Today, we're excited to introduce Linked Opportunities — a simple way to visualize connections between DeFi opportunities, liquidity flows, and cascading rewards in the Merkl app, providing greater clarity and helping you maximize your rewards.
In DeFi, liquidity often flows through multiple layers of smart contracts.
When you deposit liquidity into a vault, the vault manager can then deposit it into another vault or liquidity pool to maximize earnings.
On Merkl, for instance, you might see an opportunity like Provide liquidity to Uniswap v4 (parent opportunity), where you earn rewards by supplying liquidity directly to the pool.
At the same time, there could be another opportunity, such as Provide liquidity to the GammaUni v4 vault (child opportunity), where you earn rewards by supplying liquidity to Gamma — an automated liquidity manager — which then deposits a part of that liquidity into the Uniswap v4 pool!
Both the participants in the parent and child opportunities earn Univ4 LP rewards on Merkl!
By participating in a Merkl opportunity (the child opportunity), you could indirectly participating in another opportunity as well (the parent opportunity). Thanks to Merkl’s automatic reward forwarding, rewards from the parent opportunity cascade down to you.
Until now, these parent-child connections between opportunities weren’t always obvious to users. That’s why we now display Linked Opportunities in the Merkl app!
Merkl now displays parent-child relationships between opportunities directly in the app.
Click on an Opportunity > click on a Campaign > click on the Linked opportunities tab
You’ll see how one opportunity feeds into another, making liquidity flows easier to understand.
More importantly, you can compare linked opportunities to find the one that best fits your strategy. Indeed, each opportunity keeps its own eligibility rules and APR.
Sometimes, joining a child opportunity can be more rewarding than participating directly in the parent. For example, the child might earn rewards from the parent plus extra rewards from other incentive campaigns.
In other words, Linked Opportunities don’t just show you how opportunities are connected — they help you decide where your capital works hardest. This gives you the full picture and empowers you to make more informed choices.
Behind the scenes, this is all made possible by Merkl’s unique ability to automatically detect smart contract layers and forward rewards through them — what we call reward forwarding.
Whenever Merkl distributes rewards to a smart contract that itself qualifies for rewards, our system looks one level deeper and ensures that the final users — not just the smart contract — receive their share.
In fact, Merkl has already successfully tracked rewards through more than 7 layers of smart contract nesting to ensure they end up in your wallet!
With Linked Opportunities, Merkl makes DeFi rewards more transparent and more powerful:
This is another step toward our vision of making DeFi incentives easier to understand, easier to access, and ultimately more rewarding.