April 2023 Recap

Published in

Alpaca Finance

7 min readMay 5, 2023

We are thrilled to share that Alpaca Finance has achieved yet another milestone in April 2023 with the successful launch of our latest product, the Alpaca Finance 2.0 Money Market, which offers overcollateralized lending and borrowing.

Despite limited incentives during the beta phase, we were able to attract over $10 million in supply and more than $4 million in borrowing in the first few days after launch.

Furthermore, we have improved the performance of our Automated Vaults to better handle high utilization periods and have implemented several updates to the protocol through AIPs.

This month, we published four Institutional Newsletters where you can read the summary of major headlines in the crypto market related to regulation, products, and fundraising. We publish these newsletters every week. You can check out this month’s editions here: Edition 30, Edition 31, Edition 32, and Edition 33.

Read below for more details of our developments this month.

🌾 Lending Pools and Farms

In accordance with AIP-18, we successfully closed all 127 MDEX leveraged yield farming positions to safeguard our lenders due to decreasing liquidity on MDEX. The operation resulted in a profit of 1,547 USDC, which was used for buyback and burn of $ALPACA.

🏦 Automated Vaults

During the month of April, we made significant strides in improving the profitability and consistency of our Automated Vaults. Specifically, we have implemented the “Lowering Vault Leverage Mechanics” to mitigate negative APR% caused by high borrowing interest during a utilization spike period, such as the Binance Launchpad event.

In short, the 8x Automated Vaults would temporarily reduce their leverage until utilization drops, in order to prevent negative APR from high borrowing interest. The AV will then return to its normal leverage level once the high utilization period ends.

As such, during the recent Binance Launchpad event, we have deleveraged the following vaults:

n8x-bnbusdt-pcs1: 8x => 3x
n8x-bnbusdt-pcs2: 8x => 3x
l8x-usdtbnb-pcs1: 8x => 3x
l8x-busdbnb-pcs1: 8x => 3x

All of these vaults have now been re-leveraged back to 8x after the launchpad events.

Thanks to the aforementioned operation, most 8x Automated Vaults have been performing well in the past month with the highest 1-month Return on 8x BNB Savings (l8x-usdtbnb-bsw1) of 32% APY.

For more details on Lowering Vault Leverage Mechanics, please refer to our Docs.

Alpaca Easter Day 2023

To celebrate the Easter Day 2023, the exclusive Alpaca Easter 2023 NFT was given to all users having ALP staked by Apr 11th, 2023. You can check your eligibility here.

💎 AF 2.0

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new AF2.0 Money Market on April 27th. Our users can now conveniently deposit and borrow funds on the AF2.0 website. The AF2.0 smart contracts underwent an extensive internal code review process and have passed an audit by Inspex, which has conducted several audits for us in the past. You can view the final audit report here.

Supported Assets

During the beta phase which will last through May10th, AF 2.0 will be supporting the following assets: BNB, USDC, USDT, BUSD, BTCB, and ETH.

Following the full-scale launch, we will continually add additional assets over time.

In order to bootstrap our AF2.0 Money Market, we have an incentivization plan in place for both lenders and borrowers as follow:

ALPACA Emissions — A total of 900k (~240k) will be distributed to lenders and borrowers over a 12-week period.

For more detailed information on AF2.0, please visit our Docs.

📈 Perpetual Futures Exchange

This month, we established an analytic page for our Perpetual Futures Exchange on Dune, providing all users with convenient access to detailed Alperp statistics.

Furthermore, our Perpetual Futures Exchange has officially exited the beta and is now launched at full scale. Consequently, ALPACA rewards emissions has increased to 80,000 ALPACA/week, divided among Liquidity Providers (invest in ALP token here) and Traders (trade here).

In total, the protocol have generated over $200k worth of fees from Alperp. Our all-time trading volume has already reach $200+ million within less than 2 months. You can read all about Alperp’s revenue distribution in our docs’ Perpetual Futures Exchanges Parameters section.

