Introducing Accrue Finance — a new Solana product that maximizes your APY
Disclaimer: This article does not represent the views of Robinhood Markets Inc., nor is it intended as investment advice.
Our Story
My pseudonym is Apollo. I’m an ex-Robinhood engineer and former CTO of a Y Combinator startup. I wear jackets when it’s 70 degrees outside. Mars, my co-founder, dropped out of an Ivy League to join a tiny startup that now has over one million users. He wants to buy a pistachio farm.
We both wrestled with the obstructions of traditional finance in our day jobs. At his startup, Mars created an accounting system that now powers $100M in GMV but runs on slow ACH rails. At Robinhood, I helped synchronize siloed ledgers with millions of transactions.
Through our jobs, we saw how challenging it is to build great user experiences on top of TradFi’s antiquated foundations. Companies have to consume losses and undertake significant risk, which makes their products more expensive and brittle. Our frustrations with traditional finance led us to crypto.
Future of Finance
Solana. Solana’s innovative architecture presents a realistic path to mass adoption, while retaining the benefits of decentralization. We believe that decentralized financial services built on Solana can supplant their traditional counterparts as a result of their enhanced interoperability, automation, and liquidity. This bold future will not happen automatically; it requires thousands of tenacious operators and investors to battle through the many challenges ahead.
Yield. Many retail investors are primarily interested in long-term financial gain, contrary to the “crazed meme-stock kid” stereotype that some media outlets have portrayed. The problem is, normal people often lack sufficient knowledge to make well-placed stock bets, instead relying on superficial data to dictate their portfolio. Inflation is on the rise, and the future of the stock market is highly unpredictable after its last two years of performance. Mars and I predict that lending products on blockchains will become increasingly popular amongst consumers due to their low operating costs, greater accessibility, and trustless nature. Mars and I see a future where most people have diversified portfolios of stable DeFi yield products, balanced by more risky stock bets.
Life is all about our experiences, and money enables us to have more of them. The advent of DeFi is a generational opportunity to redefine the way people exchange value. That’s why we’re quitting the web2 jobs we worked so hard to acquire. That’s why we’re starting Accrue Finance.
Accrue Finance
When Mars and I were exploring lending protocols, we stumbled upon something very interesting. We found that there are MASSIVE APY differences across the major lending protocols. This is especially true for lower market cap tokens, like $RAY and $ORCA. In the graph below, you can see how one major protocol offers 100% APY for lending $RAY, while another protocol simultaneously offers 30% APY.
Even for more stable assets like $SOL, there are often significant differences. The graph below shows how one protocol is offering 12% APY right now, while the other protocols are offering 2%!
We wanted to share these insights with the Solana community, so we created our first product — Radar. It gives you a pulse into the Solana ecosystem by surfacing the APY data of the top lending protocols.
Want to give it a try? At the time of writing this, our product is only available to early access users. If you join our Discord and follow us on Twitter, you can know right when we launch.
We expect Radar to become much more than a data aggregator for lending protocols. There are myriad yield-generating opportunities in the Solana ecosystem that reside fragmented across websites. Rather than launching several products at once to tackle this problem, we wanted to start small with a salient pain point and iterate incrementally as we talk to our beloved users. ❤
Our goal with Accrue is to get our users the best APY when they lend their tokens. Radar is our first step in this journey of one thousand miles. If you’d like to take part in this adventure, we’d love to have you join the cru on Twitter and Discord.
Sincerely,
Apollo + Mars 🚀
