Stack DApps like Lego bricks
This tutorial will presents in details how you can use different DApps on Polygon to increase your benefits when farming stable coins.
Last updated
This tutorial will presents in details how you can use different DApps on Polygon to increase your benefits when farming stable coins.
Last updated
When you farm yields on a given farm, you usually get rewards under the form of native farm tokens. You then have the choice between either selling those, or keep them and hope they will gain some value over time. This guide will present a few different DApps (Decentralized Applications) to maximize your yields without selling anything, while still compounding interests. This articles will also start from stable coins, because this is considered as a relatively safe strategy. However, you need to keep in mind that this is not a financial advice, and that this guide should be followed with caution as results are absolutely not guaranteed. As always, do your own research.
QuickSwap is one of the biggest AMM (Automated Market Maker) on Polygon. People deposit pairs of tokens into liquidity pools and earn transaction fees from other users who use the platform to swap their tokens. During a swap, QuickSwap automatically choses the best route using the different liquidity pools, and each jump from one pool to the other is subject to transaction fees that are redistributed to the liquidity suppliers.
For this exercise, we will use the MAI/USDC pair on QuickSwap. This liquidity pool, a stable pool, proposes an APY (Annual Percentage Yield that varies between 20% and 25%). The yield is composed of the transaction fees (that are accrued into the liquidity pool) and QUICK rewards.
The pool gets a fix amount of QUICK tokens every day, and they are then distributed to liquidity providers according to their share of the pool. As an example, if the pool has the equivalent of $1,000,000 worth of liquidity, and you already deposited $1,000 of LP (Liquidity Provider) tokens, you own 0.1% of the pool, which entitles you to 0.1% of the daily QUICK reward. Your Quick reward will then be claimable when you manage the pool you entered.
You can claim them regularly in order to put them at work. Let's see how.
The Dragon's Lair is a way to optimize your gains on QuickSwap. You can deposit the QUICK tokens that you earn from liquidity pools into the Lair, and they will earn you additional QUICK rewards. This is a good idea if you want to keep the QUICK tokens instead of selling them. When your QUICK tokens are staked into the Dragon's Lair, the rewards they generate are automatically compounded, and the APY of the Lair is around 12%.
After you deposited your QUICK tokens, you will get in your wallet some dQUICK tokens that represent the share of the QUICK pool that you own. Note that the ratio QUICK:dQUICK isn't 1:1 since the dQUICK represent your share of the pool, while the amount of QUICK will increase over time as more rewards are added to the pool.
Now you have your stable coins deposited in the liquidity pool, and they generate QUICK rewards. The rewards are generating more rewards thanks to the Dragon's Lair. But wait, there's more ...
The Dragon's Syrup is an additional way that QuickSwap offers to reward even more users who are holding QUICK tokens. The QuickSwap team set up a program where partners can promote their products by granting their own token to the users of the QuickSwap platform. You can then deposit your dQUICK tokens into one of the farm in order to earn these exotic tokens on top of the Dragon's Lair rewards. The one we are interested in is the ADDY farm.
When you deposit your dQUICK into the farm, they will disappear from the Dragon's Lair (pretty much the same way your camTokens disappear from the Yield page on Mai Finance when you deposit them into a Vault). But you can clearly see that the dQUICK APY from the Lair is still applied, and that you will also get additional ADDY reward. Here, the APR (Annual Percentage Reward) is currently 21.36%.
You will notice that the Syrup farms have an expiration date. Here, the ADDY farm will expire in 50 days and 11 hours. Some new farms will show up as some older disappear.
In our case, the ADDY reward that we get can be claimed manually. You can note that the rate at which we will collect ADDY reward can only accelerate if we compound manually our QUICK rewards into dQUICK that we then deposit into the ADDY farm on QuickSwap.
We have MAI/USDC LP tokens deposited in the liquidity pool, and we earn
swapping fees
QUICK rewards from the pool that we need to claim manually and add to the Dragon's Lair
QUICK rewards from the Dragon's Lair that are auto-compounded in our existing rewards
ADDY rewards from the Dragon's Syrup that we can claim
Impermax is an application that allows their user to leverage automatically their assets in order to amplify their positions in liquidity pools. This is done by borrowing additional assets supplied on the Impermax platform.
