Aurigami Q2 in Review

Aurigami Finance

Published in

Aurigami

8 min readJul 4, 2022

TL;DR

Prudent treasury management has paved a healthy runway for us to withstand even a multi-year bear market
We are one of the healthiest lending protocols out there, with $0 bad debt and the fewest insolvent accounts by far
The Papermill mechanism is working as intended, successfully encouraging liquidity miners to HODL PLY
Thoroughness and diligence in security and audit has allowed us to escape unscathed from security issues that plagued several other protocols
Aurigami boasts some of the highest yields on Aurora, especially for stablecoins like USDC, USDT and even USN

How it began

Early this year, we closed off a $9.5 million investment round (at $50M valuation) that was co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Polychain Capital, with participation from other prominent crypto VC firms such as Mechanism Capital, Amber Group, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Lemniscap, QCP Capital, DeFi Capital, Folius Ventures, D1 Ventures, and Genblock Capital.

Not forgetting also our lineup of angel investors that include Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora; Julian Koh, CEO of Ribbon; Bobby Ong & TM Lee, co-founders of CoinGecko; Matthew Tan, CEO of Etherscan; Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen; Santiago R. Santos.

You can read more about full tokenomics of Aurigami (PLY) here, which also includes the full details of all release/vesting schedules.

We are proud to be backed by some of the best and brightest in the cryptoverse. The recent market downturn has warped the crypto landscape, especially when compared to the time when Aurigami first started out in the beginning of the year. But regardless of the market conditions, our strategic investors and us are aligned in a single mission — that is to grow Aurigami together and let it flourish.

But still, this wasn’t enough, which brings us to our next section…

PLY token distribution and listings

We recognize the importance of community building for a growing protocol. Time and time again we’ve witnessed how big names gain preferential access to more favourable terms when it comes to token sales. For the distribution of PLY, we wanted to bring a different approach to the table, one that would start all of you on an equal footing with even our seed round investors — same valuation, same price! With this, we envisioned sharing a part of Aurigami with our community in a much more distributed and decentralized manner. After all, that’s what the spirit of crypto is all about eh 🙂

500,000,000 PLY (5% of total supply) was made available at a valuation of $50M (same as our investors) through 3 distribution venues — Kucoin, Bybit and Impossible Finance. Through this, we successfully raised $2.5M. Partnering up with 3 top-tier launchpads not only helped to ensure the greatest outreach and accessibility possible for prospective investors, but also allowed us to tap into their existing user base to attract liquidity into the Aurora ecosystem.

All three IEO/IDO venues ended up with an over-subscription for PLY, signaling mounting interests in Aurigami and by extension, the overall Near/Aurora ecosystem as well.

Since then, Aurigami (PLY) has been listed on multiple centralized exchanges, including Kucoin, Bybit, Huobi and CoinEx. In addition to these, PLY was also launched on Trisolaris using Rift’s liquidity infrastructure in partnership with the NEAR Foundation.

You can see the full list of exchanges that PLY is traded on our CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap pages.

Liquidity Mining

Immediately after PLY’s TGE, we launched our 52-week long liquidity mining campaign. To date, we support 5 borrowable assets (USDC, USDT, ETH, WBTC, WNEAR) and 5 other deposit-only assets (stNEAR, PLY, AURORA, USN, TRI). All of the deposit pools are supercharged with additional PLY incentives to boost their yields and in the case of USDC, to heavily subsidize the cost of borrowing and folding. A total of 1.6B out of the allocated 4B PLY has been emitted for liquidity mining (more on this later under Papermill) so far.

Q2 Key Highlights:

Aurigami boasts the HIGHEST interest rates for stables by far on Aurora, with USDC featuring a negative borrow APY at time of writing
First money market to support USN, allowing users to earn yield-on-yield and additional >40% APY by depositing USN on Aurigami
PLY deposit pool is offering >258% APY
PLY/WNEAR LP pool is offering >420% APY

Papermill

While liquidity mining has been helpful (if not essential) in bootstrapping DeFi protocols, more often than not, it failed to sustain momentum for longevity when mercenaries inevitably dumped and left for greener pastures. This has been a long-standing issue that has plagued the space since DeFi Summer in 2020, and Aurigami aims to tackle this with the introduction of the Papermill.

The Papermill is Aurigami’s liquidity mining program, but with a twist. In place of just protocol tokens, which in this case is PLY, both PULP (a liquid-locked-token representing PLY) and PLY are collectively issued as rewards. With this, “farm and dump” is no longer a viable strategy unless farmers are willing to sell off their locked-PLY (or PULP) at a discounted price. In a way, the Papermill is a gamification of reward emission governed by Game Theory — who will come up on top with the dominant strategy?

