Written by: Ashwath Balakrishnan, at Crypto Briefing
Translation: Lu Jiangfei
Content overview
Zapper is an ideal tool for liquidity providers (LP), but it does not achieve integration in all vertical areas of DeFi;
On the other hand, although Zerion has not achieved full integration in independent verticals, it allows users to interact with a few protocols in different segmented vertical markets;
In general, the choice of Zapper or Zerion mainly depends on the actual needs of specific users.
Many people may not know that when the Internet first appeared, it caused a lot of criticism, but as the exploration of cyberspace became easier, people gradually fell in love with surfing the Internet. For example, a company like Google allows us to connect directly without having to interact with code or clumsy protocols, just through simple, popular man-machine conversations.
In the DeFi ecosystem, dashboard applications and other products that enhance user experience also play the same role. The two industry leaders in this field are Zapper and Zerion.
Zapper Fi
Zapper can be said to be one of the favorite tools used by the DeFi community, especially liquidity providers. Zapper provides a seamless interface to interact with the DeFi protocol. Various DeFi protocols can be accessed on its platform. All operations can be completed on one operation interface. Anyone can use Zapper to perform with Uniswap, Curve, Balancer and yEarn. Direct interaction.
Users only need to connect their Web 3 wallet to Zapper, the homepage will automatically load the portfolio, and then display an investment overview map. Zapper also supports the classification of these investment portfolios, such as wallets (assets), income farming positions, liquidity reserves, and loans. Zapper is well-known in the industry for its easy-to-use dashboards, allowing users to immediately assess the value of their portfolio.
Source of the above image: Zapper
Zapper has a very powerful feature-its “invest” option, which helps users quickly deposit funds into the head capital liquidity pool and yEarn vault. Currently this feature supports multiple decentralizations such as Uniswap, Balancer and Curve. Exchange.
In addition, there is a “Exchange” tab on the Zapper platform directly connected to Uniswap and Balancer. Using these two automatic market makers (AMM) to create a liquidity aggregator, Zapper can provide users with two decentralized exchanges The best exchange price in. But unlike DeFi aggregators such as 1inch Exchange, Zapper does not distribute transactions among multiple decentralized exchanges.
Source of the above image: Zapper
In addition, Zapper also provides users with two services, “exploration” and “transaction”, specifically:
The “Explore” function allows users who have funds on asset management platforms (such as Set Protocol, yEarn Finance and Synthetix) to gain a deeper understanding of their own earnings
The “Transaction” function will collect the transaction history of the corresponding address.
Zapper’s advantages
At this stage, the two DeFi functions that Zapper focuses on are liquidity supply and income farming, but it is expected that they will soon be vertically integrated with other DeFi projects/protocols. In fact, interacting with the DeFi liquidity pool through Zapper is currently the simplest method that liquidity providers can choose, and Zapper can also automatically allocate assets in the liquidity pool.
Let’s look at an example, for example, there is a DeFi user named “Chad”:
Chad currently only has ETH in hand, but he wants to provide liquidity in Balancer’s 50-50 LINK/WBTC pool.
Chad can use Zapper Fi to make the liquidity provision process easier, instead of converting half of ETH to LINK and then converting the other half of ETH to WBTC.
Chad deposits 1 ETH (approximately $300) in the liquidity pool.
Zapper Fi is launched, and ETH is divided into 150 USD LINK and 150 USD WBTC. Zapper can then deposit tokens from Chad’s address into the Balancer pool, and then credit the Balancer pool tokens to the same address.
Source of the above image: Zapper
From the above example, it is obvious that the Zapper automation function makes it very easy for users to provide liquidity. Liquidity providers no longer have to worry about the issue of “token exchange and token splitting”, because Zapper has already done it. all of these.
In terms of transactions, since Zapper is not a DEX aggregator, it will not split transactions between various trading platforms. But for retail traders with a small amount of funds, this does not seem to cause much inconvenience.
By aggregating the two most liquid decentralized exchanges, Uniswap and Balancer, Zapper can find the most profitable transactions between the two and present them to users. Since the transaction is not split, the transaction fee is the same as the fee for directly interacting with Uniswap or Balancer.