For this exercise, we will also use the MAI/USDC pool in Impermax. By depositing some LP tokens into the MAI/USDC pool, we now have the option to leverage this deposit a certain number of times in order to increase our exposed capital, and gain more rewards. You need to pay attention to a few things when you're using Impermax though
You can only borrow what other users supply
The more assets are borrowed, the higher the borrowing rate
If the borrowing rate becomes too high, your final APR can become negative, and then you will lose some of your LP
The more you leverage, the higher the APR, but the higher the borrowing rate
On QuickSwap, I deposited $20 worth of MAI/USDC pair. On Impermax, I will deposit only $10 worth of MAI/USDC and will apply a x2 lever on it to get a $20 exposure.
You can see on the screenshot above that, if I increase my leverage to x2.1, I would borrow
0.481269 USDC
0.487593 MAI
We can also see by how much the trading fees I collect would increase (+3.45%), as well as the increase in QUICK rewards (+36.83%), IMX rewards (+23.05%) and the borrowing rate (-37.20%) for a final estimated APR of 26.13%.
Note in this example that the Borrowing fees are paid using the QUICK rewards and the trading fees in case the QUICK rewards aren't enough. Then the IMX reward goes to the supplier if the borrowing fee isn't yet paid, and finally the deposit is used to pay the supplier if there's still something to pay.
Our goal here is to match the deposit we have on QuickSwap, so we'll stick to a x2 leverage. This also ensures that we don't get the risk of going into negative APRs. Our goal is not to collect as much reward as possible, but to increase our position over time, and collect IMX tokens.
We have MAI/USDC tokens deposited in the appropriate pool
Our position is levered two times in order to match the amount deposited in QuickSwap
We collect IMX tokens
Adamant is a yield optimizer platform that automates harvesting into liquidity pools and auto-compound rewards into additional LP tokens. Most of the pools present on Adamant are popular pools from big liquidity providers like QuickSwap, SushiSwap and others. Let's see how we can use Adamant to optimize our yields.
We earn QUICK tokens on QuickSwap, and we earn IMX tokens on Impermax. Let's use Adamant to farm the QUICK/IMX pool from QuickSwap. Why do that? Because the farm is actually very profitable, as you can see here:
As this article is being written, the current APY of the IMX/QUICK pool on Adamant is 417.25%. The reward is composed of
168.49% auto-compounded QUICK (QUICK rewards from QuickSwap are sold to buy additional IMX/QUICK LP tokens that are added to your position)
212.85% ADDY tokens that you can claim on Adamant (they are vested for 90 days so you can't access them right away)
35.91% fee dividends paid in WMATIC if you claim your ADDY daily
This means that your IMX/QUICK position will grow over time, and that you will collect ADDY rewards. The more ADDY you hold, the more dividend (WMATIC) you will collect.
You can also see that the APY on Adamant is Boostable. This means that if you stake additional ADDY tokens (not the vested ones), you will apply an additional multiplier to the reward you get. And that's actually a good thing, because we DO get additional ADDY tokens from the Dragon's Syrup on QuickSwap!
When you harvest the ADDY earned from your LP position in the IMX/QUICK pool, they will be locked for 90 days, but will allow you to get some dividends in the form of WMATIC. The current APR for dividends is 34% based on your vested ADDY tokens.
After the 90 days vest period, you will have the possibility to lock them for at least an additional 90 days in order to boost the ADDY tokens earned from vaults and earn additional ADDY tokens.
WMATIC dividends are the actual output of the QuickSwap + Impermax + Adamant trio we're after, because we'll be able to use them to re-inject additional LP tokens into both QuickSwap and Impermax.
We deposit IMX and QUICK tokens earned from Impermax and QuickSwap under the form of IMX/QUICK LP tokens. Adamant is earning
more LP tokens by auto-compounding a part of the QUICK tokens granted by QuickSwap for the IMX/QUICK pool
ADDY tokens that are used to boost the IMX/QUICK rewards, and makes us eligible to dividends
WMATIC dividends
With the WMATIC tokens earned on Adamant, we now can deposit them on AAVE in order to get some yield. This is the regular AAVE token leverage mentioned in the dedicated article.
Following the AAVE deposit, we get amWMATIC in our wallet. We can use the yield page on Mai Finance to auto-compound the reward provided by AAVE with the rewards from the Matic incentive and get an additional 4% on our MATIC earned on Adamant.
The camWMATIC can then be used as collateral on Mai Finance by depositing them in the camWMATIC vault, which allows us to borrow MAI, and swap a part of the minted MAI into USDC. Once we have more MAI and USDC in our wallet, we can combine the 2 stable coins into additional LP tokens that will be deposited on QuickSwap and Impermax. Once again, if you need details on how you can do that, please read the dedicated article.
