Apricot Finance AMA Summary Recap with Shin Chan Community

We held a live AMA with Co-Founder, Cecilia from Apricot Finance on 15 November 10:00 PM (UTC+8). Here’s the recap for those who missed it.

Introduction

JH | Shin Chan: Before the ama start, can you please introduce yourself and the team background?

Cecilia: Yes of course! I came from a traditional finance background, having previously been an investment banker and investor in credit, distressed assets and special situations. Thanks to my co-founders, I have been indirectly involved in the crypto space and watched the DeFi summer and eventually jumped full-time on Apricot.

The core founding team include 3–4 people, and we have known each other for close to 10 years since back in high school. We come from a diverse background — so you now know me from traditional finance. Our tech lead comes from high-frequency trading and have been a developer/coder since he was 10-ish (almost went in to academia for AI and machine learning research). Others have done multiple start-ups and also been involved in crypto since 2013 etc.

Would say we have the right mix to start Apricot, but still a lot to learn as we go since the space changes so fast, but everyone luckily is a fast learner!

JH | Shin Chan: Could you please tell us about Apricot Finance in short, and Is there anything you can share us the update/news from Apricot Finance?

Cecilia: Yes, of course! Apricot is a next-gen lending protocol on Solana. We are much more than just a pure lending protocol, as our mission is really to help users earn yields and stay protected with their borrowed funds on our platform. So to that end, we have offered at once Apricot Lend, X-Farm and Assist, 3 features that are highly integrated to have users’ best interest in mind.

We are live on mainnet for ~3 weeks now since Oct 19, and quickly increased our deposited value to $100 million in 20 mins, $200milion in first 12 hours and now we are close to $700 million.

The most exciting news is definitely our IDO this coming Thursday and Friday. There are two rounds — the first for the selected whitelisted people and the second is for open-to-all.

All details can be found here:
https://apricotfinance.medium.com/get-ready-for-public-sale-cc6c60677d7

Twitter Section Begins:

Q1: You said that 60% of APT tokens will be dedicated to the community and 40% to liquidity mining.
What is the rate to be transferred to the Apricot reserve and treasury? How will you grow your insurance fund?

Cecilia: Appreciate the question and definitely think this is an important one. However, at current stage, since we are still very new and very quickly expanding, it’s hard to put out a number and fix the rate. We have to be flexibile given it’s also competitive out there in the money market space.

With that being said, it’s also important to note that yes, Apricot is cash flow postiive since Day 1, and all the cash flow is accruing to our reserve. For the insurance fund, we have these major ources: investors’ money, IDO funds, our revenue. Note that the insurance funds will also expand with our TVL growth.

Q2: I search the definition of APRICOT in google and it shows me this “Apricot means a small, round, soft fruit with a pale orange, furry skin” why have you chosen this as your project name? What does APRICOT means to you and what new innovation you’ll bring into crypto space ?

Cecilia: Haha, yes a fun one. Indeed like you noted, Apricot looks soft and cute on the outside, but hard core inside. It reprensents our thought to package something that’s really inherently and technically complicated into something that’s super easy and intuitive for users to use (through good UI/UX design mostly). And also, Apricot starts with an A, and we definitely aim to a top project within the ecosystem.

Q3: I read on your website that the Apricot project, the “Apricot Help” and “Apricot Rescue” loan tools I found very interesting. So, Can you explain how these tools work and what benefits they will provide to all your ecosystem stakeholders?

Cecilia: Sure. So what we have right now is called Apricot Assist ( Apricot Rescue is actually a dated but still relevant concept to us, which will be explored probably sometime down the road in the medium term to have ensured liquidations).

Assist is a background program that constantly monitors your account’s Borrow Limit Used (from 0–100%, with 100% meaning that you’ve used up your borrow power and face liquidations). When your Borrow Limit Used reaches the “Trigger Level” set by yourself, Apricot Assist can help you automatically sell/redeem tokens in your deposit to repay the tokens you’ve borrowed so as to reduce liquidation risks altogether. And you can also set a “Target Level”, which will set the floor for the Borrow Limit Used and indirectly your portfolio leverage so much you will never go below.

So the idea is really to give more protection to users in the 24x7 crypto market to avoid liquidation risks so they can sleep better at night. Will note that this feature is not just new in Solana, but also first in market across other ecosystems too!

Q4: I read that through X-Farm we will be able to do leveraged yield cultivation within Apricot, I have not heard of a similar product. Can you explain how we can achieve higher yields with it? How much leverage it allows us to have? What about the risks?

Cecilia: Great qn! Yes, X-Farm is also innovative in a sense that it’s leveraged yield farming (LYF) on a cross-margin basis. You may have heard or used other LYF protocols, but we do things differently here. In other places, you’d need to own LP constituents or a platfrom required token in order to gain borrow power to LYF. However, with us, cross-margin means that you can deposit anything (BTC, ETH, SOL and anything we accept under Lend) and then win up to 3x borrowing power to farming, which truly maximize your capital efficiency.

Another maybe more nuanced point is that X-Farm borrows directly from our lending markets, so unlike most other LYF protocols, we won’t trade your underlying collaterals to force you into wanted long/short positions.

As for risks, it’s important to understand that LYF is risky. The risks come mostly from impermanent loss (IL) risks and liquidation risks. With the latter, you can always turn on Apricot Assist that can help you auto-delverage upon the trigger level to reduce liqudiation risks. For the IL loss, you really need to understand the relative price movements and impact on the returns. We, at Apricot, will soon after IDO, devise ways for people to track them more easily. There are already tools for you to track under Dashboard.

Check out our app at https://app.apricot.one/

Q5: recently they presented an error in their agriculture, however, they guaranteed 0 losses and a compensation of 110%, this provides great security and confidence for investors, my question is did they establish parameters or strategies for something like this not to happen again?