Overall, the Papermill mechanism is working as intended in encouraging liquidity miners to HODL PLY.

Out of the 1.6B PLY that has been emitted as Liquidity Mining incentives, only 32% has been claimed so far (3% in PLY and 29% in PULP were claimed)
Therefore, only 55M PLY (3% of 1.6B PLY) has been added to the PLY circulating supply which currently stands at 1.1B (11% of PLY Total Supply)

Partnerships

The bear market may be upon us but this presented us the perfect opportunity to not only focus on building, but also forging strategic partnerships with key market players. Through this, we’ve been able to diversify our offering to our users by proxy through our partners, as well as embed the presence of Aurigami and Aurora in various key cornerstones of the space.

Q2 Key Highlights:

Rift Finance — PLY/NEAR pool launched on Trisolaris using Rift’s liquidity infrastructure in partnership with Proximity.
Aurora+ — One of the first protocols to be integrated as Ecosystem Partners on Aurora+ during its launch. Users can earn multiple rewards just by depositing AURORA on Aurora+, including PLY rewards from Aurigami.
RiskDAO — Listing of Aurigami on the Bad Debt Dashboard
PinkPea Finance — Launch of USDC single-sided Partner Pool, allowing users to earn dual rewards (PEA + PLY) from staking USDC.
RiskHarbor — Support of auUSDT vault on RiskHarbor’s Core V2
DePocket — Integration of Aurigami on the DePocket Dashboard
Zerion — Integration of Aurigami on Zerion Wallet
Zapper — Integration of Aurigami on Zapper Dashboard
Bridges — Supporting Rainbow Bridge, Multichain, Synapse and cBridge in our in-app bridge function

Security and Audit

Security has always been of the highest priority for Aurigami. Our team has always operated on the ethos that a trustless protocol should be secure first and foremost and by extension (and ironically), trustworthy. We’ve stress-tested Aurigami and ideated multiple disaster scenarios, devising comprehensive preventative measures, contingency mechanisms and recovery plans based on these. For instance, we’re fortunate to have escaped unscathed from the recent Flux oracle issue that resulted in faulty liquidations, thanks to thoughtful implementations of our system since the very beginning. We recognize the risks involved in DeFi and are constantly vigilant of staying ahead of the security curve.

For those who might have missed the announcement, Aurigami has also passed all of the security audits conducted by 3 contract reviewers, including WatchPug which is one of the top security audit team on the C4 leaderboard (C4 is the biggest web3 audit contest organizer).

You can read the full audit report here.

Protocol Health

Fortunately for Aurigami, we’ve managed to build up a sizable warchest before the market downturn. Prudent treasury management means that we are shielded from the liquidity issues that have plagued so many VCs and protocols, granting us a healthy runway capable of withstanding a multi-year bear market. Our recent involvement in Aurora+ for instance allowed us to diversify and bolster our treasury with 300k AURORA (~$1M) using PLY.

In the background, our developers have also set up real-time monitoring tools to keep track of multiple key parameters 24/7, allowing us to remain vigilant of any developments and responding in a swift, efficient manner. We’ve also partnered up with BProtocol and are currently in the midst of engaging them for risk assessment and optimizing various protocol parameters.

We’re also proud to share that Aurigami has $0 bad debt and the fewest insolvent accounts out of ALL the lending protocols featured on RiskDAO’s Bad Debt Dashboard.

Community Update

The #Papeurhand family is stronk and growing!

With >47k Twitter followers and >39k Discord members, Aurigami boasts one of the biggest and most active communities within the Near/Aurora ecosystem.

Community members who have contributed to Aurigami (be it through active participation on Discord, insightful thought leadership on Twitter, helpful guidance of new Papeurhands etc.) are bestowed the coveted 3-PLY role on our Discord, granting them exclusive access to new upcoming features, future rewards/benefits and knowledge of Aurigami alphas ahead of time.

The most outstanding community member of the week is crowned as Auri of the Week 👑 on Discord, fast-tracking their entry into the exclusive 3-PLY group. Repeat winners of Auri of the Week will be conferred special rewards, reserved only for the best and brightest of us ⭐

Future of Aurigami

Rain or shine, bear or bull, the team is still putting our heads down to ship and build. In fact, many new, upcoming features in our product pipeline are in the works.

Just like the Japanese art of “Origami”, we focus on making our product fun, interactive and rewarding at the same time. As an example, a gamified feature centered around accelerating the maturity of PULP will be rolled-out soon. Beyond the horizon, we also have an Innovative Zone for isolated listings of long-tailed assets, an improved version of the Referral Program, additional token utility/sink for PLY and many more.

The market outlook may be bleak but the future of Aurigami certainly is not.