Recap of AMA with Yield Yak on Avalanche India

On the 16th of December 2021 @ 7:30 PM IST, An AMA session was held on Avalanche India official Telegram group with Dylan, Marketing Yield at Yield Yak. Below we present to you an excerpt from AMA with questions and answers. It was wonderful and very informative, Enjoy reading :)

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

Good evening everyone and ready to enjoy our special AMA tonight with Yield Yak.

Before we get started, please do NOT forget to follow the AMA Rules:
-Join Telegram Yield Yak (https://t.me/yieldyak) & Avalanche India
(https://t.me/avalanche_hi)

-Join Twitter Yield Yak (https://twitter.com/yieldyak_) & Avalanche India (https://twitter.com/Avalanche_In)

Hey @ravageur77 it’s great to have you with us today ! Could you start by introducing yourself and share your journey in Yield Yak ?

Dylan | Yield Yak

Hi everyone, thanks for having me and for hosting @KuenShahi. Really excited to be here in the Avalanche India community.

My name is Dylan and I’m the Marketing lead for Yield Yak. Like all of the contributors at Yield Yak I started out as a community member when it first launched earlier this year (around March, I believe). I loved the product and team, and I have a background in marketing, and eventually spoke to the founding team members and agreed to come on board to drive their marketing efforts as the platform began to experience exponential growth along with the entirety of the Avalanche network.

And it’s fair to say that since I came on board, the rest is a blur :). Things are moving fast, it’s a fun time to be building and working in this space.

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

That’s really incredible. When one started their journey as a community member they get to know the project much more deeply.

Really excited to have you here :)

Dylan | Yield Yak

Yeah I think it’s fair to say that in my experience that has been the best way to recruit and find contributors, directly from the community. This space is so nuanced and unique, it can be challenging to bring someone on board that doesn’t understand the intricacies of this wild world of Avalanche DeFi.

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

Let’s dive into the second segment of the AMA. 5 questions have been picked from Twitter.

Here comes Question #1 by @AshaVaadi
The number of DeFi projects and yield farming protocols are growing rapidly with many being quite similar to each other. What makes @yieldyak_ different unique and sustainable for the future among those ?

Dylan | Yield Yak

Good question to start things off.

Yield Yak has several unique features which differentiate it from competitors and put us in a position to have a long and bright future in the Avalanche ecosystem.

Yield Yak is an entirely community-driven yield-optimiser and a community-built project. All of our success thus far is due to the support of our community, and all of our contributors come from the community. I would say this is quite rare for most projects, and it has created a truly strong co-operative which I believe will sustain the project through tougher times (market trend-wise) where other projects may struggle.

The project is decentralised and can run on its own. The compounding is done by a ‘reinvest’ function which can be triggered by anyone in the community. This also goes for the distribution of Platform revenue. On our ‘ARC’ page anyone can distribute the platform revenue to YAK stakers, the treasury, and our contributors on a daily basis. These are some of the more unique features I have seen to date.

Yield Yak charges some of the lowest fees for the service in the industry, plus if you hold and stake YAK 70% of those fees are redistributed back to you in the form of AVAX

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

I must say that there are lot of unique feature in Yield Yak that makes at stand ahead 🚀

Question #2 by @SidMh4
What is the utility of the $YAK token? What can I do on the platform with $YAK?

Dylan | Yield Yak

First, it’s worth highlighting how Yield Yak earns revenue:

Every time a farm or leverage strategy is auto-compounded by a community member, 3 things happen:

-The person who hit the ‘reinvest’ button earns a reward.
-An admin fee is taken (split between Stakers, Treasury, and Contributors)
-The rest is compounded back into the underlying asset

The admin fees generate significant revenue given the TVL of >$500M that is continuously compounding on Yield Yak…enter the $YAK token:

The $YAK token was fair launched: no pre-sales, it was airdropped to its community. It has a scarce and fixed supply of just 10,000 YAK in circulation. There will never be any more YAK issued.

What can you do with it?

Revenue distribution: Stake your YAK or YAK LP position to receive 70% of the platform revenues, paid in AVAX
Governance — stalking YAK awards you ‘vYAK’ or ‘voting YAK’ which lets you vote on important proposals to help shake Yield Yak’s future direction.

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

Thanks for the detailed explanation

Question #3 by @darkseid89931
We all have heard of #Avalancherush and also congratulations to @yieldyak_ on being part of it.
Can you tell us about #Yakrush, what is this all about in a brief?

Dylan | Yield Yak

Sure. Avalanche Rush is of course the incentivisation program from Avalanche. Currently Yield Yak has received $100K from the program but this is entirely focused on incentivizing developers to build new projects on top of Yield Yak’s DEX aggregator, Yield Yak swap. If you’re an interested developer you can find out more about that here: https://yieldyak.medium.com/100-000-dev-incentives-through-avalanche-rush-program-coalition-forms-for-yy-swap-dbc77a59afff

YakRush was a promotion that Yield Yak ran earlier this year that awarded all of the platform fees taken on certain farms (in this case, Trader Joe lending farms) and airdropped it back to users who deposited into those farms. The promotion has ended, but keep your eyes out for future similar promotions.

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

To stay updated with Yield Yak, do follow all the their socials

Web | Twitter | Docs | Telegram | Discord

Question #4 by @abdul_rang17
Inflation is a True Villain. So in order to Control it many projects have CoinBurn & Buyback Systems. Do you also have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems to keep inflation in check & attract Investors to invest ?