Cecilia: Thanks. So would like to clarify first of all, it’s an error that has nothing to do with fund loss or security. Instead, it’s about the way we distribute the farming rewards across pools. That bug has been fixed shortly after. So, it’s really about the profits and not the principal. Since we feel the mistake is on our end, we decided to compenstate 110% of people’s profit, and what they should’ve earned just to show our attitude. This problem will not occur again. And as for security, we have done audits and we are for now still closed-sourced until we get a few more audits.

Telegram Live AMA Begins:

Q6: I am Very Excited to Join the IDO to acquire my $APT , Can you please tell me the Participation Criteria for that and What benifits I will get By the $APT TOKEN , Can I STAKE the TOKEN to earn Passive and additional Income ?

Cecilia: Yes, so there are two rounds for our IDO. The first one will take place Nov 18th, Thurs, 2pm UTC | 9am EST | 10pm HKT and is for whitelisted people only, but the whitelist process is already over. If you are relatively new to us and are interested, your should participate in the 2nd round, which is open-for-all and takes place on Nov 19th, Fri, 2pm UTC|9am EST|10pm HKT. The wallet cap is $4000 for this round.

Our token will first become tradable on Raydium. We will soon add APT staking to our app. APT token is govenance, but we will use our revenue to buy back and burn to ensure its value. Staking will be shortly available after.

Q7: Apricot has Lend, X-Farm, and Assist.
and I read Apricot is getting ready to launch Assist 2.0, what’s the difference?
and regarding the COT token, for your presence to introduce it to us? and how does it work?

Cecilia: Yes, we are constantly thinking of how to improve our existing offer. You can check out our latest roadmap here https://apricotfinance.medium.com/get-ready-for-public-sale-cc6c60677d7

Apricot Assist 2.0 will truly exapnd the coverge and configurability for users. Some current limiations for Assist 1.0 is here (https://docs.apricot.one/product/apricot-assist), which notably include only partial repayment for non-stable tokens, which will be enhanced in 2.0.

The COT idea is again an old but still relevant one. It has to do with securitization of bad debt assets, but this is not going to be available upon the initial offering. And we will keep researching and see if we’d deliver later on.

Q8: I find it interesting that you are doing a Retroactive Airdrop. So, I would like to know more about this, is there still a chance to earn some $APT through this airdrop? How can we participate and claim the rewards?

Cecilia: Yes, all the details about our Retro Liquidity Mining is https://apricotfinance.medium.com/retroactive-liquidity-mining-580ef87826af.

Yes, our retro LM is still running till Nov 19th, which is going to be our TGE date. You can still earn rewards if you deposit now. It’s going consider both your amout and time. Actually, if you check the app now https://app.apricot.one/, you can see the amount of retro tokens you are getting per $1k deposits for various tokens

Q9: crosschain is the future and that is what every DeFi project should explore, because future of crosschain helps the crypto space as a whole to gain a greater edge and benefit the entire industry. Apart from Solana, do you, at least in the future, intend to use another blockchain?

Cecilia: Yes, cross-chain is the future. In fact, we are prob the pioneer on this front, as we are the first lending protocol on Solana to accept wormhole-wrapped USTw from Terra, making a stride into a cross-chain future. In the future we will plan to accept more bridged assets etc.

If you are interested, check out this https://apricotfinance.medium.com/apricot-wormhole-x-terra-84f2e3e7ad18

Q10: 🍑 Lately the lending projects apart from their risk, are being hacked or recurring to scam. So, could you tell us a little about Apricot’s safety? who have been your auditors? How can you fully guarantee the security of our assets and funds?

Cecilia: Our project is being audited by Halborn security and is currently being reviewed by another audit firm. It’s important to also note that we are actually one of the few lending projects on Solana that actually wrote our own codes, instead of simply forking SPL (solana program library). Therefore, we, as compared to others, still have the edge right now to remain closed sourced, which makes it harder to be attacked, until we get more comfortable with a few more audits down the road.

Q11: how does Apricot love composability of DeFi? please elaborate us.

Cecilia: Yes, we love composability of DeFi! We are an ecosystem player and love to integrate with other projects to really tap this potential. So we have many partnerships, for example — with respect to Oracles, we are integrated with Switchboard and Pyth technically. Also, for Lend, we supported tokens from strong SOL projects as collateral and for X-Farm, we are highly integrated with Saber, Orca, Raydium and etc. We have also announced partnership with Terra, which makes us the first lending protocol to support USTw in Solana.
It definitely benefits all communities as users will have a much better and smoother experience accessing different products, and really getting the convenience and yields they should be getting, especially upon a fast network like Solana.

Q12: Your IDO plan shows that you intend to allocate 40% to Liquidity Mining, 10% to Reserve Treasury, 10% to Protocol and Incentive, Private Sale 20 %, Public Sale 4%, and 16% for Team and Advisors. Why only 4% for Public Sale? Won’t you increase this soon to attract investors?

Cecilia: 4% is already 2/3 of our intiial circulating supply. If there are more people who are super interested in buying, they should immeidately check out the Raydium pool to buy our token. At this point, we are not likely to change the amount to be sold.

Q13: I read on your Medium that Apricot has various campaigns to engage apricots such as quiz, ‘Expression of Interest’, #ApricotEDU and etc. can you explain more about these campaigns? how do you plan to improve the interaction with new users outside the crypto space?

Cecilia: Yes, we do these campaigns because we are a community first. That’s also why we are doing the uncapped auction style that’s very popular in Solana, which may help us raise a lot more funds arguably. We use those campaigns as ways for the community to communicate directly with us, and we will reward these people with the whitelist spot so they can participate in the first round. We want our tokens to be at the hands of our early users and people who truly understand our value and potential

- End-