What are the disadvantages of Zapper?
Zapper has both advantages and disadvantages. Its biggest disadvantage is the lack of support for the largest vertical market in the DeFi industry: lending. According to the ranking of liquidity, three of the top six DeFi protocols are engaged in lending business, namely: Aave, Maker, and Compound, but Zapper has not yet entered this market, so certain transaction activities that users expect to conduct may be restricted. (Chain note: Zapper stated as early as July 2020 that it would integrate protocols such as Aave and Compound soon, but it is now October, and this has not happened yet.)
Another problem is that although Zapper is an excellent product for decentralized exchange liquidity providers, integration with the yEarn vault also means that they are in the tokenized asset management industry, but Zapper still cannot access Set so far. Protocol strategy.
Founding member of Zapper
The three co-founders of Zapper are Seb Audet, Suhail Gangji and Nodar Janashia. They have extensive industry experience in user experience design, encryption product development, and financial management.
Before founding Zapper, Seb Audet helped build the dashboard application DeFi Snap, allowing users to view all their DeFi activities on a simple interface.
Suhail Gangji and Nodar Janashia jointly created DeFi Zap, which is also a similar dashboard application, but adds some new features, such as allowing users to create bundled transactions and support simultaneous interaction with multiple smart contracts. Users only need to answer a few questions to assess their investment profile, and DeFi Zap will provide them with some investment advice that fits the user’s “investment sentiment”.
What is Zerion? How does Zerion work?
Zerion is also a top DeFi tool for individual users that can be used to simplify the trading experience. Investors can interact with the DeFi protocol “indirectly” through Zerion without having to visit Compound, Uniswap, and other income farming “farms”.
First, you can log in to the Zerion homepage and connect your wallet address to it. Users can connect to multiple addresses, and then you can get a simple summary view of “DeFi Net Assets”. After completing this operation, users will be able to see an overview of the portfolio of all wallets and cleverly divide them into different categories, such as savings and loans.
In Zerion’s “Overview” page, investors can see which investment returns in the portfolio are the best and which investment returns are the worst, and can track the overall portfolio and individual investment performance on the homepage.
For now, EtherScan is still the tool of choice for most DeFi investors to track transactions, but Zerion makes it easier to obtain historical transaction data. Users only need to visit the history page to obtain detailed chart display information for each transaction. On EtherScan, users have to open new links to view the detailed information of each transaction, while on Zerion, the detailed history can be extracted on a scrolling page.
However, the real value of Zerion is not limited to showing users a dashboard of assets and transaction information. Its real role is to play the role of a “DeFi interface”, abstracting and simplifying many complex transaction operations, making it easier for investors to understand .
Source of the above image: Zerion
On Zerion’s “Market” page, users can use ETH or USDC, DAI, USDT or TUSD and other stable currencies to purchase almost all Ethereum-based assets. Each asset on the “Market” tab has a brief corresponding to the relevant project. Information, and some simple financial data, such as price changes, market value, and the highest level of asset prices in history.
For those users who seek more flexibility in DeFi tokens, Zerion provides users with a direct exchange interface service that can exchange any token for another token. It is worth noting that the current token exchange service is only applicable to ordinary ERC-20 tokens and ETH.
At this stage, users who use Zerion’s “market” function may not have enough token types to choose from, but users will soon be able to purchase Set Protocol and Melon’s tokenized asset management strategy.
Source of the above image: Zerion
Zerion also provides services for fund flow pools and farmers. Currently supported platforms include Balancer Labs, Curve, yEarn Finance, Bancor and Uniswap, and will soon add support for Mooniswap.
In addition, Zerion provides access to the loan market on Compound and the borrowing market on Compound and Maker. All in all, Zerion integrates some of the most important vertical businesses in the DeFi market, and is currently adding more value-added features, such as mStable’s savings plan, and Nexus Mutual, Curve, Matic and other agreement mortgage services.
Advantages of Zerion
For investors, it seems that they need to pay attention to and track the latest DeFi products and optimizations all the time. Unless one is always energetic, it is impossible to master everything, and this is actually a problem that aggregators like Zerion hope to solve.
