Governance Engagement and Participation Analysis

Governance Discussion
We've created a more formalized forum where the community can continue discussion on governance proposals in a more standardized manner. We believe this approach, where users will easily be able to view and learn from past discussions, will create much more focused and impactful conversations for potential proposals that will benefit the platform long-term.

The first forum thread for discussion we've posted is for a potential proposal ideated by the community to switch rewards from UNI V2 and Bal to UNI V3. We encourage the community to join the discussion and share their thoughts on the forum, even if you've previously shared in any of our social channels as this forum will be the center of governance discussions going forward.

Join the proposal discussion here: https://apy.trydiscourse.com/t/switching-rewards-from-uni-v2-and-bal-to-uni-v3/12


User Interface
Our front-end team has completed integrating the front-end with updated smart contracts. We’ve updated input validation logic and UI/UX around forms to cover various edge-cases when depositing and withdrawing from the platform. Finally, our team has completed developments for mobile responsiveness to ensure users on mobile, a large projected share of our userbase, will have as fluid a yield farming experience as those on any other device.

APY Token Farming
APY DAI/USDC/USDT Liquidity Mining*
TVL: $21,736,950.96
APY: 45.41%
*As of Thursday, 10/21/21, 4:10pm EST

👾 APY.Finance Weekly Update 10/17 - 10/23 👾

APY.Finance Alpha Launch
We have some very exciting news to share about the upcoming APY.Finance Alpha launch. Tune in to our Telegram channel where APY.Finance’s founder and CEO, Will Shahda, will join the community for an AMA. Users are encouraged to ask any questions they may have about the upcoming launch, platform operation, governance proposals, and more.

Join us in Telegram later today, 10/28/21 6:00pm EST / 22:00 UTC for a special announcement & AMA.

As we approach the Alpha launch, we will be updating our docs where users can learn more about the platform and its operation. Over the next couple of weeks, we highly encourage all users to familiarize yourselves with the updated docs prior to launch to learn more about the platform’s new features and operation.

Security & Financial Audits
After much collaboration, we are very excited to announce we have officially completed our security and financial audits with Halborn. You can review the live audits and Halborn’s findings here:

Smart Contract Audit
Financial Audit

This thorough financial audit evaluates financial risks and spans past the standard smart contract audits typically seen within DeFi.

Security
As we’ve spent this week continuing mainnet testing, our smart contract engineers have updated end to end scenario tests to run through each protocol integration, and rebalances for every supported token. Our engineers have also fully tested claiming and swapping tokens, and have ensured that all protocols are integrated properly.

Governance
A governance proposal for a Curve-frax pool will be live at 8PM EST / 12AM UTC later today. Frax is a promising project that aligns with our goals. $APY governance token holders are able to head over to our Snapshot proposal page to vote by Nov 9th, 8PM EST / 12AM UTC.

Vote here once the proposal is live.

User Interface
Our front-end team has integrated an updated APY core package with the front-end, ensuring live smart contracts are now connected to the refreshed user interface. We’ve also continued media queries and responsive CSS, as ensuring a streamlined and responsive experience is crucial to delivering a simple yield farming experience to all users.

APY Token Farming
APY DAI/USDC/USDT Liquidity Mining*
TVL: $43,702,305.54
APY: 24.49%
*As of Thursday, 10/28/21, 3:20pm EST

👾 APY.Finance Weekly Update 10/24 - 10/30 👾

🎉 It’s official! 🎉 After many months of rigorous development, auditing, and testing, APY.Finance is officially launching the Alpha build mid-November. We’re excited for what’s to come, and for the community to be able to use the platform after much anticipation. We appreciate your continued support, and look forward to the next step in making DeFi simple and accessible en masse.

