What is Apollo?
ApolloDAO is a yield optimizer built on Terra. The team’s current focus is on auto-compounding, however over time the team will develop more advanced strategies. Additionally, ApolloDAO seeks to be fully cross-chain and will build upon other chains like Cosmos or Solana.
Ryan from Apollo describes it as, “A bank built on money nobody can freeze.” when asked how he would explain Apollo to his grandma.
Apollo’s Vision
Apollo has a broad vision and as one of the first yield-aggregators on Terra, it has a first-mover advantage. Right now the product is very similar to another yield-aggregator — Spectrum — however the vision for Apollo is grand as you’ll read in a recent interview with the Apollo team.
Guy from Apollo describes Apollo’s vision as
“allow a user to come to the Apollo platform, and in the simplest way, just deposit UST and specific a “risk level”, and their money would be deposited into a number of different predetermined vaults, with the best yield matching that risk profile, and wrapping this savings product into one token (probably an NFT). A more simple way would be something like combining a range of delta neutral strategies into one wrapped saving product. The rewards would then be compounded back into the position too.”
A unique feature of the Apollo platform is the “warchest” through which Apollo wants to become a hedge-fund where they invest the capital and generate returns for Apollo token holders. Here’s Guy from Apollo again,
“We are looking to create a full treasury management platform that would integrate into our yield platform for example. I think also the way we will allow our token holders to manage and deploy our “warchest”, which is all the revenue made through our products can add a lot of user/community engagement and also generate great returns.
With the Warchest, nearly 100% (1% of profit goes to Angel protocol) of all revenue generated by Apollo DAO products will go to bootstrapping it for the first 3 years (or until token distribution ends).
To begin with it will be 80% Luna and 20% aUST, but this is really to give our token holders a blank canvas. Initially they will be able to vote on which would be the best farming opportunities to deploy the capital, deploy it on Apollo, change allocations to other tokens, enter private and public farming for token releases on Pylon etc. — so lots of opportunities on Terra for it atm.
It will also be used for Apollo token buybacks at certain price points. Long term token holders will have increasing ability to vote on how to deploy the capital, moving beyond farming on Terra to other chains and potentially even utilizing centralized methods of generating returns. We would also be looking at stuff like using to bootstrap validators on a variety of networks.”
Adoption
Apollo’s farms have proved massively popular with the TVL reaching almost $142 million in 1 week! At it’s peak the TVL exceeded $200m within 24 hours! The community farming event was supposed to last a month but 3 Million Apollo were farmed within only 3 days! The team had to announce an extension of the community farming event.
Using Apollo
Apollo has one of the nicest user-experience amongst yield aggregators. Getting started on Apollo is probably one of the simplest tasks. With other yield aggregators/farms you have to swap into equal amount of tokens in the pool. That process is not easy especially when volatile assets are involved. Apollo makes this simple with allowing the user to enter the vaults/farms with either:
- UST and swapping into the right ratios on the user’s behalf or
- With existing LP tokens.
Data Analysis
You can have the best product but you need users for it to be a success. Let’s take a look at the numbers that Apollo has generated so far since launch on September 14, 2021. This data analysis is done using the data from Flipside Crypto (https://www.flipsidecrypto.com).
Overall Picture
Let’s first look at the overall number of transactions and depositors per deposit type (UST or LP tokens). As expected the frictionless UST deposits have proved more popular than the LP Tokens.
Comparing UST vs LP deposits
LEGEND: For these next set of visualizations — Green = UST and Yellow = LP Tokens
Looking at the distribution of transactions over time, the interest was highest on launch day (September 14, 2021) and has gradually declined and found a steady state since.
The amount of UST deposited on launch day peaked at around $55 Million while the amount of LP tokens peaked around 10M. Note: these are the number of LP tokens, the total value in UST should be much higher.
At launch, we had about 4000 depositors for UST and around 2800 for LP tokens.
Looking at the number of strategies users contributed to, it seems like all the 30 strategies (i.e. vaults) were deposited into on launch day for both UST and LP tokens. However, lately the number has decreased which is likely a result of reduced APR/APYs returns.
Comparing Strategies/Vaults
When you view the Apollo Vaults on Finder, they are represented by a unique strategy id. For e.g. the ANC-UST Vault is represented by strategy_id = 30 . In the below charts, we’ll use these Ids to get a sense of how popular each of these vaults are.
Here’s an example transaction — https://finder.extraterrestrial.money/columbus-4/tx/74D17AC11A077BC7C528126847CAFFE7A8C86029D362989FC64AE935D48CCC1C
UST Deposits
Let’s look at the UST deposits first. It’s clear that the strategies 29 and 30 are the most popular with strategy 29 having most of the daily transactions and deposits. Looking at the APY/APR rates since launch, it’s not a surprise to guess that strategy 29 is the MINE-UST pool.
LP Deposits
Looking at the LP deposits, we see a similar dominance by strategies 29 (ANC-UST) and 30 (MINE-UST) for transactions but for the amount of LP tokens deposited the strategy 29 (ANC-UST) holds more than 90% share. How can this be?
My hypothesis is that the ANC-UST pool was the largest pool on Terra before Apollo launch. Therefore, while transactions are nearly equal to the MINE-UST pool, the number of LP tokens migrating to Apollo are very large.
Where is the new liquidity coming from?
Now let’s look at the sources of new liquidity being added to Terra. There are two sources that I’m considering for this scenario — Central Exchanges and Bridges (Ethereum, BSC).
To find the source I’m using the following logic.
- First, I get a list of addresses that made a deposit into Apollo post-launch i.e. September 14, 2021.
- Then, I’m looking at the pre-launch timeframe between August 7, 2021 (When Apollo posted launch details) and September 14, 2021 (Apollo public launch).
- Next, I’m looking for deposits made to these addresses from either a central exchange or a bridge. For the addresses for the exchange and bridge, I’m using the information available on ET Finder under “Named accounts” — https://finder.extraterrestrial.money/named_accounts. The exchanges that are included in this analysis are — Kucoin, Binance, Bkex, Coinone, Upbit, Moonpay, Coinex, Huobi and Bithumb.
Now let’s look at the numbers.
On launch day, ~$30 Million of the $55 Million UST (from the charts above) deposited into Apollo came from central exchanges. Similarly, ~$15 Million UST came from the bridges. Therefore, almost 80% (45M/55M UST) of the launch deposits was new liquidity into the Terra ecosystem.
Conclusion
- Apollo has proven to be very popular
- Apollo made it really frictionless for users to deposit and it has proven to be the right decision.
