT0 to the lending pool for liquidity, the current annualized yield is about 25%.

It’s worth noting that most of the APR for borrowing USDT0 is provided by Plasma’s campaign. The actual borrowing rate is currently around 3%. If borrowing demand rises, the rate may quickly increase, squeezing your net yield.