Alpha Launch Announcement & AMA Recap
Last week, we hosted an AMA where the community gathered on Telegram to ask questions about platform development, security, auditing, governance, and the future of APY.Finance with CEO and founder, Will Shahda. Below is a brief synopsized recap of discussion shared in the AMA. We encourage you to join our Telegram channel, and view the AMA thread (https://news.1rj.ru/str/apyfinancechat/144364) for a complete overview of each question and context in its entirety.

- Once the Alpha is released, the APY.Finance team will continue platform development, including already existing planning for a V2 which we believe will dramatically improve the platform’s efficiency and levels of decentralization. Increasing decentralization will keep us on the right side of compliance, and open the doors to many more interesting mechanics down the line.
- A major goal and result of increasing decentralization will be to make things more permissionless, including the inclusion of farms which can then be decided entirely by governance.
- Security auditing that initially revealed vulnerabilities around access control and the possibility of compromised team accounts (hacked or stolen keys, etc) led to an overhauled system of roles and permissions to prevent this from occurring. We’ve recently made our audits public, where you can review in detail the audited findings and remediations to solve them:
https://github.com/HalbornSecurity/PublicReports/blob/master/Solidity%20Smart%20Contract%20Audits/APY_Smart_Contract_Security_Audit_Report_Halborn_Final.pdf
https://github.com/HalbornSecurity/PublicReports/blob/master/Financial%20Pentesting/APY_Financial_Pentesting_Report_Halborn_Final.pdf
- We are keeping an eye on the possibility of the inclusion of other networks down the line, but will initially focus our release on Ethereum mainnet.
We are hyper aware of the importance of decentralization and compliance and will take measures to ensure both.
Full decentralization will greatly increase possibilities to increase token utility and implement innovative token mechanics.
As of 11/9/21, all investor tokens will have been distributed to seed investors.
- Most of the smart contract code is currently verified on Etherscan and GitHub repos will eventually be made fully available to the public.
- We have many marketing initiatives lined up that we think the community will be very excited about, with a heavy focus on sustainable and organic long-term growth initiatives that will help educate users about DeFi, as well as build awareness and adoption for the target-audience of the platform.
- We intend to support other stablecoins for deposits in the future, once we can carefully ensure that they’re well supported, secure, and have high liquidity.

Security
We’ve implemented and refined safeguards surrounding our upgrades of pools holding user liquidity to provide failsafes, protecting user’s funds, based on the approach that USDC used to updating their contract. Read more about it here.

User Interface
This week, our front-end engineers have completed all necessary integrations between the updated User Interface and the latest smart contracts. We’ve also pushed a staging demo site including updated transaction modals and charts.

In next week’s update, we will address some suggestions proposed in the Discourse governance discussion channel.

APY Token Farming
APY DAI/USDC/USDT Liquidity Mining*:
- TVL: $66,249,942.17
- APY: 14.21%
*As of Thursday, 11/4/21, 4:00 pm EST

What's Next?
Following the upcoming Alpha launch, we have many plans in store for taking APY.Finance to the next level. See attached below a preview of concepts and a timeline we've been floating, based on feedback from the community, for what's to come. Stay tuned for next week's update as we continue to explore some feedback and suggestions seeded by the community in our governance discussion Discourse channel, where we encourage all users to continue participating, and sharing ideas. We hope you're as excited for what's to come as we are!

https://apy.trydiscourse.com/

Please note: once the Alpha build is made live, we will activate a reserve-pool safeguard which prevents the pools and user’s funds from being drained in the rare black-swan event of a system-wide hack or exploit. As a result, whales who own a large portion of the TVL will not be able to instantaneously make large withdrawals of ~10% or more of the TVL at the time of withdrawing. To avoid the necessity of making smaller withdrawals over a longer period of time, contact us at support@apy.finance prior to withdrawing to ensure these withdrawals don’t activate our safeguards, and that you will be able to withdraw the full amount at once.

A proposal for the Curve-lusd pool has been made live and is available for $APY token holders to vote through 11/15/21, 1:00 pm UTC. Vote here.

