The Best Bull-Run LP Pairs: Agent Max's New User-Friendly Settings That Keep You In Range Longer (DAO King AMA)

The Update in One Sentence

Agent Max now gives you two ways to run every pool it recommends: the optima sweet spots (the absolute best backtested performance, which sometimes means long rebalance delays and a lot of time out of range) and a brand-new user-friendly, close-to-optima tier (a little wider, a shorter delay, and most of your time spent in range earning fees). The whole point of this DAO King AMA is to explain the difference, walk through the exact settings on the best pools, and show why "in range longer" doesn't mean "earning less."

DAO King's framing at the top of the call: "Alex has made it even more friendly where you're going to be in range even longer... he's really getting granular and this is absolutely breakthrough." Alex then spends the next 52 minutes proving it, pool by pool.

What Agent Max Is Actually Hunting

Alex is looking for one thing above all: accumulators. A pool is an accumulator when, over time, the position ends up holding more of the tokens than it started with — more ETH, more BTC, more SOL — because the fees and reward emissions out-earn the impermanent loss.

He looks at everything through the lens of ETH, because most of these pairs are paired with ETH and most holders are trying to stack more ETH through the cycle. If you end a period with more ETH than you started with — especially during a bear market — then when things take off in the bull market you capture that upside with a bigger bag. That's the accumulator thesis in one line.

The measuring stick for that is the "verse ETH" metric — annualized value versus ETH. When Alex says a setting is "41% annualized vs. ETH," he means: start with 1 ETH of value, and over a year these settings would have accumulated to roughly 1.41 ETH of value. The goal is always to push that number up while keeping realized impermanent loss low.

The Backtesting Engine Is the Moat

The reason Agent Max can find these pools — and the reason the numbers aren't reproducible anywhere else — is the backtesting engine Alex built. It runs on real pool data: real volume, real swap fees, real reward-token emissions, the compounding effect, realized impermanent loss, and Snuggle and MaxFi's 15% performance fee (charged on earnings only) — all factored in.

Critically, it's modeled true to how Snuggle's no-swap rebalancing actually behaves on-chain. That's what makes it different from any generic LP backtester. As Alex put it: this data is "basically useless anywhere else unless you're having a timer on your phone saying rebalance every three hours after you've gone out of range." You physically cannot run these strategies by hand or on a swap-based platform — the friction would eat you alive. The backtest is built to the smart contracts, so the results map to what actually happens when you deposit.

Out of 1,600+ pools on Base with decent liquidity, Agent Max flagged about 20 as standout accumulators — "absolute monsters" that accumulate quicker and more aggressively than anything else on the chain. This AMA is a tour through the best of them.

⚠️ A note on all the numbers below: they're backtested over roughly a 145-150 day regime that Alex describes as one of the slowest, lowest-volume stretches of the bear market. He considers them conservative — live volume in a bull market often runs two-to-four times higher — but backtested performance is not a guarantee. Live APRs move with volume, emissions, and price. Treat every figure here as a reference point, not a promise.

The Problem With Pure Optima

Over the last month, Snuggle and MaxFi released the first batch of Agent Max picks and a lot of users dove straight in. Some of them picked the raw optima settings — and ran into a user-experience wall.

The optima settings are, by definition, the best backtested performers. But "best" sometimes looks like a 172-hour rebalance delay where the position sits out of range 70% of the time. Over a long window, those exact settings crush it. But in the moment, a newer or more impatient user watching a position sit idle — not earning fees — gets frustrated and starts wondering if something's broken.

Nothing is broken. As Alex explained: "Time out of range is actually part of the strategy for minimizing impermanent loss." When your position is out of range on Snuggle or MaxFi, it isn't bleeding — it's parked one tick-space from the price, waiting to earn again, and not realizing new IL in the meantime. The long delay filters out short-term wicks so you're not chasing every move. Over 150 days, that patience is what produces the monster cover ratios. But you need faith in the data to sit through it.

The Fix: Settings That Sit Right Next to Optima

So Alex built a second backtesting pass — one that runs tens of thousands of configurations on each individual pool. The insight: right above and below the absolute optima, in both the range widths and the rebalance delays, there are settings with nearly identical results that happen to be a little wider, have a shorter delay, and spend a much higher percentage of time in range.

You give up a sliver of theoretical maximum. In exchange, you're earning fees most of the time, and — in Alex's words — "it just feels way better." Everyone loves seeing their position in range with the earnings ticking up hour by hour. The user-friendly tier is designed to give you that while still landing you on a monster accumulator.

Here's what that looks like pool by pool.

