🔥AMA_ GTA x Apricot Finance🔥
Warm-up questions
Part 1: Introduction
1. Would you introduce yourself to the GTA Trading Community? Your background and why do you create Apricot Finance?
Hey everyone, I’m Cecilia, co-founder of Apricot. I came from a traditional finance background in credit investing. Having watched DeFi summer in 2020 and done more research on Solana and etc., I made the decision to start exploring some ideas based on what we find missing on market today earlier this year. Then I left my prior job to jump full time in the crypto space. The team behind Apricot has a diverse background in tech startup, finance and crypto in general, so we want to leverage our knowledge and experience to create something better and hopefully improve DeFi user experience in all possible ways.
2. Can you describe what Apricot Finance is in a few sentences?
Apricot is a next-gen lending protocol that supports cross-margin leveraged yield farming on Solana. Our mission is to help users maximize yield while protecting their downsides. So in short, with Apricot, users can:
1. Deposit assets to earn interests (Apricot Lend)
2. Borrow assets for trading or leveraged yield farming (Apricot X-Farm)
3. Pre-configure when and how automated deleveraging takes place (Apricot Assist)
Lend, X-Farm and Assist are our current three product offerings and they are highly integrated to create a complete user experience.
We are live on mainnet on Oct 19th, having accumulated $100mm TVL in 20mins, $200mm in 12hours and now over $400mm in ~2 weeks. We also raised funding from reputable funds like Delphi, Lemniscap, Solana capital etc in Aug.
3. What special things in the Apricot Finance project?
Yes, haha, my fav question! Really would encourage people to spend a little time to get to know us more and you will probably find that we have a couple innovations in what we offer. To break them down one by one by product -
Under Lend: although this seems like basic lending/borrowing, but (1) we can accept LP tokens as collateral, which not only do we auto-compound for you, you also earn borrowing power to do X-Farm. (2) moreover, we are also the first lending project on Solana that has a partnership with Terra, having just announced our support for UST and LUNA
Under X-Farm: we are the first to offer leveraged yield farming (LYF) a cross-margin basis, meaning that users can gain borrow power by depositing any assets under Lend to gain borrow power to farm. This differs from existing LYF platforms as they often require you to town LP constituents to start with or any platform-required tokens, which are not ideal if you don’t want to touch/trade your underlying principal assets to take unwanted long/short positions. Our X-Farm is highly integrated with our borrowing system such that you underlying principal collateral can stay untouched. Then, this works well with
Assist: last but not the least — arguably the best innovation we have to help users stay protected from volatilities and liquidation risks. This is not seen elsewhere, as we allow users to configure at what leverage level do they want to start auto-deleverage their portfolio, and Assist can automatically do that once the trigger level is hit. It can be triggered many times to allow users to stay below liquidaiton point.
4. Currently on the market are there any competitors?
Given our innovative features and integrated offerings, I truly believe that we don’t have any direct or similar competitors. However, we do face competition under each of product offering, and also under the broad umbrella of lending/money market category within Solana — as we also categorize ourselves as a next-gen lending protocol.
Without giving specific names, therea are competitors. However, we stand out in a couple ways. Most importantly, We are not just lending, and we have users’ interest in mind. We offering LFY to drive organic borrowing interest from Lend, and it’s created based on our mission to create more yields for users. Beyond that, we also have downside protection through Assist, as nobody wants to get liquidated at the end of the day.
On the more technical side, we are one, if not the only one, that didn’t simply fork Solana Program Libary codes for our lending contract, as we want to write our own contract to not only optimize for what what we do and also stay nimble in future innovations.
5. Could you tell more about Apricot Finance’s roadmap?
Of course. At Apricot, we are never short of ideas and it’s always more of a matter on what to prioritize. So, we have many things on our roadmap, but I think they broadly falls under two categories.
(1) Improving existing offerings, which include
- Adding more assets & pools
- Expand the coverage for Apricot Assist to make it more powerful even for advanced traders who can truly turn Assist into an auto trading feature to set the price and action triggers
(2) Expanding product offerings, which mostly involve
Things like finding more ways to generate yields for users as X-Farm is just one of the tools, we can add more strategies
6. Can you share with us what is the Apricot Finance token use case?
Haha, good qn as we just announed our plan to do public sale very shortly. For now and at the start, our upcoming APT tokens are mostly for governance purposes. We will be having staking pools for people to stake our tokens and earn more yields. Later on, we will explore sharing part of the protocol fees that we are generating with token holders once we have established our governance structure set up more properly. Before that, token value will be maintained and appreciated through mostly buyback.