Dylan | Yield Yak

Inflation is indeed a tricky challenge for most projects to manage. Because YAK has a fixed 10K supply, we don’t need to worry about managing emissions or token inflation. However, we are working with Olympus Pro from OlympusDAO, who provide discounted bonds for LP positions, to improve Yield Yak’s POL (Protocol Owned Liquidity). Our objective with this is to increase the amount of liquidity that the Yield Yak treasury owns so that we do not need to allocate platform fees to incentivize LP positions. Instead we could then shift 100% of platform revenues to single-side YAK stakers who wouldn’t have to take on the Impermanent Loss risk of providing liquidity. This would be a win/win for Yield Yak and its users.

We are also considering whether the AVAX that is distributed to YAK holders should be compounded into YAK — this would create buy pressure on the YAK tokens and is in line with Yield Yak’s compounding nature. This is likely to be something that would go to a governance vote in the future.

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

Here comes the last question from twitter

Question #5 by @yogiyoswa
We’ve had serious issues with rug pulls from tokens lately and honestly, it’s nothing to laugh home about. My first question is, how secure are our funds with you? Are our investments safe??

Dylan | Yield Yak

Great question. So,, first of all, we encourage everyone to do their own research before investing in any farm or strategy on Yield Yak. While there is a certain level of due diligence done before new farms are added, we can’t provide guarantees on the safety of the underlying farms and ultimately aren’t responsible if an underlying protocol were to suffer an attack or something malicious. We have dedicated a section of our documentation to highlight risks to farmers, which range from the underlying protocol risks, to impermant loss, to more volatile yield farms we often refer to as ‘pool2’s. You can read about them here: https://docs.yieldyak.com/for-farmers/risks

That being said, Yield Yak takes security very seriously, and we have a track record of no security breaches or incidents to date, which we hope speaks for itself in terms of time in market with no incidents. Our Treasury Funds use a multi-sig, and we have an ongoing audit in progress with CoinFabrik auditors, which the results of will be shared soon.

We have also committed 100 YAK (that’s nearly $300K) towards Bug Bounties that anyone can make a claim for if they find a bug or critical issue with our contracts. You can find out more about our Bug Bounty program here: https://docs.yieldyak.com/for-developers/bug-bounty

For revenue distribution, we use an ‘ARC’ contract, aka Automated Revenue Collector, which transparently collects and redistributes platform revenue in a truly decentralized manner.

Telegram Questions

Kuen Shahi | Avalanche

Let’s dive into the third segment of the AMA that is live questions asked by the community members on telegram

Dylan | Yield Yak

Let’s do it

HERO

The number of DeFi projects and yeil farming protocols are growing steadily, and many are quite similar to each other. Among these projects, How will you innovate and survive?

Dylan | Yield Yak

I think what’s important to innovate and survive are to keep the user experience first and front of mind in all product-based decisions. What user problems are we trying to solve? And to keep in mind that not every user is familiar with DeFi as some of us may be. It can still be a very intimidating space and has a long way to go to onboard new users.

Secondly: our community. Community is ultimately the great differentiator, we’ve see that with Trader Joe’s success in overtaking Pangolin as the no 1. DEX on Avalanche. They built a strong community and have stayed true to them. Yield Yak has a great community that it intends on serving well going into the future.

Anurag

How does project increase the token’s value, liquidity and utility ? So that it can lead to an increase in token prices ? What is your plan to make your project stable and provide the highest return for investors in the long term ?

Dylan | Yield Yak

The strategy there is to focus on increasing our share of TVL in the Avalanche Ecosystem. As TVL increases and the more funds that are auto-compounding and earning rewards (of which Yield Yak takes a fee) increase, the APY for staking YAK will increase which ultimatley will lead to more demand for the token itself. So our strategy is definitely focused on capturing a larger % of DeFi assets yield farming or deposited into lending strategies across Avalanche.

Pradeep Kumar

why you have fixed supply?

Dylan | Yield Yak

Good question. The reason for a fixed supply is that the token’s objective isn’t to incentivize funds, the platform itself provides a service that ‘pays for itself’. So the objective of the token is both governance and revenue distribution. And for those objectives a fixed supply token is perfect. Emissions tokens are more suitable for DEXs and platforms that need to constantly ‘rent’ liquidity by increasing or decreasing emissions bsaed on trading volume and liquidity. We don’t have those needs.

Sid

A problem of many defi protocols is security. We’ve seen problems with flash liquidations, market manipulation and funds being stolen from the protocol. How safe is yak in terms of security?

Dylan | Yield Yak

We take security very seriously. I would point towards our time in market without any security breaches or hacks. IMO this is the most telling sign of a ‘safe’ protocol versus any rubber stamped audit. We have seen many protocols hacked even after audits which may or may not be of the highest quality. We have an ongoing audit with CoinFabrik, and our developers are actually known to point out bugs or issues with new protocols launching in an attempt to be good actors in the space.

Aflatoon

Community is one of the core strength for yield yak
What is this yield yak ARC and What is this buzz about YAK HEROS?

Dylan | Yield Yak

ARC is the transparent and decentralised way revenue is collected for the platform. You can see it accumulating in real time, and once per day a ‘Yak Hero’ can distribute the revenue to all YAK stakers by clicking on the ‘Distribute’ button on yieldyak.com/arc

Lucifier

What is the future roadmap. Any plans on stepping outside of current field?

Dylan | Yield Yak

We intend on continuing to focus on what we do best, which is optimising Yields for DeFi enthusiasts on Avalanche. We see a lot of projects try to do a bit of everything, but we believe we are best served by narrowing our focus and being best in class.

About Yield Yak

Yield Yak makes numbers go up. Ape into new autocompounder farms with quick releases and high yields. Swap on Yak for the best prices on trades with zero aggregator fees. Sit back and just earn, including big APYs on stablecoin farms.

Web | Twitter | Docs | Telegram | Discord

About Avalanche

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