PRQBOOST — The what & how of PARSIQ’s new token

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PARSIQ

7 min readFeb 18, 2021

Intro

First a little background — if you don’t care about this, just skip this section.
On October 6th 2020, CoinMetro suffered a security breach on an employees device, that was connected to their wallet system. The perpetrator was able to withdraw 3.4 million PRQ and so the race was on for the PARSIQ team, to speed up their plan on deploying a new token to implement new functions to their smart contract, before the perpetrator was able to drain the liquidity off of Uniswap.

At the block 11008759, timestamp Oct-07–2020 01:05:28 PM +UTC, PARSIQ executed their plan to render the bad guys tokens worthless and save the ETH liquidity from the Uniswap pool.
A snapshot was taken and 22 out of an allocated 44 million PRQ pool was used from PARSIQ’s reserves to drain all the ETH sitting in the Uniswap pool.
PARSIQ immediately issued statements in their Telegram what they had done, as to stop people from trading on Uniswap — since there is no way for anyone to halt trading on Uniswap, all they could do was warn people in all their socials and so they did.

Unfortunately a lot of people saw this crash in price as an opportunity to buy cheap PRQ, without first investigating why the price had crashed 99.99%.
Furthermore Poloniex made several mistakes that day, you can read all the details in PARSIQ’s statement right here: CoinMetro Hack, Poloniex and Next Steps

A reported 150 people lost money(ETH) by doing so and was one of the reasons the boost program came to be.

The issue with Uniswap

When you provide liquidity to Uniswap, you enter with an equal fiat(dollar) value of any given ERC-20 token and ETH, so if PRQ is at 0.1 USD and ETH is at 400, then providing 10.000 PRQ to the pool, requires 1.000 USD worth of ETH, or 2.5 ETH in this example.

As a reward for putting your funds into the Uniswap pool you get a part of the fees(0.3% per trade) that is collected on every trade in the pool(people buying and selling). So, if you put 10.000 PRQ into a pool that has 90.000 PRQ already, your contribution would make the pool 100.000 PRQ in size and your part of the pool would amount to 10% and that would mean you would get 10% of all fees collected as well.

“Impermanent loss” is a term to describe temporary loss — the problem with describing it as temporary is that it can become permanent as soon as you withdraw your funds from the pool, and if PRQ price rises, the ratio of your pooled tokens shifts towards more ETH and less PRQ.

A really good article describing permanent loss can be found here: Uniswap: A Good Deal for Liquidity Providers?

A snippet from the article mentioned above

PRQBOOST program, a cure for impermanent loss?

Maybe not a cure, but definitely a strong incentive for those afraid to be afflicted by this, when providing liquidity.

PRQBOOST incentive program was born in the creative minds of the PARSIQ team, and the idea is to offset the impermanent loss than can happen when you provide liquidity to the Uniswap pool and as an incentive for everyone for earn some passive income on their PRQ with the added bonus of reducing slippage in price for larger buys/sells on Uniswap.

So, how does it work?

It’s fairly simple, you hold your PRQBOOST tokens in the same wallet as you use to provide PRQ-ETH to the Uniswap pool(where your Uniswap LP tokens are kept) and PARSIQ uses their own wallet monitoring system to reward you with extra PRQ.

How do I get started?

First, you need to understand that there is a risk associated with doing this, it’s called impermanent loss — but can become very permanent if you decide to withdraw your tokens from the pool. Go up in this article to read about impermanent loss.

Second, you have to have the PRQ you want to add to the pool and the equivalent in ETH located in one of the Uniswap supported wallet systems:
MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase Wallet, Fortmatic and Portis.
I will be using Metamask for chrome to show you the step by step. Download Metamask.
I’m assuming that you know how to transfer the funds needed to the ERC-20 wallet.

Start at this link: https://app.uniswap.org/#/pool

Click “Connect to a wallet”

Choose Metamask

Select which accounts in your metamask should be able to interact with Uniswap and click next

And that’s it for connecting your wallet to Uniswap

Click “Add Liquidity”

Click “Select a token”

Paste the contract address of PRQ into the search field and click PRQ in the list
0x362bc847A3a9637d3af6624EeC853618a43ed7D2

Now input how much ETH or PRQ you want to add. You just have to add one, the other will autofill. Click “Supply”

Click “Confirm Supply”

Now it’s time to confirm the token move via Metamask. Check https://ethgasstation.info/ for correct gas input and click “Confirm” once done.

Once this step is completed you should see new Uniswap V2: PRQ 2(Uniswap V2 (UNI-V2)) LP tokens in your ERC-20 wallet on https://etherscan.io/

If you want to see them in your Metamask you can add this contract: 0x64cac8fa24f437ceca90e20a7a24a609f162b0d1.

And that’s it, make sure your PRQBOOST tokens are in that same wallet and every 13.39 seconds (at the time this article was published), you are earning PRQ via the PRQBOOST program.

Payouts are made weekly to your wallet holding the LP tokens and PRQBOOST tokens, if you are in the top 100 earning boost pool, otherwise you will have to manually claim them, via the boost portal PARSIQ will set up shortly.

How much extra PRQ do I earn?

Your portion of the reward “pie”, depends on how many others are also providing liquidity to the pool and also holding the PRQBOOST token.
Reward info + calculator is: https://boost.parsiq.net/

Who got the PRQBOOST token?

Holders of PRQ in any ERC-20 wallet or on CoinMetro, when the snapshot was taken on Friday the 30th of October.
The people mentioned previously who bought the old PRQ token on Uniswap, after the snapshot had been taken on the 7th. But only those who actually had lost ETH in doing so. If you bought the old PRQ token and sold it for profit, you would receive no PRQBOOST tokens.