Part 2: Questions form
Guest selected 5 best questions to answer sent before beginning of AMA:
- Please provide more information on your ApricotFinance ROADMAP. What are the most anticipated plans and events for the next few days and months that we should be aware of?
Yes, so I outlined some big categories above. But for now, I think the most important milestone coming up is definitely our public sale, which we are going to release more details next Monday. Really hope GTA community members could check us out.
2. Smart contract is very risky, many news pop up right now about some of other project being hacked, so how you convince your audiences here ApricotFinance?
Yes, of course! Security is of utmost importance, so that’s why despite us being the first lending protocol to get on testnet, we waited until we have done at least one full audit to get on mainnet. We are still soliciting more audit firms and currently being reviewed by another — just for context, Solana uses Rust, which is a kind of newer language so finding auditing firms is usually harder. Moreover, to make users more at ease, until we get a lot more audits, we are currently closed sourced, which would make it harder to get hacked.
3. What are your top priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year? Which part of the ApricotFinance project are you most focused on right now?
Haha, so bear with me as I’m going to mention our upcoming public sale and token launch again. It’s going to our number 1 near term priorities. Then the next one that involves product focus is definitely to improve our existing prodcut offerings to ensure a better user experience. Fore example, we are thinking of adding an in-app swap feature to let people easily swap assets to repay the remaining debt balance etc.
4. Is your ApricotFinance platform suitable for Crypto beginners? Or does it only appeal to professional users?
Totally welcome beginners to try our platform. We spent a long time simplifying our UI/UX to make it really user friendly, and you can see for yourself! The only part I would recommend people to do a little more research and understand the risks behind is leveraged yield farming — especially around what impermanent loss is etc. However, you can always check out our docs and other resources for these quesitons. Don’t forget to enable Assist at all time!
5. What about the audit company you work with? Do you have some partners already regarding audits?- Ibrahem Sobhy
Yes of couse. We have an audit with Halborn Security, and we are also working a Solana-recommended team to get reviewed. We are in talks with some more to get more eyes and also peer review too. In future, once we open source, we’ll have bug bounty programs for community too
Part 3: Community interaction
- I can’t find enough information for tokenomics on the website. Can you provide more details? What percentage of bets have you made? Will your platform go the coin burning route?
Anything regarding our upcoming and tokenomics will be released early next. Please follow our social media accounts for any updates! Espcially https://twitter.com/ApricotFinance
2. Revenue is a very important aspect for all projects to survive and maintain the project / company. What is the way to generate profit / revenue of token? What is the income model ?
So like many other lending project and even traditional banks, our revenue model isn’t that different as we will take interest rate spread. At the same time, we also takes a performance fee from the gains generated by users who are using our farming products — in that aspect, our revnue is the same as the farming protocols. We have multiple revenue sources.
3. What are the competitive advantages of your project? What advantages do you have that other competitors dont have ? What would be your project secure most similar contender in the market today in terms of scalability, security, features, and adaptability?
Hopefully my intro about our unique features give you a clear sense on how we are different and how in strict sense, we don’t really have any direct competitors. Our biggest advantage is that we have users’ interest in mind — therefore, we always look for ways or our mission is to help people earn more in a down-side protected way. We are the one who cares the most about the users.
4. Community support is one of the biggest aspects of a project’s success. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?
Yes, we fully acknowledge that community comes first, so therefore unlike many current Solana projects which are doing straight uncapped auction, we went ahead and are doing a whitelisting first and foremost. Please do stay tuned and follow our social media accounts for information on our public sale
5. What are the benefits of holding your token as long term investment? Can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors to keep the your token in the long run?
The benefit is that you’ve made the right decision as it’s a team that’s worth investing in ^^. We have both ideas and the ability to excute and the heart to do right things. Also, more importantly, we are already generating good positive cash flow despite being on mainnet for 2 weeks and those will be going to appreciate our token.
