Flare Finance ExFi Beta V2 Launch

[brianwalden]

I'll ape in and be your guinea pig.

First, I put all my WSGB up as collateral in Flare Loans. They're allegedly using it to delegate and I'll still earn rewards but I haven't found the claim button yet. Plus their FTSO sucks so I'm not expecting much.

Then I used it to borrow CAND. That's their dollar stablecoin (Canary Dollar). CAND keeps its peg like F-assets are designed to do. Each CAND is backed by at least $1.10 worth of SGB. There's no interest to borrow, but there is a $100 reserve to pay for fees if you get liquidated and an upfront fee of less than 1%. I made sure the (amount borrowed + reserve + fee) * 1.1 for the required collateral reserve was slightly less than half the value of my collateral. This means I can survive a 50% drop in SGB and not get liquidated. This is safe for normal times, but wouldn't survive another May crash.

The reason I borrowed first is because this keeps my original SGB safe (as long as I don't get liquidated). Then I went over to Flare X and sold half the borrowed CAND for SGB and deposited it them in the liquidity pool. The pool earns swap fees as people use it to swap between CAND and SGB, so your LP tokens that represent your share in the pool should increase in value over time and when you finally exit the pool you'll get more CAND and SGB out than you put in. I couldn't find any indication of what kind of rate the pool is earning.

Liquidity pool mining exposes you to impermanent loss. As the price of the two coins changes the amounts of each one you hold changes as the pool tries to balance out each side so that it holds an equal value of each coin. If the prices change faster than the pool earns fees, you can lose money relative to if you had just held the two coins separately. If SGB goes to the moon, for example, you could end up with a whole bunch of CAND and not much SGB. This is why I borrowed against my SGB and am only providing liquidity with those borrowed funds.

The next step is to go stake your LP tokens in the Flare Farm. When you do this you earn DFLR which, correct me if I'm wrong, will be redeemable for YFLR when Flare Finance launches on FLR. Or is this DFLR redeemable for SFLR? I can't keep all these coins straight. I appear to earning quite a lot of DFLR right now, but who knows what it's worth. The rate at which you earn always drops as time goes on.

You'll have to claim your DFLR every so often and then I think you can stake that back on Flare Loans to earn something. I haven't gotten that far yet.

Overall I'm kind of disappointed in Flare Finance. Their interface is difficult to use and lacks basic information litter easy to find APRs, etc. I'm familiar with these DeFi products and have used them on other platforms, yet still struggled with Flare Finance. Feel free to ask questions, I'll try to answer them.

DeFi is exhausting.

[brianwalden]

Does anyone have the contract addresses for CAND, DFLR, the LP Pool, and any other tokens that are out there?

How does the EXFI airdrop work, will funds in current Flare Finance products count for the snapshot or do we have to withdraw everything back to our own wallets?

[jn_r]

1 hour ago, brianwalden said:

Does anyone have the contract addresses for CAND, DFLR, the LP Pool, and any other tokens that are out there?

How does the EXFI airdrop work, will funds in current Flare Finance products count for the snapshot or do we have to withdraw everything back to our own wallets?

I found quite an extensive list of tokens here: https://songbird-explorer.flare.network/tokens

Quote

If SGB goes to the moon, for example, you could end up with a whole bunch of CAND and not much SGB. This is why I borrowed against my SGB and am only providing liquidity with those borrowed funds.

I'm not sure what you intend to say here is correct or at least not complete. So you borrow CAND using SGB. Now imagine the opposite of your example, you put CAND with SGB in a Liquidity Pool and SGB would drop in value. Then if you unstake you are left with a lot of SGB and not much CAND. Meaning you have to buy extra CAND to pay back your loan.

With this construction you are long SGB and/or short CAND (sort of, not exactly). It's a position, but not without risk.

