Altitude: Simplifying the Money-Making Process

Ape-tizers:

• There’s no shortage of money-making opportunities in crypto, but passive yield strategies are often overlooked. Altitude makes it easy to get started.
• Altitude is like an onchain financial manager that’s available 24/7. When a user deposits assets on Altitude, it monitors for the best rates and allocates assets accordingly.
• From passive plays to looping and high-yield cross-protocol strategies, Altitude lets you earn with minimal effort.

Alright, let’s be honest. The 2024/25 crypto cycle has by far been one of the strangest for the altcoin market.

A fleeting AI coin bubble, coupled with a memecoin mania filled with unholy amounts of crime, has resulted in the market being one-sided, and that side is BTC.

With more participants coming into the market with more sophisticated strategies, it’s getting harder and harder for us trench-dwellers to make it out of mom’s basement.

But as they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Or something like that.

Rather than just chasing poor narratives propelled by scammy KOLs and insider cabals, it’s more fruitful to look elsewhere. Chasing the hot ball of money will often end up with you getting your hands caught on fire.

There’s no shortage of money-making opportunities in crypto, but passive yield strategies are often overlooked.

Despite the bad reputation most passive strategies often get, you will thank yourself later on as you watch everyone round-trip generational wealth while your capital continues to grow slowly and steadily.

For this, we believe Altitude is one of the best options out there.

What is Altitude? A quick primer

Altitude is a DeFi borrow aggregator that automates loan management and optimizes borrowing rates while generating yield with idle capital. It does this by acting as an automated intermediary between the user and lending protocols.

Altitude is integrated with lending giants like Aave and Morpho and popular DeFi protocols like Curve, Convex, and Pendle. When a user deposits assets on Altitude, it algorithmically monitors for the best rates and allocates assets accordingly.

Simultaneously, it uses DeFi protocols like Curve, Convex, and Pendle to generate yield for users to pay back loans.

Think of Altitude as an onchain financial manager that’s available 24/7.

Key elements of the protocol include:

1. Altitude public vaults
2. Parallel farming
3. ALTI token

Before we get into some strategies, let’s first get familiar with the platform's interface.

How to use Altitude?

When you first visit the Altitude app, you will see this interface.

Click on the “connect wallet” option in the top right corner and connect the wallet you want to use on Altitude.

It’s important to note that Altitude is native to the Ethereum mainnet, so move the funds you intend to use to Ethereum.

Once you’re connected, you’ll see this.

As a user, you have three panels to navigate through.

Under “Get Started,” you can perform the basic borrowing functions such as depositing wstETH and cbBTC to borrow USDC.

The next panel is the “dashboard.”

This is essentially your portfolio tracker. It gives you all the information you need about your active positions and their health. It makes it easy to monitor and make decisions based on that information.

Lastly, you have the “vaults.”

As the image shows, this gives you all the information you will need about the different vaults. So, before picking a vault to use, it would be worthwhile to first go through all this and then make your decision. DYOR, as they say.

Alright, so now that you’re familiar with the interface, let’s get into the good stuff.

Borrow & earn through Altitude

At the time of writing, Altitude has two V2 vaults that are live and active:

1. cbBTC-USDC V2
2. wstETH-USDC V2

Both vaults have very similar configurations and currently borrow from Aave. The main difference revolves around the collateral they take, i.e., cbBTC vs. wstETH.

When interacting with either of the vaults, the idle capital from your collateral is put to use in protocols like Morpho and Pendle. Essentially, the portion of your collateral that would typically not be used in other protocols is automatically deployed by Altitude to yield-generating platforms.

The yield essentially pays back the user's loan while the user enjoys a stress-free life.

So here are some potential strategies you can execute.

Passive strategy

Imagine you’re sitting on a good amount of ETH. The markets are looking good for the next few months, so you want to hold onto your precious ETH but also dabble in some shitcoin shenanigans.

Altitude is the best platform for that.

• Step 1 - Convert ETH to wstETH
  
• Step 2 - Deposit wstETH on Altitude
  
• Step 3 - Borrow USDC against your wstETH at a low LTV (10-20%)

Lower LTV’s engage smart repay and at times give you a negative APY (still earning interest)

• Step 4 - The protocol will automatically deploy your assets in integrated DeFi protocols (Curve, Pendle, Morpho) to generate a yield. This yield pays back your loan
  
• Step 5 - You can earn a sustainable 13% APY on your ETH while using the USDC you borrowed for other onchain activities
  
• Step 6 - Start looking for mansions

This is one of the most effective strategies as it earns you a competitive yet sustainable yield on your asset while automatically managing the loan.