👾 APY.Finance Weekly Update 10/31 - 11/6 👾

APY.Finance Alpha Launch
It’s official! APY.Finance will be releasing the Alpha launch build this Monday, 11/15/21.

We’re extremely excited for the community to finally have the opportunity to use the platform firsthand, and begin yield farming. The initially deployed farms are highly risk-adjusted and vetted for security and diversity. Users can expect yields to increase over time as we continue to host new governance proposals for additional farms, increasing diversification, and reducing exposure to riskier, higher-yield farms that are voted in.

Please note: Once the Alpha build is made live, we will activate a reserve-pool safeguard which prevents the pools and user’s funds from being drained in the rare black-swan event of a system-wide hack or exploit. As a result, whales who own a large portion of the TVL will not be able to instantaneously make large withdrawals of ~10% or more of the TVL at the time of withdrawing. To avoid the necessity of making large withdrawals over a longer period of time, contact us at support@apy.finance prior to withdrawing to ensure these withdrawals don’t activate these safeguards.

Alpha Deployment
After much deliberation and close scrutiny for any remaining code updates necessary for launch, core contract development and deployment code is officially completed, and all loose ends have been tied off. The code is now frozen and prepared for deployment to mainnet in preparation for the upcoming Alpha launch. Our team is currently developing a launch checklist to ensure smooth deployment onto mainnet.

Further, our smart contract engineers have created an internal operations manual, which formalizes internal processes used to operate the platform on a daily basis. This will greatly assist in preventing operational error, as well as assist in onboarding new team members as the APY.Finance team begins to scale.

Governance
We now have a new URL for governance proposal discussions which you can view here.

A governance proposal to integrate the Curve-frax pool has been completed and voted through by the community. Further, a governance proposal for Curve-LUSD has been made live and is available for $APY governance token holders to begin voting now.

Governance Discussion Feedback & Building Liquidity Depth
We are continuously monitoring and reviewing feedback from our community, especially as various governance discussions begin to grow on our Discourse channel. While reviewing the discussion thread regarding switching rewards from UNI V2 and Bal to UNI V3, it has reinforced the goal of finding new and innovative ways to increase token utility.

While we believe there is value in consolidating liquidity, we understand there may be concerns around impermanent loss when moving staking incentives over to Uniswap V3. As a result, we’ve been keeping an eye on opportunities presented with Defi 2.0 and protocol-owned liquidity.

In particular, we’ve been exploring the very interesting mechanics of bonding markets, such as that in Olympus Pro. We are exploring these bonding market mechanics, as they may prove to be an effective way to build liquidity depth as seen in other projects that have implemented these mechanics, without the risk of exposing users to impermanent loss.

We will continue to monitor and review conversations posted on this discussion forum as we prepare for the next phase of APY.Finance, and exploring the possibility of expansion with Defi 2.0 tokenomics, cross-chain & L2 adoption, and increasing decentralization.

User Interface
While performing live mainnet end-to-end testing with the finalized UI in preparation for deployment, our front-end has refined the UI for added usability and clarity. engineers are finalizing the UI in preparation for deployment to a staging site by reviewing the UI with a fine tooth comb, and implementing any necessary debugs and refactors.

Further, our team is optimizing Coingecko API calls, which will result in increased scalability, as the system’s load will not be increased as we continue to add new strategies to the platform, a pivotal feature in ensuring a streamlined platform performance.

APY Token Farming
APY DAI/USDC/USDT Liquidity Mining*
TVL: $45,644,222.66
APY: 32.17%
*As of Thursday, 11/11/21, 1:25pm EST

Reminder: Once the Alpha build is made live, we will activate a reserve-pool safeguard which prevents the pools and user’s funds from being drained in the rare black-swan event of a system-wide hack or exploit. As a result, whales who own a large portion of the TVL will not be able to instantaneously make large withdrawals of ~10% or more of the TVL at the time of withdrawing. To avoid the necessity of making smaller withdrawals over a longer period of time, contact us at support@apy.finance prior to withdrawing to ensure these withdrawals don’t activate our safeguards, and that you will be able to withdraw the full amount at once.