WETH/cbBTC on PancakeSwap — The Most Blue-Chip Pair

This is as blue-chip as a correlated pair gets: wrapped ETH and Bitcoin, two of the top three assets in all of crypto.

• Optima (moderate): 2% wide range, 75-hour delay. 3.95x cover value, ~41% annualized vs. ETH — but only 47% time in range. More than half the month sitting out.
• User-friendly (moderate): 4.6% wide range, 16-hour delay. Still a 3.13x cover value — $3.13 earned per $1 of impermanent loss — with far more time in range.

Same monster accumulator, much smoother ride. Alex's framing on the math: a blue-chip correlated pair like this, compounded over a two-year window into the bull run, can turn a starting position into several times its size — and because it's ETH and BTC, your position value also rises as the underlying tokens appreciate. He's careful to note these regime numbers are lower than what live pools have been paying recently, so he treats them as a conservative floor.

SOL/WETH — The Compounding Play of the Moment

SOL/WETH is the position Alex is most animated about, and he runs it on two different DEXes.

On Aerodrome (a "chunky" pool with 2% tick spacing, meaning you can only set your range on discrete 2%-wide units):

• Optima (moderate): 4% wide, 3-hour delay. 74% time in range, 2.75x cover value, and a "verse ETH" of 1.91 — roughly 91% annualized vs. ETH. Almost doubling your ETH-denominated value over a year, before the tokens themselves move.
• User-friendly (moderate): ~8% wide (it snaps to the 2% tick spacing), 3-hour delay. 84% time in range, 4.75x cover value, ~59% annualized vs. ETH — nearly the same accumulator with far more time earning.

Alex showed two live views of the same uSOL/WETH pool. The raw-LP (unstaked) version — earning the swap fees only, auto-compounded 50/50 — was about 8 days old, running a ~140% rate on fees alone, with only one rebalance in that stretch. The staked version of the pool trades those swap fees for AERO emissions (on Aerodrome it's fees OR AERO, never both), and with AERO on a tear it was running closer to ~200% at the time of recording. Both variants exist across Snuggle and MaxFi — and on a high-volume pool like this one the raw-LP fees can rival or beat the staked AERO, which is why Agent Max often runs these unstaked. The team noted the pool is so fee-rich that Snuggle and MaxFi users are capturing an outsized share of all fees flowing through it, precisely because no one else can position as tightly.

On PancakeSwap (a finer-tick pool, not chunky), the same pair earns CAKE on top of its swap fees — PancakeSwap farming is additive, so a staked position keeps 100% of the swap fees and earns CAKE emissions as well:

• User-friendly (moderate): 6.72% wide, 17-hour delay. 85% time in range, 4.54x cover value, ~21% annualized vs. ETH. (The pure optima on this pool runs much tighter and more patient — roughly 2% wide on a 113-hour delay — which is exactly why the wider, friendlier band is the better everyday setting.)

Both SOL/WETH surfaces are the same underlying accumulator thesis (Solana vs. ETH, ~92% correlated) on two different DEXes with two different reward tokens — a diversification choice, not a contradiction.

AAVE/WETH on Uniswap — The Recovery-Token Lens

AAVE is a special case, and Alex uses it to teach a lesson about reading the data through the right lens. AAVE crashed on a protocol exploit earlier and then recovered hard — it's strong again and, in Alex's read, not going anywhere.

• User-friendly (go wide): 27.89% wide, 1-hour delay. You're in range 96% of the time — earning almost constantly. 2.08x cover value, ~51% annualized vs. ETH.

The key caveat: don't judge this pool by its "verse HODL" number, because it's a recovery token that pumped hard off the exploit lows — that would flatter the result. Look at it through the "verse ETH" accumulator lens instead. Alex also showed a live AAVE/WETH position running much tighter — 6% wide / 3-hour delay — printing a ~200% earning rate, but with 14 rebalances, which means it's taking on more realized impermanent loss than the wide setting. His point: the tight setting juices the earnings rate, but the wide user-friendly setting protects you and still accumulates beautifully. Which one is "right" depends on your read of the token and your tolerance — that's where a little market context matters.

The Mechanic That Makes It All Possible

Fourteen rebalances would be a disaster on any other platform. Here's why it isn't on Snuggle and MaxFi, in Alex's own words:

"There are no swap fees, there is no slippage, no price impact, no MEV extraction on any of the rebalances. It uses Snuggle rebalancing, which just slides the range up next to the price one tick-space away, waits for the price to drift back in, and you're earning again. So you minimize impermanent loss by 40 to 50% per rebalance."

