Thank you to the Bang Pateng Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with APY.Finance on September 20, 2020. This guest star Mr. Will Shahda (CEO of APY.Finance). If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 2nd AMA recap!
We are glad to meet here:
Mr. Will Shahda – CEO of APY.Finance
Introduction Session
Before we start our first segment kindly introduce yourself to the community?
I’m Will Shahda, the founder of APY.Finance.
I’ve been involved in the crypto space for awhile, and in particular got involved with DeFi starting in 2018. When all the speculation from the 2017 ICO craze ended, the only people still in the space were truly committed to the tech. During this time is when we saw DeFi come into the picture.
As a technologist, I was excited to see a new segment of crypto providing real value to users. DeFi got back to the roots of crypto, programmable money. The platforms that were being built were useful now, not in some hypothetical blockchain future.
During this time I started attending as many Ethereum development hackathons as possible. Building teams to hack on a project under tight deadlines. The more my teams competed, the more we won.
The most recent hackathon I participated in was HackMoney. It was here that the idea for APY.Finance was born.
Question Segment 1
Q1. Could you please describe, what is APY.Finance?
APY.Finance is a yield farming robo-advisor that focuses on user experience and risk management.
There are three major pain points with the yield farming user experience: barrier-to-entry, time commitment, and cost.
APY solves these pain points by giving users a single place to deposit their liquidity. All it takes is a low cost transaction to deposit. The platform handles all the heavy lifting of yield farming by pooling everyone’s liquidity and distributing the gas cost.
We also use a risk assessment framework to assign every strategy a risk score. APY then distributes user liquidity across a portfolio of yield farming strategies to optimize for risk-adjusted yields.
Q2. How to buy APY Token? How much supply is available?
We will be kicking off our public liquidity rewards program soon so early supporters will have a chance to earn the token.
After that we are moving forward with an IDO and exchange listing in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for more updates on this.
You can also find more information about our token economics in our recent article announcing the APY token: https://medium.com/apy-finance/introducing-the-apy-token-edac64d0cf6b
Q3. How are you different and unique from all other yield farming projects out there?
APY is a yield farming aggregator. It sits on top of other yield farming protocols, routing capital to optimize returns. There are a couple of other projects attempting to automate yield farming, but there are a few advantages to APY.
The first big advantage we have is in our smart routing system. By focusing on a portfolio of strategies rather than automating a single strategy at once, we mitigate yield dilution, optimize for risk-adjusted yield, and diversify smart contract risk. It also allows us to be completely strategy agnostic.
Second is our liquidity pool. Everyone can deposit into the same liquidity pool and get exposure to this portfolio of strategies. Other platforms have many fragmented pools, increasing complexity and forcing users to understand the differences between them in order to make their own decision about strategy and risk. A single pool also increases the economy of scale for users, reducing their yield farming costs.
Third is the architecture we are building for full community governance. It will give the community incredible control over strategies that the platform includes in its portfolio. Imagine being able to use a UI similar to https://furucombo.app/ that allows you to create a strategy and propose it to the APY platform.
Q4. Can you explain, what are your upcoming plans in a couple of month/years?
First, we are kicking off the liquidity mining rewards program. We are allowing users to start depositing liquidity to earn APY before we begin running strategies. We will also have an IDO and exchange listing in the coming weeks.
From there, when we have reached the MVP for our initial strategy portfolio, we will do an alpha launch. We are well on our way to hit this target the engineering team has been making amazing progress.
After the alpha launch we begin our plan of progressive decentralization.
We will give APY token holders increasing control over the system. Allowing them to propose changes to strategies and eventually allowing them propose entirely new strategies.
We are developing a generalized strategy architecture with our smart contracts that will support community control over discrete steps in our strategies, The community will be able to propose changes that can be deployed automatically without the need of a smart contract engineer to develop new contracts.
We hope to show a demo of how this will look in the coming months as well.
Question from Twitter
Q1. APY seeks through its smart contract to redirect my funds to the best yield farming strategies, then will I get different tokens depending on where my funds go or will I receive APY tokens as a reward?
You will receive stablecoin from the APY liquidity pool and you will receive APY tokens from the liquidity mining program.
Tokens that are mined by the APY strategy portfolio are continuously swapped for strategy input tokens to compound returns. When a user withdraws their stake from APY, a portion of liquidity is unwound from the portfolio and swapped into the appropriate stablecoin to return to the user.
Separately, users benefit from our liquidity mining program. We distribute APY tokens to our users as an incentive to join the platform. It also helps us achieve a wider distribution of APY token holders that we hope will participate in governance of the system.
Q2. What is APY biggest challenge in blockchain future? And how will you handle it? How important is community support for the APY project? and how do you plan to build a large community and develop Blockchain?
Our biggest challenge is to stay on the forefront of the latest developments in DeFi. It’s a space of rapid innovation and there are new paradigms every month.
That being said, our team is passionate about DeFi an we believe we are well equipped to stay immersed in this industry.
Community support is important for any decentralized platform and we believe the best way to build community is to give value. We want to educate users on DeFi, help onboard them into the ecosystem, and most importantly earn them yield.
Even before early governance features are released, we want to listen closely to our community when making decisions about the direction of APY. As long as we empower and incentivize our community, we believe they will be active participants. We want our community to feel real ownership over the APY platform.