Edited November 20, 2021 by jn_r

[B088IN]

Lol couldn't use the Loan function as I didn't have enough SGB! Oh well, looks like I won't be trying that side of it

[Benny]

Seems I am always late to whats happening. How can you get Cand using the bifrost wallet? I thought all of the functions would be integrated into it and so I have only been allocating my rewards vote waiting for the next step. So glad I found this site

[B088IN]

You have to use the browser within the Bifrost wallet to access the flare finance website 👍

Having spent the day playing around with it, I have come to the conclusion I need to read way more about it before trying it out any further. There is so much to get your head around and I haven’t even scratched the surface. I’m sure I’m doing most things wrong and so came to the realisation I’m better off leaving it basic, so turned everything back to into SGB and will stick to basic delegation using WSGB for now. I’ll spend the time looking more deeply into the various options and take the plunge again once FLR goes live. Realised it’s way more complicated than I hoped with the small amount of understanding I have at the moment. 

Edited November 21, 2021 by B088IN

[Seoulite]

1 hour ago, B088IN said:

You have to use the browser within the Bifrost wallet to access the flare finance website 👍

Having spent the day playing around with it, I have come to the conclusion I need to read way more about it before trying it out any further. There is so much to get your head around and I haven’t even scratched the surface. I’m sure I’m doing most things wrong and so came to the realisation I’m better off leaving it basic, so turned everything back to into SGB and will stick to basic delegation using WSGB for now. I’ll spend the time looking more deeply into the various options and take the plunge again once FLR goes live. Realised it’s way more complicated than I hoped with the small amount of understanding I have at the moment. 

Me too. I’m going to keep my stuff in bifrost at least until the FF snapshot. After that I might take another look.

 Remember also there is an opportunity cost in terms of rewards. Your SGB gets delegated to DeFi oracles and one other provider. Some DeFi oracles does not perform very well, you are missing out on some rewards in return for getting DFLR. At the moment it’s impossible to calculate which is better in money terms though.

[brianwalden]

7 hours ago, jn_r said:

I found quite an extensive list of tokens here: https://songbird-explorer.flare.network/tokens

I'm not sure what you intend to say here is correct or at least not complete. So you borrow CAND using SGB. Now imagine the opposite of your example, you put CAND with SGB in a Liquidity Pool and SGB would drop in value. Then if you unstake you are left with a lot of SGB and not much CAND. Meaning you have to buy extra CAND to pay back your loan.

With this construction you are long SGB and/or short CAND (sort of, not exactly). It's a position, but not without risk.

Yes, sorry. I wasn't trying to be delta neutral. I'm long SGB and want to protect that long position while trying to earn a little extra from it.

Edit. I realize even that answer isn't clear. By protect I mean from the impermanent loss that comes with farming. Farming with borrowed money has its own risks.

Edited November 21, 2021 by brianwalden

[jn_r]

6 hours ago, brianwalden said:

Yes, sorry. I wasn't trying to be delta neutral. I'm long SGB and want to protect that long position while trying to earn a little extra from it.

Edit. I realize even that answer isn't clear. By protect I mean from the impermanent loss that comes with farming. Farming with borrowed money has its own risks.

Thanks for the explanation though. Wasn't aware of the option of WSGB in the nests, that should give both ftso profit and some extra farming earnings (correct?). But yeah I think IL is indeed a factor, makes it more complex. I see it as 2 investments in one pool. If SGB rises, you could have had more by just holding SGB. Now you only have the profit of half the SGB plus a little more because of how that AMM works. Maybe you could try it with 2 accounts starting with same amount and see after some time what the difference has become. As matter of fact I think I will try that :-)

Edited November 21, 2021 by jn_r

[Guest]

16 hours ago, brianwalden said:

Does anyone have the contract addresses for CAND, DFLR, the LP Pool, and any other tokens that are out there?

How does the EXFI airdrop work, will funds in current Flare Finance products count for the snapshot or do we have to withdraw everything back to our own wallets?

Token Addresses:

WSGB - 0x02f0826ef6ad107cfc861152b32b52fd11bab9ed

DFLR - 0x6f1be01f9cd0c14e38f94e81cb281ecb98cc6a9b

CAND - 0x70Ad7172EF0b131A1428D0c1F66457EB041f2176

FLRX - 0x32c16bA8A4B1f2501A16bcdAF53b51Fb982eAec4

All of the above tokens have a precision of 18 decimals.