That's the whole edge. On a swap-based system, every rebalance swaps your tokens to rebuild the position — and some systems charge up to ~1% per swap. Run 20 rebalances and 20% of your capital is simply gone to friction, before you even count IL. Because Snuggle never swaps through the AMM, Snuggle and MaxFi can go places no one else can: chunky 2%-tick pools, ultra-tight ranges, high-rebalance settings. As Alex put it, "we're coming into parts of the liquidity pool where nobody else can sit."

One honest caveat that runs through the whole video: impermanent loss is minimized, not eliminated. Snuggle removes the swap-based costs entirely and cuts realized IL by 40-50% per rebalance, but a real, small amount of IL is still realized — the whole game is out-earning it with fees, which is what the cover ratio measures.

VVV/WETH — The Speculative Juicer

Not every pick is blue-chip. VVV/WETH is a more speculative pool that Alex flags as a portfolio "juicer" — size it accordingly against your mostly blue-chip core.

• Moderate: 27% wide, 7-hour delay. 82% time in range, 2.45x cover, and a huge 334% annualized vs. ETH — 1 ETH of value compounding to ~3.34 ETH of value over the year, even after impermanent loss, because it's grown so fast.
• Conservative (optima): wider still — DAO King liked this one at ~64% wide, ~217% earning rate, very little IL, and a 6.5x cover value.

Alex's warning is explicit: these are more speculative tokens, so allocate carefully — mostly blue-chip, with a smaller slice in the juicers if you want the extra earning rate and the fun of watching it.

AERO/cbBTC on Aerodrome — The Community Favorite

The community sniffed this one out on their own, and the cover values explain why they love it. It's a chunky 2%-tick pool.

• Optima: 8% wide, 140-hour rebalance delay. Only 54% time in range — but a 24.5x cover value, a 178% earning rate, and 186% annualized vs. ETH. AERO goes on runs and comes back, so a long delay is the sweet spot: it barely rebalances, realizes almost no IL, and rides the AERO strength.
• User-friendly: ~27% wide, 3-hour delay. 95% time in range, over 9x cover value. Very little impermanent loss, massive verse-ETH.
• Aggressive (user-friendly): 19% wide / 41-hour delay — still 84% time in range, ~122% total APR, and an 11x+ cover value. The 200%+ earning rate lives instead on the super-aggressive optima — a tight ~2% band on a 72-hour delay (~198% total APR) — but that one sits in range only 21% of the time, which is for users who fully trust the data.

Alex showed a live raw-LP position here running the 8% wide / 142-hour optima with zero rebalances in 8 days and a 116% earning rate — a position that spent much of its life out of range and still accumulated hard, while both Bitcoin and AERO appreciated underneath it.

The Two Flywheels

Several of these pools pay a reward token — CAKE on top of the fees on PancakeSwap, AERO instead of the fees on staked Aerodrome pools — so Alex closes with the flywheel concept: compound those rewards into more accumulators instead of letting them sit.

The AERO flywheel: if you're running a staked Aerodrome pool (a staked uSOL/WETH, for example) that's paying AERO emissions, take that AERO and drop it into the AERO/cbBTC pool with the moderate setting. Now your reward tokens are themselves accumulating against Bitcoin at a 9x+ cover value.

The CAKE flywheel: every PancakeSwap pool pays CAKE on top of its LP swap fees. Rather than let CAKE pile up in your wallet, compound it into the CAKE/WETH pool:

• User-friendly (moderate): 9.42% wide, 9-hour delay. 92% time in range, 3.11x cover value, ~52% annualized vs. ETH.
• The pure optima runs tighter and far more patient: 6.72% wide / 123-hour delay — only 69% time in range, but a ~19x cover value.

Either way, "free" reward tokens become new positions that earn more tokens — and if CAKE and ETH each 2x-3x into the bull run, so does your compounded position value. (On a swap-based system you'd be forced into a ~65% wide range to run CAKE/WETH at all, with a very low earning rate — another thing only the no-swap mechanic makes viable.)

You always have the simpler option, too: just recycle each pool's rewards back into that same pool. The flywheel is for when you want to route them somewhere with even higher edge.

Why User-Friendly Wins for Most People

Toward the end, both hosts landed on the same conclusion: for the majority of users, the user-friendly settings are simply the better choice. DAO King put it plainly on the CAKE/WETH example — given the choice between the tighter, more patient optima (6.72% wide / 123-hour delay: a ~19x cover value and ~60% APR, but in range only 69% of the time) and the wider, friendlier 9.42% / 9-hour setting (92% in range, ~64% APR), "I would go with the 9%." It's a smoother ride, you're in range longer, and — as Alex said — "I love checking my position and seeing more positions in range. You refresh the page and your earnings have gone up more and more. It just feels good."

