August 2022 Recap

In August, we continued to add new leveraged yield farming pools to our platform. On top of that, we also improved Automated Vaults by introducing the repurchasing strategy which is currently piloted on the n3x-BNBBUSD-PCS1 vault. We also added another Grazing Range partner, boosting yield for those who staked ALPACA in our Governance Vault. Alpaca Finance has also climbed in the the DeFi TVL ranking at DeFillama to the 20th rank (from 26th last month).

We published our first Institutional Newsletters where you can read the summary of major headlines in the crypto market related to regulations, products, and funding. The newsletters will be published weekly. You can check out the first two editions, Edition 1 and Edition 2, which were released in August.

The Alpaca Gaming Q&A Video now includes subtitles for 18 languages.

Read below for the details of our developments this month.

🌾New Lending Pools and Farms

In August, we added two new farms to the platform:

• STKBNB-BNB (4x, PancakeSwapV2, BNB Chain) earning 37%+ APY
• pSTAKE-BUSD (2x, PancakeSwapV2, BNB Chain) earning 389%+ APY

With this recent Grazing Range partnership, leveraged yield farmers on the two new pools will be able to earn an additional ~200k USD in PSTAKE bonus rewards which will be distributed at the end of the eight-week campaign period. You can read more details here.

We will continue to add new farms with our existing DEX partners (PancakeSwap, MDEX, BiSwap, SpookySwap) and future ones too.

🏦 Automated Vaults

In August, we started piloting a major improvement on the Automated Vaults by introducing Asset Repurchasing. Normally, the vault will have to swap the token through DEXs (e.g. Pancakeswap, Biswap) which will incur a price impact and 0.25% swapping fees. Now, with repurchases, AV investors will benefit from lower swap fees, no price impact on large swaps, and more frequent rebalancing. The repurchaser who swaps the vault’s assets can benefit by doing an arbitrage strategy — i.e., buying an asset from the AV(with less than 0.25% swap fess) and selling on CEXs.

We are currently piloting the repurchase method on the Market Neutral BNB-BUSD PancakeSwap (n3x-BNBBUSD-PCS1) vault. This particular pool’s performance will be monitored closely, and once the new method has been verified to work as expected, we will roll out the implementation to other remaining vaults. You can read more here.

🔥 ALPACA Buyback&Burn

Each week, we share our revenue and ALPACA buyback & burn statistics on Twitter. In August, a total of 1,445,552 ALPACA (~$385,000) was burned over 4 weeks, or an average of 361,388 ALPACA per week. The total cumulative burn is now ~25.5 million ALPACA (13.6% of total supply).

ALPACA has been deflationary for 35 of the last 42 weeks. 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) earn ALPACA emission rewards, (3)get Grazing Range rewards, (4)receive xALPACA to vote on Alpaca Improvement Proposals (AIPs), and (5)have private access to high leverage (>4x) Automated Vaults. Currently, users can earn 22.8% APY on the BNB Chain and 23.6% APY on Fantom.

In total, 51.1% of circulating ALPACA has been locked (up from 49.3% last month), and we have paid over >$2.9 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 now 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.

Grazing Ranges: Users who stake ALPACA in our Governance Vault can earn Grazing Range tokens. Grazing Range tokens are tokens of protocols we have partnered with (bold indicates new partners this month):

• 23,300 PSR (~$90k USD; from 6/30 to 8/25)
• 55,550 HIGH (~$90k USD; from 7/28 to 9/22)
• 980,000 PSTAKE (~$200k USD; from 8/11 to 10/6)

Users who stake at least 500/5000/50,000 xALPACA (3 tiers) during the first 4 weeks of a Grazing Range campaign can earn a Grazing Range NFT. In August, the HIGH (Ext.2) NFT became claimable on Project Galaxy. Details of each Grazing Range campaign are available on our Medium.

👨‍👨‍👧‍👦 Community Events

We host several community events each month, where users can earn NFTs, community badges, and tokens. We make these events easy to participate in, so spend a few minutes to claim these rewards!

In August, we had an AMA session with the Bitget community and gave out some NFTs during the session. You can check your eligibility here.

Alpaca of the Month

Congratulations to the community members — Dominator008, Enddypaca, Chip, GD, and Linh Dep — for winning Alpaca of the Month for August! They received these great custom avatars from @MerZair:

To win Alpaca of the Month, just be active in our Discord or Telegram, helping other users or contributing to the community. Details are here.

📃 Platform & UI/UX Updates

We delivered some UI/UX improvements this month:

• Long/Short messages when opening 2x farm position now show “Neutral” exposure
• Fixed Stake page bugs and added Stake/Unstake
• Improved text in content & tooltips on Alpies NFT Staking & other pages
• Improved load time of P/L charts on AV Invest pages
• stkBNB-BNB and $PSTAKE-BUSD farmers can now check their earned $PSTAKE rewards

👨‍👨‍👦 Twitter Spaces Fireside Chats and Podcasts

We released 2 podcasts in August. Listen to insightful thoughts on key blockchain developments with our Head of Strategy and Marketing Sam and our Head of Institutional Growth Pete:

• 24th Fireside Chat (August 10th, 2022) — CeFi Situation, Tornado Cash Ban, Coinbase Deal with Blackrock, Solana Hacking Incident, NFT space at the moment, ETH PoW vs PoS after Fork, the flow of Capital in crypto, New Rebalacing Strategy for AV, and Alpaca Gaming.
• 25th Fireside Chat (August 25th, 2022), Tornado Cash Incident Development, Solana’s Dev Faking Activities, NFTs, BendDAO, Dogechain, FEI, ACALA Situation, and Q&A on Alpaca.

❤️ Charity

We are happy to announce that with the donation of $8.9k to Llama Sanctuary, a not-for-profit dedicated to caring for homeless, sick, and neglected llamas an alpacas located in Canada, Alpaca Finance has now donated all the donation funds from Alpies sales revenue. The total donated amounts came out to $270,100.

This effort could not happen without the Alpies holders. Thank you for your contribution and supporting a good cause.

📰 Other News

In August, Alpies Holders were whitelisted by two NFT projects

• Myth.Art, NFT IP Distribution Platform
• Ziggyverse, NFT project with an in-game utility

Dauntless Alpies has been listed on NFTKEY Marketplace — https://twitter.com/NFTKEY/status/1554370837024624640

Alpaca Finance’s Leveraged Yield Farming was introduced on Biswap’s Education Hub — https://twitter.com/Biswap_Dex/status/1555810909985165312

DEFIYIELD.app, a notable Asset Management Dashboard, presented the Ultimate AlpacaFinance Yield Farming guide

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 an expansion of the Repurchase Strategy on AV and Alpaca Gaming updates.

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