[PM2]

Hi. Does anyone know whether we can participate in the dFLR airdrop if our SGB is swapped / farmed on the snapshot date? I assume we'll have to unwind everything?

[Guest]

Briefly dipped and got out of ExFi v2. Each person's risk appetite is different so this is just my perspective - 

Participation 

• I did not participate in LP staking. Too much pain with tracking taxes, knowing there isn't any software available to help with Flare/Songbird yet, and U.S. tax season starts in 1.5 months. 
• I did participate in Loans. I minted CAND with my WSGB, staked that CAND for DFLR, and staked my DFLR for additional rewards.
• Got out from Loans with between 1% and 1.5% loss in SGB/WSGB.

Thoughts

• The software has been improved a lot more, and Songbird certainly scaled a lot better than last time. There are still some UI bugs (including inability to stake DFLR from mobile MetaMask) but by and large a vast improvement.
• The system needs a lot more liquidity. Spreads for the SGB/CAND vs. SGB/USD (Bitrue) were almost 20% to 25%. I'm lucky to get out with just a small loss. That said, this is not some indictment on the platform. It's just where we are in terms of a product rollout. If I had an account on Bitrue, I could have sent off my SGB awards and gotten better returns, but it wasn't worth an extra KYC/AML and to have to deal with the IRS with additional documentation (funds offshore). 
• A good time to get into Loans would be after single asset yields are enabled along with availability of S-Assets and the state connector. 

The primary reason why I waded into loans is to see if there was any DFLR to mine during the first few minutes like with v1. Unfortunately the best time to easily get DFLR was at the beginning of v1. There wasn't much DFLR available as rewards in Loans this time around. So that was a waste of 1-1.5% off my funds.

I'm still staking my DFLR from v1 and continue getting rewards by staking it, so I'm overall glad to have v2 turned on. I'll be back when S-Assets are available, but I'll stick to single asset yield farms until there is tons of liquidity.

Finally

ExFi is the closest thing Songbird can get in terms of a real-world scale test. Coston failed several times during the limited Flare Finance Alpha/Beta. And the Flare development team was certainly watching closely. The platform performed really well, with ~0.5 second blocks. I think we will start to see them turn on state connector soon and S-Assets shortly after.

Edited November 21, 2021 by Ripley

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, PM2 said:

Hi. Does anyone know whether we can participate in the dFLR airdrop if our SGB is swapped / farmed on the snapshot date? I assume we'll have to unwind everything?

I think you may need to exit LP staking farms so your actual SGB can be read but should be able to keep everything else. 

[Seoulite]

11 hours ago, Ripley said:

A good time to get into Loans would be after single asset yields are enabled along with availability of S-Assets and the state connector

Thanks for your post. 

Managing single assets seems more suitable for the beginning or for people who don't have a lot of time to devote to tracking their position. No doubt the rewards will be lower as a result but nonetheless.

It also remains to be seen how lucrative things like S-assets will be in terms of rewards or staking. When we have a clearer view of all this we can do some breakdowns on what is the best for each person's level of investment. In any case, I'm glad something is moving, and as you said hopefully they are going to turn on the other two protocols soon. 

[PM2]

On 11/21/2021 at 1:53 AM, Seoulite said:

Me too. I’m going to keep my stuff in bifrost at least until the FF snapshot. After that I might take another look.

 Remember also there is an opportunity cost in terms of rewards. Your SGB gets delegated to DeFi oracles and one other provider. Some DeFi oracles does not perform very well, you are missing out on some rewards in return for getting DFLR. At the moment it’s impossible to calculate which is better in money terms though.

I was watching the videos put up by patty XRP and Mickey B Fresh and I noticed that their browser version seemed to have much more functionality than mine (not that I could not do everything I wanted). Does anyone know why this is? Perhaps Android / iOS? I tried switching browser from Brave to Chrome but it made no difference.