Following his investments of $141 million in Puffer Finance and $253 million in EigenLayer last month, Sun Yuchen, founder of Tron, has once again made a move in the “Ethereum liquidity repledging” race. This time, he has invested $480 million in ether.fi, a new coin mining project currently being conducted by Binance.
Last month, Sun Yuchen invested a substantial amount of capital in the LRT “liquidity repledging token” race. He pledged up to 58,000 stETH tokens to Puffer Finance, with a total value of approximately $141 million, becoming the points champion of the protocol. In addition, he also deposited 104,001 stETH tokens, worth about $253 million, into EigenLayer.
Such a large amount of collateral has led the community to exclaim, “Does Sun Yuchen empty his pockets like this for every airdrop?”
However, this also represents Sun Yuchen’s confidence in the LRT race. Recently, he has made another move. According to online analyst Yu Jian’s monitoring, Sun Yuchen has set his sights on Binance’s latest coin mining project, ether.fi. Binance announced this news on March 12th, and on the following day, March 13th, Sun Yuchen pledged 120,000 ETH to the protocol, worth approximately $480 million. This amount exceeds the $141 million invested in Puffer Finance and the $253 million invested in EigenLayer last month.
As for the source of this funding, Yu Jian added that from February 8th to February 25th, Sun Yuchen purchased a large amount of 173,800 ETH through withdrawals from centralized exchanges and on-chain purchases, at an average price of $2,869. Based on the current ETH price of around $3,900, this investment is worth $678 million, with unrealized profits of up to $179 million and a return rate of nearly 36%.
Ether.fi, currently the largest Ethereum liquidity repledging protocol, allows users to pledge ETH in exchange for eETH, a native liquidity collateral token. According to DeFiLlama data, the protocol’s total value locked (TVL) has exceeded $3.1 billion, more than twice the $1.427 billion of Puffer Finance.
The reasons for attracting such a large amount of capital are twofold. First, ether.fi is the only protocol in the LRT race that supports ETH redemption. Second, pledgers can enjoy four types of rewards: Ethereum PoS staking rewards, EigenLayer repledging rewards (which have not yet begun), ether.fi platform points (which will be exchanged for airdrops in the future), and EigenLayer platform points (which will also be exchanged for airdrops in the future).
On February 27th, ether.fi announced the completion of a $27 million financing round led by Bullish and CoinFund. Prior to this, the protocol raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by North Island Ventures, Chapter One, and Node Capital. Arthur Hayes, the founder of BitMex, also participated in the investment.
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