Anyone who has been using DeFi for a while has experienced it's fragmentation problem. DeFi isn't as easy to use as something like a TradFi app that offers all the financial services you could ever need in one place. With DeFi you often have to use many different disconnected protocols to achieve the results you need. One day you start out in DeFi by depositing some crypto in one or two dapps, six months later your crypto is spread out on 15 different blockchains and 100 different dapps and those are just the ones you know about. You will run into annoying issues, such as leaving $500 on some obscure dapp that nobody is still actively using. By the time you remember it's there you might have to literally learn how to program smart contracts just to withdraw your crypto. There won't be any help available because the discord has been entirely populated by bots saying GM to each other for two years straight. The added complexity of DeFi fragmentation is a major barrier for new users coming into crypto who are used to the convenience of TradFi.
Thankfully, the Amulet project is attempting to solve this problem in DeFi by providing multiple services on one unified platform. This way users don't have to use (and trust) as many different protocols because many of the products they need are all on Amulet. Amulet V1 started as just a DeFi insurance dapp where you could buy protection for your DeFi positions, but has evolved from there and recently launched Amulet V3 which offers a wide selection of yield generating opportunities all in one place.
What is available on Amulet V3? There are even more ways to earn yield now. Let's look at all of them. They provide an LST (liquid staking token), called amtSOL that currently offers ~7% APY on your staked SOL while still providing you the liquidity advantages of unstaked SOL. Normally if you stake SOL natively, you can't access it at all without unstaking it first which takes around two days. With an LST like amtSOL, you can still earn staking rewards while also having access to your staked SOL's liquidity. You can sell it immediately if needed, or you can use it in DeFi to gain additional yield or as collateral for a loan.
There is also the original product of Amulet, insurance. DeFi is risky, you can lose money to hacks or bugs with no recourse. You can't just call customer service and get your money back. DeFi insurance addresses this problem with what are called covers. Amulet offers covers for various dapps, for example if I wanted to put $500 into Sanctum, I could protect my $500 from any potential smart contract vulnerabilities by buying a cover on Amulet. To protect my full position for a 30 day period it would cost me 0.0207 SOL which is the equivalent of paying a rate of 0.5614% a month for insurance. While this does decrease your overall yield, you won't get any yield at all if you lose your entire position to a smart contract vulnerability! So using covers is a good idea, especially if you are using newer dapps that haven't been battle tested as much. The coolest aspect of this is that you are able to get the protection of insurance in a permissionless way, so you don't have to be approved by some insurance company as long as you have the funds to pay for it.
You can also become an underwriter for Amulet's DeFi insurance. Haven't you ever wanted a piece of the massive pie that is insurance premiums? Now you can get some of that sweet pie! To do this, you simply stake SOL and receive the aUWT token in return. This token represents your share in Amulets insurance revenue. You can redeem your aUWT at any time for amtSOL. The base APY of aUWT is currently 10.42%. If that's not good enough for you, you can use the "Boost Underwrite" feature and participate in Amulet's advanced revenue sharing scheme. This allows you to stake your aUWT on to any of the 31 available Solana DeFi dapps, such as Raydium or Meteora, and earn additional yield on top of the base yield. One thing to consider before staking is that unstaking aUWT is temporarily unavailable whenever there is an active insurance claim in progress, but is re-enabled as soon as the claim is settled.
Amulet also has four LST vaults to earn yield with, including vaults for $amtSOL, $mSOL, $bSOL, and $JitoSOL. These vaults offer impressive yields, adding between 13 and 20% on top of the base APY of each LST. Not only that, but these vaults all have built in protection from AmuShield, which monitors the underlying pools 24/7 and will automatically suspend the vault and attempt to retrieve funds if it detects an attack. If any losses are sustained, there is an Amulet Safety Fund which will compensate user's losses up to the fund's capacity. I thought this was a cool feature, it's like having a robot sentry guarding your loot. Without something like AmuShield, users of an attacked pool oftentimes won't even find out about an attack until it's way too late to do anything about it.
Is that all? Nope, there are even more ways to use Amulet V3! You can participate in the protocol by acquiring it's governance token $AMU. You can then lock your $AMU for any period from 1 week to 1 year for an APR of between 2.7% and 139.2%. In the future, Amulet will enable governance and you will be able to use your locked tokens to vote on protocol proposals. You can also provide liquidity to the amtSOL/SOL and the amtSOL/aUWT LPs which both currently earn 31% APY. The more liquidity Amulet can attract to these pools, the easier it will be for people to swap in and out of Amulet's products with low slippage.
Amulet offers an impressive array of yield generating opportunities in one easy to use dapp, saving you from having to go to multiple places to earn yield. I think this is the direction DeFi needs to go in, with superdapps that provide many different services all under one roof. That's what consumers like, having everything they need in one place. Amulet isn't done yet either, they plan on launching other products in the future such as lending/borrowing. Will Amulet be able to attract enough users to sustain itself long term? Only time will tell, but they are certainly putting the work in and you should go check out Amulet V3 for yourself.