That's the entire spirit of the update: keep the accumulation, drop the anxiety.

The Long Game: Bear Accumulation Into the 4-Year Cycle

The strategic frame underneath all of it is the Bitcoin 4-year cycle. We're in the bear-market accumulation window; the next leg typically begins around October/November. The move is to accumulate correlated-pair positions now, token-denominated, so that when the market runs into 2027-2029 you're carrying a much bigger bag into the upside.

Alex's math on why this matters: if SOL and ETH each 2x over two years, a compounded LP position doesn't do a 2x — it does an 8.5x, because you've been stacking extra tokens the whole way and those tokens appreciate. At a 3x it's closer to a 12x. Last cycle Alex ran a cruder version of this play and did about a 4x; this cycle, with the no-swap tech layer added, his stated goal is a minimum 8.5x and potentially higher. He's verifying it live with a real portfolio (he referenced roughly $60K running across these positions) to confirm the present and future results line up with the backtests — and in several cases, he says, the live pools are currently outperforming even the backtest during the July relief rally.

The recurring discipline: two weeks is noise. You need months of data across high-volume and low-volume periods to learn a pool's true earning rate. Anyone who jumps in, sees a slow week, and bails is misreading temporary conditions as the trend.

The Alligator Strategy: Rotate Before the Run

The most actionable takeaway is the "alligator strategy" — positioning ahead of the bull run. If you're sitting in WETH/USDC or BTC/USDC, you have a capped-upside problem: say your range is $1,500-$1,900. Once ETH blows past $1,900, the position fully converts to USDC, you stop appreciating, and you'd have to keep buying back at higher prices — paying fees, realizing IL — every time it moves. That's exactly the wrong position for a market about to run.

The alligator move: take those WETH and BTC legs and rotate them into correlated pairs — ETH/BTC, SOL/ETH, AAVE/ETH, LINK/ETH. Correlated pairs never fully convert to a capped asset, so you keep 100% of the upside while still earning aggressive fees through the chop. Alex called the bottom of the May-June drawdown as the ideal moment; roughly half the user base rotated then, ahead of the July relief rally, and those portfolios have been printing since. The window to reposition is before the market really starts moving.

The TVL Story

Alex closed by sharing the growth chart. Snuggle and MaxFi's combined TVL was essentially zero in February; at the time of recording it was $1.72 million and on an exponential rise. The May market dump, the June alligator-strategy pivot, and the July relief rally are all visible in the curve — inflows accelerating, position values climbing. He noted the current month was already more than half of the prior month's inflows just six days in.

His read: while other rebalancing platforms are losing TVL through this stretch (they don't get the upside of correlated pairs and they don't share this strategy data with users), Snuggle and MaxFi keep growing because capital flows to the most capital-efficient system — and because the team is actively trying to help users win rather than just charging them for every rebalance and compound along the way. Both hosts floated $10M TVL by end of year as a realistic target, with the bull run being the real unknown to the upside.

Try Snuggle

The best way to evaluate any of this is to put a small amount into one of the recommended pools and let it run for a week or two — remembering that a slow first week is noise, not signal.

1. Deposit on Snuggle (or MaxFi — same protocol, same pools, same settings) — connect your wallet and pick one of the pools from this update: uSOL/WETH on Aerodrome, WETH/cbBTC or SOL/WETH on PancakeSwap (swap fees + CAKE), the community-favorite AERO/cbBTC, or CAKE/WETH. The aggressive, moderate, and conservative presets — including the new user-friendly settings — are pre-loaded.
2. Choose optima or user-friendly. For most people, start with the user-friendly moderate preset — you'll spend the majority of your time in range earning fees, which is the smoother way to learn the system.
3. Track it on the Positions page — fully liquid, no lockups, withdraw whenever. Watch the token-denominated accumulation and the cover ratio rather than the daily dollar value. That's the accumulator lens the whole AMA keeps returning to.

The Snuggle Discord is where the rolling release of the rest of the ~20-pool lineup is announced, and you can follow @SnuggleFi for updates as Agent Max ships fresher, more user-friendly settings.

⚠️ Not financial advice. Every APR, cover value, "verse ETH" figure, and multi-year projection in this article is a backtested or modeled snapshot over a slow-volume regime at the time of recording — live results move with volume, reward emissions, and price. Backtested and projected performance are not guarantees. Impermanent loss is minimized here, not eliminated. DeFi involves impermanent loss, smart-contract risk, market risk, and liquidity risk. Read the full risk disclosure at /risks before depositing.