As we begin mainnet deployment today, we encourage users to check out the new User Manual which will assist users in yield farming on the Alpha build as soon as it is live.

We will continue to update the community on the mainnet deployment process as we upgrade pools and deploy captial to strategies.

Reminder for users withdrawing large amounts of deposited stablecoins from the platform at one time (>10% of the TVL): your transaction may trigger the Reserve Pool Safeguard which prevents the pools and user’s funds from being drained in the rare black-swan event of a system-wide hack or exploit. With the safeguard in place, account holders that own a large portion of the TVL will not be able to instantaneously make large withdrawals of ~10% or more of the TVL at the time of withdrawing. To avoid the necessity of making large withdrawals over a longer period of time, contact support@apy.finance prior to withdrawing to ensure these withdrawals don’t activate these safeguards.

In 20 minutes, we will begin upgrading the production APY pool. Our upgrader contract will perform a series of automated on-chain tests, protecting user's funds. The pools will automatically lock as we perform a manual review. Once this process is complete, we will announce 2 hours prior to redeploying liquidity to the live portfolio, and users will have the opportunity to withdraw or deposit prior to going live.

👾 APY.Finance Alpha Launch & Post-Launch Roadmap Preview 👾

Following the completion of core platform and smart contract development, we are extremely excited to announce that APY.Finance has reached an incredibly significant milestone as the Alpha build is officially launching on mainnet. Prior to using the platform for the first time, we encourage users to view the new User Guide which guides users in yield farming on the platform.

The Alpha platform, however, is just the beginning, as it marks the first key step of many in our plans to scale the APY.Finance team, platform, token utility, and decentralization. In this article, we’d like to provide a brief overview of what users can expect next from APY.Finance.

Increasing Yield & Rapid-Integration With New Farms
One of APY.Finance’s core principles is delivering the highest risk-adjusted yield possible. We are initially deploying our Alpha build with just a few low-risk vetted farms and strategies which have been successfully voted through by $APY governance token holders via our Snapshot governance page. Users can expect yield returns to increase over time as we continue to host new governance proposals for additional farms which will increase diversification and improve yields. We are also currently working on a Convex integration to boost Curve yield.

With a diversified base of proven and safe farms, we can rapidly integrate with newer riskier farms while keeping a lower overall risk profile. A core element of the framework we’ve built within the APY.Finance platform is the extremely nimble solution we’ve created which allows rapid integration of new farms near instantaneously once they are voted in. New farms will often have higher yield returns early on, and our rapid integration will allow us to capture yield from these new farms with quick turnaround. In order to assist in rapid integration and staying on the cutting edge of new farms, we are onboarding a DeFi Researcher to constantly vet for, and keep the team and the community up-to-date on the latest DeFi protocols that APY can integrate with for additional yield. Further, we are also onboarding a Data Scientist to analyze protocols for possible inclusion in the APY yield farming portfolio, and create data models which will allow us to predict a strategy’s impact on the overall portfolio, and assist the community in making informed governance voting decisions.

Cross-Chain & L2 Expansion
We’ve been evaluating the natural evolution of our currently implemented yield farming strategies as we prepare to move to other chains and L2s which will have many added benefits. Moving to other chains and L2s will not only increase yield for users, but will also lower platform transaction costs by allowing the platform to be more nimble, rebalancing more frequently, which improves capital efficiency as idle capital and low yielding capital will be put to greater use quicker.

Our team is currently conducting research on EVM compatible chains and L2s to determine our first expansion as we continue to progress toward cross-chain and L2s. We are weighing our options based on the criteria of available liquidity, user traction, onboarding process’, incentives and predicted longevity.