Yes, it is advised to keep checking the dashboard to monitor your position, but in terms of risk, this is very much on the lower side of the spectrum. So if you’re tired of losing everything to insider scams in the trenches, try the passive approach.

High-yield cross-protocol strategies

As is common with any DeFi protocol, composability is a big factor.

Using Altitude, you can execute some neat cross-protocol strategies to earn a yield in the 15%- 20% range. If you go turbo degen risk mode, you can bump that up a bit more.

• Step 1 - Convert ETH or BTC to wstETH or cbBTC
• Step 2 - Deposit wstETH or cbBTC on Altitude
• Step 3 - Borrow USDC at a 40%-50% LTV (roughly 11% supply APY)
• Step 4 - Deposit your USDC into Pendle for PT-sUSDe (12.6% APY)

From here, you have a bunch of different options:

• Hold PT-sUSDe until maturity for a fixed yield
• You can use platforms like Inverse Finance that will allow you to use PT-sUSDe as collateral. With this, you can perform up to 8x leveraged looping strategies to earn 50%+ APY

If you aren’t interested in using Pendle, there are other options. You can take the USDC that you borrowed from Altitude and use it to bridge to merging networks like Fuel, HyperEVM, or Sonic.

Get involved with the DeFi ecosystems on those networks. Start providing liquidity in DEXes, trading coins, or interacting with other yield-generating protocols. Chances are the yield will be higher, and you will also be eligible for some decent airdrops.

Looping

For those who don’t know, looping is a strategy wherein a user can rinse and repeat the same process to effectively leverage their loan and earn a higher yield.

For example, if a user has ETH and deposits it into a lending protocol to earn some yield, they can take the USDC that they borrowed with that ETH to buy more ETH.

They then take the new ETH they borrowed and deposit it back into the protocol to increase the size of the position.

Keep rinsing and repeating the deposit, borrow, buy, redposit strategy till your heart's content. That’s looping.

The same can be done with Altitude.

• Step 1 - Convert ETH to wstETH
• Step 2 - Deposit wstETH into Altitude (50%-60% LTV)
• Step 3 - Borrow USDC and use USDC to buy more ETH
• Step 4 - Convert new ETH to wstETH and deposit it on Altitude
• Step 5 - Rinse and repeat to the risk level you are content with

This is a good strategy because of Altitude’s automatic repaying and parallel farming feature. As we know, Altitude is the most capital-efficient lending platform out there. It uses all idle capital to earn yield through external protocols to pay back a user's loan.

Factoring in all this, Altitude can offer a sustainable 11%- 13% APY, which is pretty neat for major assets like ETH or BTC.

In addition to the yield, you can keep your ETH and hold it in another yield-bearing asset, wstETH. Thus, you are essentially winning on all fronts while putting in minimum effort.

That’s the Altitude way.

Plus, there’s a cherry on top.

ALTI token

The ALTI token is the protocol's native governance token. Its primary use case is to allow users to vote on different protocol features/configurations, but it also boosts yield for those users.

There are two facets to this:

• Rewards
• Referrals

When you deposit cbBTC or wstETH into the Altitude vaults, you earn a high yet sustainable yield on your assets and are eligible to earn some ALTI tokens as part of the incentives program.

This program provides a 20% boost for borrowers who borrow with an LTV between the 5%-25% range.

For example, if the public incentives on offer for a particular day are 15%, a user who borrows within the LTV range will get a 20% boost in incentives in ALTI tokens, which comes to an APR of 18%.

So when you’re executing a strategy with low LTV, keep in mind that you also get this bonus yield.

The other benefit is the referral program that was recently introduced by Altitude.

The concept is simple: Anyone can generate a referral link and invite friends. As the referrer, you get 10% of the rewards generated. But here’s the difference.

With Altitude, the referee doesn’t lose a portion of their stack; they keep 100% of the rewards. Altitude adds 10% to the rewards they generated and gives it to the referrer.

As is often the case with Altitude, everyone wins.    

Concluding thoughts

Altitude is a change of pace that was necessary for this industry. Simple, elegant, and effective.

While all of us are caught in the crypto rat race of chasing the next hot narrative or scanning the next 1000x meme, Altitude offers the chance of playing the game in your own lane.

This game has always been a marathon, not a sprint.

So while everyone lines up for the hope of hitting a 1000x when they most likely hit -99%, you can simply stack yield on the side while having a little bit of borrowed USDC to play around with.

Using Altitude is like running the crypto marathon, but at Eliud Kipchoge’s pace. The choice is yours.

Thanks to the Altitude team for unlocking this article. All of our research and references are based on public information available in documents, etc., and are presented by blocmates for constructive discussion and analysis. To read more about our editorial policy and disclosures at blocmates, head here.