🔥 ALPACA Buyback&Burn

Each week, we share our revenue and ALPACA burn statistics on Twitter. In April, 504,440 ALPACA (~$144,400) was burned over 5 weeks, or an average of 100,888 ALPACA per week. The total cumulative burn is now ~31.0 million ALPACA (16.5% of total supply).

ALPACA has been deflationary for 66 of the last 73 weeks. As per the ALPACA emission schedule, the ALPACA token is now guaranteed to be fully deflationary as ALPACA emissions & rewards are now officially finished. We added extensive details on burn and various sources of burn on our Docs here. On top of that, we hope to again refer our readers to this article by a community member, explaining ALPACA’s deflationary nature and how it will lead to a natural rise of the ALPACA token’s price over time.

🗽 Alpaca Governance

Any user can stake ALPACA in the Governance Vault to (1)earn a share of our platform’s revenue, (2)get Grazing Range rewards, and (3)receive xALPACA to vote on Alpaca Improvement Proposals (AIPs). Currently, users can earn 3.76% APY on the BNB Chain and 3.15% APY on Fantom.

Note: In accordance with AIP-12, the insurance plan was activated and is currently directing 50% of the protocol revenue going to Governance to cover the bad debt until the full amount is paid off.

In total, 40.4% of circulating ALPACA has been locked, and we have paid over >$3.7 Mn to ALPACA governance stakers. Read all about Alpaca Governance in our Part 1 and Part 2 Medium articles or visit our docs’ Governance section.

Our Discord has a private channel for xALPACA holders where governance members can discuss topics and discover/share alpha. There is a bot automating membership and the minimum required to gain entry is 100 xALPACA in a wallet. From time to time, we do special airdrops from partners (i.e. NFTs) in this channel to xALPACA holders and also Alpies holders (in their respective private channels). You can also bring up any Governance topics for discussion in our Forum.

Alpaca Improvement Proposals (AIPs):

AIP-17 voting has successfully passed. The community voted to reserve the extra ALPACA token from the AIP-15 incentives for future initiatives / product launches.
AIP-18 voting has successfully passed. The community voted to sunset MDEX pools and close all MDEX positions.

For those who participated in voting, the NFT for AIP-17 and AIP-18 are now available to claim on Galxe. Visit our Governance Forum to read about, discuss, and vote on these AIPs.

📃 Platform & UI/UX Updates

We delivered some UI/UX improvements for Alperp this month:

Tradingview integration
CN translations addition: Traditional & Simplified
Shareable referral links
Live tracking of ALPACA trading rewards
Trading pairs as part of URL
Allowed users to click on opened position to switch graph & input to that asset

📰 Other News

In April, Alpaca Finance was invited by BNB Chain in a discussion about Product Innovation — https://twitter.com/BNBCHAIN/status/1648823792096153602

Alpaca Finance was invited to discuss about DeFi Trends, Transparency, and Advantages by Hack.AI, a trusted Web3 Security Company — https://twitter.com/hackenai/status/1643554350998880257

Alpaca Finance was invited by OpenOcean, a leading Web3 DEX Aggregator, to participate in a Cross-AMA — https://twitter.com/OpenOceanGlobal/status/1646297846411325440

Mooncao Podcast, a Techonology-focused podcast, invited Alpaca Finance to join their show— https://twitter.com/MoonacoPodcast/status/1646452891706638337

Alpaca Finance’s Perpetual Futures Exchanges was featured on several media as follow:

Feedback

We greatly value our users’ feedback, which you can give at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QGY4wJUvYdYWe6TQn460m0A7H07xMUcBGEnU-pUXyg4/viewform?ts=61e8ce4e&edit_requested=true

Next Steps

We will continue to build and meet the list of goals detailed on our roadmap. The upcoming updates that you can look forward to include news on our CL DEXs Integration, Alpaca Gaming, and Alpaca Finance 2.0 (LYF).

We announce updates on our Twitter first, so follow us to be the first to know!