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.
History
Apollo team consists of 12 co-founders who are a mixture of full-time and part-time individuals that met at the Delphi hackathon earlier this year. The team is spread around the world.
Apollo’s Vision
Guy 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.”
Listen to Mike who is a front-end dev and DevOps lead at Apollo Dao speaking at TeFi Alpha in New York last month.
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.
How Apollo works
Before Apollo and Spectrum were introduced Terra users would be rewarded with ANC and MIR tokens for farming on Anchor and Mirror Protocols. The users could swap half of these reward tokens to UST making sure they had an equal balance and add them to the farms they were already vested in thus compounding the returns. Apollo automates this entire process! Once invested in an Apollo vault, you will see the number of LP tokens increase!
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 UST and swapping into the right ratios on the user’s behalf or allowing the user to enter the vaults with existing LP tokens.
Step 1:
Visit https://app.apollo.farm/ and pick a vault which you want to invest in.
Step 2:
Next, select if you want to deposit UST or the LP tokens for the vault.
Step 3:
You’re done! That’s how easy it is to get started on Apollo.
Choosing the vaults
Apollo displays couple of numbers on each of the vaults. The first one is the auto-compounded return to be expected from the vault (e.g. 161.98% APY from the MINE-UST vault). The second number is how much APR will be generated by routing 10% of the vault rewards to buying Apollo tokens at $0.25.
The details of the vaults can be seen by clicking the “…” button on the vault details page.
Here are the details for the MINE-UST vault.
Conclusion
Apollo makes the process of compounding returns on Terra even easier! It’s truly takes the phrase — “Let your money work for you” to the next level!
I can’t wait for Apollo’s warchest to start investing in various projects and being able to cash out returns generated as an Apollo token holder. Decentralized fund management for the masses!