In early stages, we think our liquidity mining program will help bootstrap users and generate interest in the platform.
Q3. The Liquidity Mining Rewards program of Apy Finance was recently announced. How can we participate as miners, and what are the reward % and dates of distribution?
You’ll have to wait for the official announcement on that. Don’t worry, it’s coming incredibly soon and we think you’ll like it �
Q4. Apy finance’s team mission is to democratize yield farming. What are the key points of the current way yield farming is developed that needs to be changed to achieve that, and what is your approach for it?
Democratizing yield farming necessitates the accessibility of yield farming. We need to cross the chasm for crypto-natives trying to earn permissionless yield.
We need simple no-nonsense onboarding. Even pools that automate parts of DeFi still require substantial domain knowledge to understand.
We also need to reintroduce proper risk management. Increasing amounts of anon developers forking projects has been creating misaligned incentives under the guise of fair launches. We need to keep a watchful eye over where millions of USD are being allocated. Risk management is healthy for the entire DeFi ecosystem and will help it grow in a sustainable way.
This is why we have the APY liquidity pool. A single place where users can deposit funds to get exposure across the entire DeFi ecosystem. It is also why we have the APY strategy portfolio. The system can manage risk by optimizing for risk-adjusted return.
Q5. On your website I can see that one of your Advisors is the founder of Jarvis! How Jarvis is correlated with http://APY.FINANCE? What is the contribution that Jarvis makes to http://APY.FINANCE? What are the profits? Thank you!
The founder of Jarvis, Pascal, is an advisor to APY. He has built an incredible community around Jarvis and we hope to build a community just as committed.
I have worked with Pascal in the past and have incredible respect for the way he conducts business. He is also very networked in the industry and has helped APY build relationships with critical connections.
We also hope to integrate with Jarvis and leverage their own yield farming programs as part of our strategies. I personally helped build their Synthereum platform, so I have first-hand knowledge of the benefits of being a Synthereum liquidity provider.
Segment Free Asking
Q1. What is APY’s biggest challenge during alpha launch? and how do you respond?
The biggest challenge for an alpha launch is the security of smart contracts. We believe that “move fast and break things” works when you’re basically an ad platform, but not when your building software that handles a user’s money. Many projects in DeFi are shooting from the hip a little too much and we think that it’s not healthy for the ecosystem overall.
We want to ensure that our launch goes smoothly and that we’ve done everything we can to cover the attack surface on our smart contracts when we release.
Q2. Many investors hit and run in the sell and sell session after listing on the first exchange, How did #APYfinance prevent early investors from selling their tokens and what benefits would #APYfinance give them?
We believe that people will see the long term power the APY token can have when used for governance and seek to hold it. Fundamentally it is a utility token and we see it’s utility greatly increasing in the future as we move forward with our roadmap to fully decentralized governance.
We are also looking into a staking mechanism that would allow users to lockup APY in exchange for greater APY rewards as well. Encouraging APY token holders to be aligned with the long term vision of the platform.
Q3. What are the ways are you generating profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model? How can it make benefit win-win to both investors and your project?
We do not have any fees baked into the system from the start. However, it is entirely possible for the community to vote in fees using the governance token if they chose to.
We hope to make APY a self-sustaining community-owned system that in the future will not be dependent on us at all.
When this vision has been fully achieved, the APY token will have considerable power with regard to the allocation of capital. This power can create and destroy a significant amount of value through governance decisions.
Q4. �The Liquidity Mining Rewards program of Apy Finance was recently announced. How can we participate as miners, and what are the reward % and dates of distribution
�. The team of APY finance is committed to the long-term success of the project, so the team has adopted a 4 year vest. Feeling confident and also onsideeing it the best for investors, would you explain is this design and how it ia benefitial for vestors
You will have to wait for the official announcement detailing the exact amount of rewards that will be given for our liquidity mining program. Don’t worry, the announcement will be extremely soon.
We have adopted the 1 year cliff, 4 year vest for team tokens because we believe it aligns our incentives with long term growth of the project. This has been the standard in the startup world for a long time. We’ve seen a number of supposedly fair launches where the “team” has no tokens. Yet somehow the team seems to make off with millions just a couple of weeks later.
Because we are a known team based in the US, it is important we comply with regulations. We believe this provides another layer of trust and safety for those using the APY platform or obtaining the APY token.
Q5. A) To archieve the success any Project needs an aggresive Marketing, so can you tell me what are your strategies to become more popular and gain mass adoption? B) What is the Smart Routing and what is its role into APY Finance ?
To answer (B):
Smart routing is what lets us operate at such a high level of yield farming aggregation. Instead of automating very low level operations of single strategies, we can look at things from a bird’s eye view and automate the movement of capital between a much wider variety of financial primitives. This gives our users the advantage of diversified smart contract risk and lower volatility of their returns.
We see this smart routing as the living, breathing form of capital called superfluid capital. Capital that is always in motion and always routing liquidity to the financial primitives that need it the most.
MORE INFO ABOUT APY.Finance
Web : https://apy.finance
Telegram : https://t.me/apyfinancechat
Twitter : https://twitter.com/apyfinance
Medium : https://medium.com/apy-finance
Announcement channel : https://t.me/apyfinance