Introducing ETH Saver - A new home for leveraged staking

tl;dr: We've launched a new app for leveraged staking strategies, that builds on Aave, Compound, Morpho, Lido (wstETH), Rocketpool (rETH) and Coinbase (cbETH) and provides an accessible UI with a new fee model for these positions. Read on for the full story or jump further below for the details.

First introduced when Lido's stETH was added to Aave v2 back in early 2022, the phenomenon of leveraged staking is not really a new thing by now. What's more, it's really not new to DeFi Saver users either, as these kinds of strategies have been supported from day one.

Over the course of the past year and a half, we've seen this approach grow in popularity, but also variety, with multiple other liquid staking tokens gaining traction (rETH, cbETH) and a growing number of different protocols providing access to or even specialising for these kinds of positions (Compound v3-WETH, Morpho-Aave v2 & v3, Aave v3).

We've covered this strategy in great depth earlier this year and our DFS Stats platform shows just how popular it has been, but we've also been collecting feedback on how we can improve things for leveraged stakers.

The shared inputs helped us massively in understanding the existing pain points and figuring out the best way forward and today we're very excited to share what we've been working on over the past few months.

Introducing ETH Saver

ETH Saver is a new app in the DeFi Saver ecosystem that specifically focuses on leveraged staking by providing a new interface optimised for these options, combined with an alternative model that's better suited to these kinds of positions.

Just like DeFi Saver, ETH Saver is fully non-custodial, too, and it's built on our existing architecture, which allowed us to provide support for both most popular LSTs (with wstETH,rETH and cbETH) and lending protocols (with Aave v3, Compound v3-WETH and Morpho-Aave v3 currently available).

An optimised interface

The ETH Saver UI has been streamlined to provide a more approachable access to leveraged staking strategies, but also to enable quicker management together with better overview of position stats and performance.

Our main focus has been on providing detailed information on all important points and risk factors when creating these positions and on displaying accurate information on the position's performance and current health, combined with easy access to all needed management actions.

A new fee model

The standard approach to fees on DeFi Saver has been basically the same since we first went live - if the user is executing a complex transaction (i.e. one that includes multiple protocol interactions) and that transaction includes a token swap, then there'll be a service fee applied. The only change introduced here was the split into two tiers, where swaps between assets correlated in value (e.g. ETH<>(w)stETH<>rETH<>cbETH) now have a 0.1% fee of the swapped amount, while all other pairs are still at 0.25%.

As this was a fee applied both at the moment of entering and exiting the position, in case of leveraged staking positions it put users in an inconvenient spot where exiting the position in case of an urgency would potentially put them in a loss and there was effectively a breakeven period to consider.

To mitigate this and provide a fairer environment, ETH Saver features a performance based fee model, where a 10% performance fee is taken at the point of exiting position(s).

This kind of approach ensures that users have the flexibility of exiting their positions no matter how recently they opened them.

Migrating existing positions to ETH Saver

Any users with supported leveraged staking positions currently open through DeFi Saver can simply migrate their positions to ETH Saver when wanted (or when gas is low) to enjoy the new interface and to switch to the new fee model.

The balance of the position at the moment of migration will be considered the starting balance at ETH Saver, meaning that any performance fees would only be considered from that moment onwards. The migration itself is free in terms of any kind of service fees, though it does involve network interactions, meaning there'll be some transaction fees to consider.

Please note that the migration process is currently available from DeFi Saver to ETH Saver, but not the other way around.

We hope you'll enjoy ETH Saver as much as we've enjoyed creating a new DeFi app and we're also hoping to hear feedback and comments from you in the DFS discord.

While we already have plans for a number of additional features that you're perhaps used to seeing at DeFi Saver, your inputs always help us understand where our priorities should be.