Alpaca Finance July 2021 Recap

July was a momentous month for Alpaca Finance. We climbed to #3 on BNB Chain in terms of TVL and won Binance’s Most Valuable Builder competition. In addition, we doubled our buyback & burn rate, launched new pools, and added innovative tools to make leveraged yield farming more versatile, while continuously striving to improve our security. Here is a recap of what we’ve accomplished this month.

🏆Won Binance’s Most Valuable Builder II Competition

Alpaca Finance became a winner of Binance’s Most Valuable Builder II (MVBII). The competition spanned 3 months and saw >500 applicants. Ten winners were chosen based on product innovation, security, community, and transaction volume. Winners will be listed in Binance’s Innovation Zone, and potentially receive direct investment from Binance.

📈Valuation Metrics Rising

Alpaca Finance’s metrics continue to improve. Notably, we became #3 on BNB Chain in terms of TVL and #21 across all multi-chain DeFi projects. This month, users holding ALPACA increased by 13% month-over-month (+5000 holders) to over 42,000 holders. Our MarketCap/TVL and MarketCap/Outstanding Loans also remain the lowest among DeFi projects, indicating Alpaca Finance may still be undervalued.

👀ALPACA is becoming a hot commodity

In July, our token was ranked the #1 traded token on BNB Chain by BSCDaily, the #1 traded token among borrow/lend protocols by Cryptolaxy, and the #3 traded token among DeFi apps by Dapp.com.

🔥Doubling Buyback & Burn

In July, we burned a total of 440,552 ALPACA worth ~$312,000. We also implemented changes that doubled our ALPACA burn rate. Starting July 28th, we adjusted our fees closer to industry standards, with the majority of additional revenue going to buyback & burn of ALPACA, as explained in this Medium post. Also, starting July 18th, we changed the liquidation fee for 3rd party liquidators, so that 80% of the fee began to go to buyback & burn of ALPACA.

🚀Launched TUSD Partnership With 40Mn+ Capital Infusion

We formed a major partnership with TrueUSD to launch a TUSD lending pool & leveraged yield farming pools. As a vote of confidence in Alpaca, TrueUSD deployed 40+ million TUSD into our lending pool in two rounds. Users became able to lend and stake their TUSD for up to 9% APY(current rate). The TUSD pool also allowed Alpaca to onboard leveraged TUSD-token farming pairs. We have added TUSD-USDT and TUSD-BUSD farming pools (max 4x leverage), where users can now earn up to 21% APY. This article and video will guide you through the easy steps of leveraged farming stablecoins.

💱sALPACA redemption

Our sALPACA vault finally reached term completion of 4 months. Our locked ALPACA rewards were released but ALPACA price managed to stay stable, proving our rewards management plan succeeded! ALPACA holders can now sit back and farm without worrying about any rewards lockup potentially causing a selloff. It’s all beautiful green pastures from here.

🌾New Farming Pools Added

This month, we launched six new farming pools, including a pair with AXS — the hottest new crypto of July. The yield on our farming pairs, with or without leverage, remains the highest on BNBChain.

APY
787% AXS-BNB (3x)
587% ORBS-BUSD (2x)
14% BUSD-TUSD (4x)
19% USDT-TUSD (4x)
93% TRX-BNB (3x)
1004% BTT-BNB (3x)

😊New Tools and Improved User Experience

Adjust leverage level. We released a tool completely new to leveraged yield farming: You can now increase or decrease your leverage level in an active position. This tool allows you to amplify your potential gains or decrease your risk. With the Your Positions dashboard, simply click on “Adjust Position” and click on “Borrow More?” to adjust your leverage.

Oracle Guard Bot. Our community members made a Telegram channel to track our Oracle Guard activations and deactivations. When activated, the Oracle Guard temporarily pauses opening, closing, and adjusting of new positions to prevent price manipulation and attacks. If users are looking to exit a position quickly but the Oracle Guard happens to be activated for that pair, the Telegram channel is particularly useful in alerting users when the Oracle Guard deactivates

User-requested features added:

• Stablecoin filter on our farming pools
• Integration of Alpaca within Huobi Wallet’s Mobile App
• Docs integrated with seven languages
• When opening/adjusting a position, you will see your Share of Pool (%) for both Alpaca & the integrated DEX
• 1x positions no longer show liquidation threshold or safety buffer
• Farm page pairs default to selecting borrowed asset with highest APY
• Added social link to our NFTs
• Slope 2 of interest rate model was shifted from 50->60% to optimize utilization
• After choosing a leverage level on the Farm page, it stays on that leverage when opening a position

🏅Listing on BitMart

ALPACA was listed on BitMart, joining KuCoin, MEXC, and Gate.io as centralized exchanges where ALPACA can be traded. We actively continue to pursue listings on more exchanges and are in the middle of various listing pipelines.

🎭New Grazing Farms and NFTs

This month, we launched two new Grazing farms with our partners Wault Finance and Orbs. Users who staked 500/5000/50,000 (3 tiers) ibALPACA into the WEX farm before July 21st for at least 27 days (details) or the ORBS farm before July 14th for at least 27 days (details) will earn a special Alpaca NFT. Follow our Twitter to learn when new Grazing farms will be launched.

We gave out Grazing farm NFTs for the campaigns that finished this month as well — $FORM (FormationFi) and $ODDZ (Oddz Finance). We also gave out a special NFT to participating viewers of our AMA with TrueUSD. Finally, we released Episode 3 of our animated NFT short film — Little Al and the Magical Alpaca Farm.

All NFTs can be viewed on Project Galaxy and traded on the secondary market on Treasureland. Interestingly, Alpaca NFTs were the #4 most traded NFTs on Treasureland, indicating their high demand and growing value.

📚New Learning Material

We are constantly adding easy-to-understand learning material so our users can leverage yield farm responsibly and optimize their risk/reward. This month, we released two parts of a six-part series on how to profit with Alpaca Finance:

Strategy 1: Hold a Token While Earning High Yields at Low Risk (aka Lend & Stake) | Instructional Video — This strategy describes how to earn yield by lending your single-asset tokens.

Strategy 3: Supercharge Your Stablecoin Yields | Instructional Video (with subtitles in 20 languages) — This strategy describes how to yield farm stablecoins on leverage to earn the highest yields on your stablecoins in DeFi.

Strategies 2, 4, 5, and 6 will be released soon. We also continue to update our Yield Farming Calculator as a comprehensive guide to model your profits/losses when the prices of tokens move.

🔒Improved Security

We received two more audits from SlowMist and InspexCo. That makes 9 audits total, which should be the highest number of audits for any BNB Chain project.

We also integrated with Chainlink to receive the most secure price feeds. Chainlink Price Feeds are time-tested and well known for supplying high-quality price data with multiple layers of decentralization to protect user funds from unexpected situations like exchange downtime, flash crashes, and data manipulation attacks like flash loans.

📰Other News

• New Hires: We’ve recruited some senior team members to expand our efforts with institutional products and business development. Here’s an Official Chainlink interview with James, our Head of Business Development, and Pete, our Head of Institutional Growth.
• Mint Ventures’ evaluation on investing in Alpaca Finance.

Next Steps

We will continue to build and meet the long list of goals detailed on our roadmap. Many new features and developments are expected in August. Follow our Twitter and be the first to know!