Do you plan to take out some ETH collateral and use it to loan USDT on Compound, and then deposit ETH and USDT into the Uniswap liquidity pool to cultivate UNI tokens? Well, now you can just use Zerion to do it “one-click.”
Investors do not need to access multiple different operating interfaces and perform a series of transactions, but can perform all operations on a separate interface on Zerion.
Zerion has also added many new features (such as using NXM on Nexus Mutual or using BZRX tokens on bZx), even for high-end DeFi users, it can be turned into a useful product. Not only that, Zerion’s dashboard is concise and easy to use. Users can easily track their historical transaction records in different DeFi protocols.
Disadvantages of Zerion
Zapper’s current strategy is to focus on a niche market, and there is no doubt that they have done this.
Zerion obviously does not want to follow the same development path as Zapper. They intend to expand their products to multiple DeFi verticals, but the problem is that Zerion still cannot support all the agreements in these verticals. For example, in the lending vertical market, although Zerion supports Compound and Maker, it does not support Aave-you know, Aave is the largest currency market agreement in the DeFi field.
Of course, Zapper has become an indispensable tool for active liquidity providers by virtue of its comprehensive integration and product development advantages.
Meet the Zerion team
Zerion was founded in 2016 with three co-founders. They wanted to create a simple solution to track and manage ERC-20 tokens and build it into a “one-stop shop” that can interact with DeFi products. The three co-founders are:
Vadim Koleoshkin is the most business-minded co-founder of Zerion. He previously founded a consulting company called Jufy Projects and set up an application development studio.
The other co-founder of Zerion is Evgeny Yurtaev. He previously worked as a software engineer at Google and Jufy Projects and has extensive experience in the Ethereum blockchain.
Alexey Bashlykov is the third co-founder and CTO of Zerion. He is an Android developer and was also a co-founder of Jufy Projects.
Zerion and Zapper
The difference between Zerion and Zapper may not be very big, and it depends on everyone’s needs, such as:
Those who are looking for products with extensive integration for liquidity pools and profit farming may prefer to use Zapper;
On the other hand, if you are an active and diversified user in the DeFi lending market, then you may prefer Zerion.
Zapper has obvious advantages for liquidity providers. For example, ETH can be used directly on Zapper to provide liquidity to the Uniswap pool, reducing the transaction operation process from two steps to one. People can even choose to use some unrelated assets (such as LINK). Zapper will convert half of the assets into ETH and half of the assets into DAI, and then deposit them in the Uniswap liquidity pool.
Source of the above image: Zapper
On Zerion, users need to manually sell half of their ETH to exchange for DAI, and then add these two assets on Uniswap in the correct ratio. However, although it is a bit more complicated than adding liquidity on the Uniswap local interface, Zerion can be connected to other protocols and provides users with a wider range of options.
Source of the above image: Zerion
In fact, Zapper has also begun to try to further optimize and begin to integrate more other protocols. Now people can use various assets to invest in any yEarn vault. Zapper will first convert the tokens into the required form (for example, yUSDC vault is USDC, yYFI The vault is YFI), and then make a deposit.
Although Zerion also has plans to integrate more protocols, the platform currently only provides revenue farming integration for the two platforms Uniswap and Bancor.
In addition, when accessing and viewing address transaction records, Zerion’s dashboard interface is cleaner than Zapper, but Zapper performs better in depth analysis of available information. For example, although SNX token mortgagers can use Zerion and Zapper to view detailed information, Zapper provides more data points (such as the transaction fees claimed by Synthetix).
It is commendable that Zerion has adopted a broader product development approach. They hope to cover all verticals in the DeFi industry, rather than being limited to becoming a “master” in one field. As Zerion is accelerating the integration speed, we have reason to believe that they will become a comprehensive hub for DeFi interaction in the future.
in conclusion
There is no doubt that Zerion and Zapper are two very good DeFi products that promote the popularization of DeFi through high-quality user experience. Choosing between the two is not an easy task, the specific needs depend on the specific needs of the user.
For active liquidity providers, Zapper has very obvious advantages; but for those who are just getting involved in DeFi and want to test all functional services, Zapper is undoubtedly an ideal choice.