Some of the options for expansion we are currently evaluating are:

EVM-Compatible chains & L2s:
- Avalanche
- Harmony
- Fantom
- xDai
- Binance Smart Chain
- Polygon
- Arbitrum

Finally, we understand the frustration with the rising gas fees, which makes acquiring small amounts of the $APY token unavailable to users, as the token is currently only available for purchase on mainnet. Moving over to L2s will have the added advantage of lower user transaction costs, saving users on deposit costs and making the platform even more accessible to a wider range of users with access to smaller amounts of capital. This will become even more important as APY.Finance continues to scale and cements itself as a platform where any user, regardless of experience or capital, will be able to participate in yield farming with APY.Finance.

Improving $APY Token Utility
One of the immediate goals we have is increasing $APY token liquidity and utility. While listening to feedback from the community discussed in our social channels and Discourse governance discussion forum, we’ve speculated some ways which this may be best achieved.

By integrating DeFi 2.0 mechanics focused on concepts such as platform owned liquidity and self-sustaining liquidity to improve liquidity depth, we believe we will be able to improve token liquidity without risking users to impermanent loss. To demonstrate its effectiveness and evaluate if it’s the right solution, the Data Scientists we’ve recently onboarded will work with us to develop analytical models which will assist us in evaluating exactly how token bonding markets similar to Olympus DAO affect tokenomics.

We are also researching how best to automate liquidity provision on Uniswap v3, so $APY stakers can achieve greater capital efficiency. One of the options we are exploring is Gelato’s G-UNI protocol.

Further, we are evaluating ways to insure the platform against shortfall events while improving token utility for $APY holders. After thoroughly researching other platforms that have a safety or stability module where tokens can be staked for additional rewards, we believe there would be great benefit to allowing staking of $APY tokens in a safety module to insure against shortfalls or platform exploits. We are considering, and evaluating optimal practices to allow $APY token holders to receive increased platform rewards and/or other benefits, and ways for the $APY token greater governance powers as we continue to increase decentralization. We encourage $APY token holders to share their ideas and discuss their thoughts on ways to improve token utility in the APY.Finance governance discussion Discourse channel.

The Wrap-Up
We hope this was an insightful look into the development of APY.Finance following today’s Alpha launch, and are extremely eager and excited as we ramp up into the next phase.

The APY.Finance Alpha build will be live on mainnet for users to begin yield farming today.

🚀 The new UI is officially live!🚀

In 2 hours we will deploy all user liquidity to our first 6 strategies. After this, our reserve pools will be in effect. If you’re a whale with a large percentage of TVL, make sure you familiarize yourself with the reserve pools (https://docs.apy.finance/getting-started/reserve-pool-safeguard).

We have a full pipeline of new strategies that will be released, so keep an eye out for the governance proposals.

If there are any formatting issues with the UI for your device, please reach out to support@apy.finance and be sure to include your Discord or Telegram handle as well as your device / browser.

🥳 We are now completing the final stage of mainnet deployment as we deploy user liquidity to our first 6 strategies.

Happy yield farming! https://apy.finance/

🎉 It's official! 🎉 Mainnet deployment is officially completed and the APY.Finance platform is LIVE and ready to begin yield farming now!

https://apy.finance/

🤝 APY.Finance Integrates Fractional-Algorithmic Stablecoin’s Curve-FRAX Pool

Learn more: https://medium.com/apyfinance/apy-finance-integrates-fractional-algorithmic-stablecoins-curve-frax-pool-8ceb61a6ac71

🗣 Following successful integration, APY.Finance has been added to the Frax.Finance staking page.

https://twitter.com/apyfinance/status/1461067432945139718

📢 There is currently a known issue with "The Graph" and its indexing which may result in incorrectly displayed $APY rewards temporarily. Our engineers are aware of this problem and currently working on a solution.

⬇️ Want to hear us talk more about DeFi than we already do?

Join us in NYC on 11/30 as founder and CEO, Will Shahda, joins Chainlink for a panel on all things DeFi.
https://twitter.com/apyfinance/status/1461377973102292994