Thank you to the NanoNews Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with APY Finance on September 15, 2020. This guest star Will Shahda, CEO & Solidity Engineer. If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 67th AMA recap!
We are glad to meet here:
Will Shahda, CEO & Solidity Engineer
For taking your time out from busy schedule for the AMA!
Introduction Session
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Apy Finance?
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.
Q2: Can you briefly 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.
Q3: What companies/projects do you see as competitors, and how does Apy Finance stand out compared to them?
There are a couple of players in the yield farming aggregation space but they are either centralized or focus on lower-level yield farming automation.
APY’s big advantage is our smart routing system. By focusing on a portfolio of strategies rather than automating a single strategy at once, we mitigate yield dilution 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. What is the use-case of the Apy Finance?
We see three major pain points with the yield farming user experience: barrier-to-entry, time commitment, and cost.
There are a ton of people flooding to DeFi right now. Everyone is hearing about all this crazy action, all these crazy returns. Even BTC maxis are jumping into the ring with WBTC and renBTC. But what they face is an incredibly complicated landscape with lots of undefined risks.
I’ve talked to many crypto-natives that have suddenly taken an interest in DeFi, but found themselves lost on how to capture the opportunity. There is a big onboarding problem.
Once users figure out the best ways to yield farm, they find themselves stuck with a full time job. They spend all day on Crypto-Twitter trying to stay on top of the latest strategies, managing their positions, and assembling complicated spreadsheets to try and understand their actual ROI.
For many users, yield farming has also become far too expensive. Entering into a yield farming strategy can cost over $50 in gas fees. This creates a ton of friction for the average user, and optimizing their positions daily is completely out of the question.
APY.Finance 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. This makes onboarding very simple and very cheap.
Once a user has made their deposit the system automatically manages their portfolio of yield farming strategies. Continuously optimizing positions for yield, managing risks, and providing analytics to calculate ROI. Users can be hands-off, safe in the knowledge they are getting high yields without needing to commit hours a day to farming their crops.
Q5. What are the major milestones Apy Finance achieved so far & what are in future pipeline?
First, we are starting with our liquidity mining rewards program. We are allowing users to start depositing liquidity to earn APY before we begin running strategies. 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.
Twitter Session
Q1: We’re all know that September is a difficult month for the crypto world due to unstable market situation,
Why did you choose to hold a IDO for $APY token at this month? Do you see an opportunity with the current volatility in the markets??
We believe that underneath all the volatility, there is strong growth in DeFi and that yield farming will continue. We think there is huge opportunity for APY due to our product-market fit as well as all the excitement around DeFi.
Q2: How does the APY Finance Backup provide liquidity for exchange and how is the backup better than ordering a book? How is APY Finance changing the new DeFi ecosystem and what are the plans for the next few years?
There are two ways we hope to change DeFi in both the short and the long term.
We think our model for pooled liquidity is necessary for Ethereum today. The network is reaching the limits of its throughput and we need a more efficient way to handle these increasingly complex DeFi transactions. By pooling liquidity and then batching the movement of that liquidity to financial primitives in a single atomic transaction, not only are we creating enormous gas savings, we are reducing the number of transactions going out on the network. This reduces gas fees for everyone on Ethereum, not just users of our platform.
In the long term, the architecture we are building for governance will empower DAOs like never before. Right now DAOs have a limited ability to programmatically interact with complex financial primitives. With this architecture it will be possible for a DAO to automate the use of liquidity in a near endless variety of ways, without requiring a smart contract engineer to step in and create a new contract every time.
Q3: What algorithms and commision rate used in the APY Finance yield farming platform? Is it designed to make a passive income?
APY.Finance optimizes it’s yield farming strategy portfolio for the best risk-adjusted yield. The yields will depend heavily on the market, but the economy of scale provided by the system gives the user a better return than yield farming on their own by lowering their costs. It is absolutely a way to earn a passive income if you have any amount of capital to deploy.
Q4: Is the project only focused on benefiting farmers? Are there other features in particular that the project introduces to the community to encourage investment in the medium and long term? If so, what other than farming? Thank you!
APY.Finance is focused on yield farming and alleviating the pain points users face.
That being said, the architecture we’re building has larger implications than just yield farming. We see the potential for a whole new paradigm of DAOs.
The architecture we are developing for APY is so generalized that it could be used by a DAO to automate virtually any action on the Ethereum blockchain. We believe this could be the glue that ties DAOs to the world of DeFi financial primitives.
Q5: Have the smart contracts been audited by the blockchain system? is the safety guaranteed so feel safe when providing liquidation for $APY?
We take the security of our own contracts very seriously. Even though DeFi users have recently become comfortable jumping into unaudited contracts, we still want to hold ourselves to a high standard.
Our contracts are comprehensively tested and we use the latest smart contract best practices.
Once any contract is done with active development for its latest stable version, it will also be audited by a third party to verify its security.
However, securing our own contracts is not enough. By diversifying our smart contract risk with a portfolio of yield farming strategies, we also reduce the risk from vulnerabilities in external contracts.
Live AMA
Q1. How does APY automate the provision of financial liquidity? Also, what kind of special technology does APY use?
We allocate capital according to each strategy’s risk-adjusted yield. We believe it is important to have a diversified yield farming portfolio to avoid dilution of yield and diversify smart contract risk. Our smart routing system allows us to pool liquidity together and keep gas costs for user’s low when doing the heavy lifting of yield farming strategy deployment.
Q2. hello sir, Back to back so many AMA, don’t you get fed up with same old questions, What you expect from community?
It has been a ton of AMAs 😂. The best questions are the ones that make me think, dig deeper into APY, and explain how it works.
We have tokens allocated for community initiatives. We want to use these to incentivize community engagement and reward people for participating in APY governance. We hope to use these tokens to encourage members of the community to help onboard and educate others as well.
Q3. Now, some project have policies for their ambassadors to create a contribution and attract recognition for the project! So the APY Finance team plans to implement policies and incentives for your ambassadors?
We have tokens allocated for community initiatives. We want to use these to incentivize community engagement and reward people for participating in APY governance. We hope to use these tokens to encourage members of the community to help onboard and educate others as well.
Q4. Does the APY Finance team have a training and guidance system for newcomers to cryptocurrency? How do you attract and reach them?
We will be producing content to help onboard users and educate them about DeFi. We hope that this outreach brings in users interested in yield farming but intimidated by the barrier to entry.
We see the APY platform as a chance to educate users as well. Giving full transparency into our yield farming strategy portfolio, showing users how it works, what protocols are used, and what those protocols do.
Telegram: https://t.me/apyfinancechat
Telegram announcements: https://t.me/apyfinance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/apyfinance
Medium: https://medium.com/apy-finance
Website: https://apy.finance/
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