Nexus Mutual rolls out major Protocol Cover upgrade

[krugman25]

Calling all yield farmers and defi degens, Nexus Mutual has just rolled out its major Protocol Cover upgrade. Be smart and take a tiny fraction of your 3 and 4 figure yields to protect your bags against exploits and attacks.

In addition to the standard smart contract exploit coverage it also now covers oracle and governance attacks. It covers any and all L1 chains as well as L2 solutions (Optimism, zk-rollups, validium, etc.)

https://twitter.com/x/status/1386689976637792260

https://twitter.com/x/status/1386689981096374278

 

[krugman25]

Fun fact, Nexus Mutual is now covering $700,000,000 of users assets with mutual members staking over $1,000,000,000. https://nexustracker.io/

 

[destriero]

lol.

 

[destriero]

This shit is an IQ test.

 

[krugman25]

lol.

Hey man, it's been a long time.

Anyone can read about the pricing formulas here https://nexusmutual.gitbook.io/docs/users/docs. Basically pricing is based on how much collateral mutual members have staked against that protocols coverage pool. Generally if a protocol is new and/or doesn't have sufficient auditing then members will be hesitant to stake (and potentially lose their collateral in the case of a claim) on it.

Select a protocol that's been on the platform for a while, trusted in the space, and has a lot of capital staked like Aave and you get something like this.

 

[krugman25]

I'll add, the long term trajectory is for users to never buy cover directly from Nexus mutual but from cover underwriters (like https://armor.fi/), or even better, directly from the wallet UI with just 1-click cover. It will eventually happen but it takes time a bootstrap a protocol from 0 and get it fully integrated. 3 years ago Nexus didn't even exist.

 

[destriero]

The premiums are absurd. Hey Krug.

 

[johnarb]

I looked into NXM a while back but the membership stuff, kyc, and some subjective decision making on claims kinda pushed me away. I think the CEO got hacked, or maybe I'm confusing it with another project

Some were concerned with coverage and if enough funds are there, the FTX solution and to a related degree the Bitfinex hack was to allocate funds sourced/pooled by the people people in-charge

Anyway, insurance on smart contract bugs and hacks is a great thing and wish them the best, we need this very much in defi, but hope it evolves to a decentralized and defined insurance platform

 

[krugman25]

The premiums are absurd. Hey Krug.

I don't think so, imo. One year of cover is 2.5% which considering how nascent and risky the space is I think is a killer deal. It's an almost negligible rate when you calculate even the lowest stable yield in the space, which is somewhere in the 10-20% range, and for the more risky stuff the yield is closer to 50-100%.

Yearn (https://yearn.finance/vaults)

Sushiswap LPing (https://analytics.sushi.com/pools)

Various protocol stablecoin yield rates (https://loanscan.io/)

 

[krugman25]

@johnarb I'll address all of your comments.

I looked into NXM a while back but the membership stuff, kyc, and some subjective decision making on claims kinda pushed me away.

KYC may be going away (see tweet below) now that the team believes Nexus is sufficiently decentralized. But even if it doesn't happen you don't need to KYC anymore by using a cover underwriter like Armor.Fi

https://twitter.com/x/status/1385309618763702277

I think the CEO got hacked, or maybe I'm confusing it with another project

Correct. His personal wallet was targeted in a relatively sophisticated attack. This is probably one of the best places to read about it. https://www.rekt.news/nxm-hugh-speaks-out/

Nexus Mutual's smart contracts are some of the oldest in the space and have never been exploited. They rank up there with Uniswap's smart contracts (quite old in DeFi terms and never have been exploited).

Some were concerned with coverage and if enough funds are there, the FTX solution and to a related degree the Bitfinex hack was to allocate funds sourced/pooled by the people people in-charge

The protocols formula doesn't allow an excessively larger amount of coverage to be taken out than what members have staked for that protocol. So if $10M of collateral has been staked for a certain protocol or CEX, that's about how much coverage can be taken out. In terms of leverage, the protocol as a whole is extremely low leveraged (usually less than 1:1) versus traditional insurance companies. They will slowly increase that over time but there's a reason their mascot is a turtle. lol.