What follows is a simulation made with an initial investment of $1,000 worth of MAI/USDC LP tokens, and the current APRs / APYs given by the different platforms on August 30th 2021. This is not a real application of what we described above. Rates will vary, token prices will vary, some programs will come to an end etc ... so the final results are just an estimation of what you could get if everything remained stable, which will never be the case.
Since we have $1,000 worth of MAI/USDC, we want to split the LP tokens between QuickSwap and Impermax. Because Impermax allows us to leverage our deposit, we can actually put more tokens on QuickSwap and use the leverage option on Impermax to match what we get on QuickSwap.
In order to lower the risk of negative interests on Impermax, the split will be as follows:
$900 worth of MAI/USDC on QuickSwap
$100 worth of MAI/USDC on Impermax with a x9 lever to expose $900 in the MAI/USDC pool
For the rest of the simulation, we will consider that QuickSwap grants a 25.56% APR on MAI/USDC paid in QUICK tokens, and Impermax gives a 20% average APR on MAI/USDC at x9, only paid in IMX tokens. This corresponds to a daily rate of
+0.07% on QuickSwap
+0.05% on Impermax
This means that at the end of Day 1, we already collected
$0.63 worth of QUICK
$0.49 worth of IMX
From there, we can combine all the IMX we get with a portion of the QUICK reward into IMX/QUICK LP pair that will be deposited on Adamant. The LP pair has a value of $0.98 and we still have $0.14 worth of QUICK that we deposit on the Dragons's Lair for dQUICK. dQUICK are then used on Dragon's Syrup to start collecting ADDY on Day 2.
| Reward type | Value in dollars |
|---|---|
dQUICK on QuickSwap | 0.14 |
ADDY on QuickSwap | 0 |
IMX/QUICK on Adamant | 0.98 |
ADDY on Adamant | 0 |
WMATIC on Adamant | 0 |
camWMATIC on Mai Finance | 0 |
debt on Mai Finance | 0 |
We still have the same position on QuickSwap and Impermax, nothing changes and we once again get $0.63 worth of QUICK and $0.49 worth of IMX that are used to get $0.98 worth of IMX/QUICK and $0.14 of dQUICK deposited in the ADDY farm on QuickSwap.
However, the IMX/QUICK position on Adamant is earning 151.96% APR in IMX/QUICK (or +0.42% daily). This means that our original $0.98 deposit is now at $0.984, and we're adding $0.98 from farming on QuickSwap and Impermax. It also generated 177.43% APR (or +0.49% daily) ADDY, corresponding to $0.005.
On QuickSwap, the dQUICK we deposited in Dragon's Syrup is generating additional QUICK tokens at 12.26% APR (+0.03% daily) and ADDY tokens at 17.08% APR (+0.05% daily). This is applied to the $0.18 worth of QUICK, meaning that at the end of Day 2 we already generated $0.00006 worth of ADDY and $0.000054 worth of QUICK. The ADDY reward can be claimed and added into Adamant to start boosting the ADDY APR of the IMX/QUICK position.
| Reward type | Value in dollars |
|---|---|
dQUICK on QuickSwap | 0.274 |
ADDY on QuickSwap | 0.00006 |
IMX/QUICK on Adamant | 1.98 |
ADDY on Adamant | 0.005 |
WMATIC on Adamant | 0 |
camWMATIC on Mai Finance | 0 |
debt on Mai Finance | 0 |
Moving on, the ADDY reward claimed on Adamant are now generating some WMATIC reward. The first $0.005 worth of ADDY collected earn 56% APR (0.15% daily) or WMATIC dividends, which corresponds to $0.000007 worth of WMATIC. Keep in mind we're only starting the engine here.
| Reward type | Value in dollars |
|---|---|
dQUICK on QuickSwap | 0.411 |
ADDY on QuickSwap | 0.00019 |
IMX/QUICK on Adamant | 2.971 |
ADDY on Adamant | 0.014 |
WMATIC on Adamant | 0.000007 |
camWMATIC on Mai Finance | 0 |
debt on Mai Finance | 0 |
We can now add the WMATIC in the loop. This dividend will be deposited on AAVE, then used on Mai Finance to borrow new MAI.
| Reward type | Value in dollars |
|---|---|
dQUICK on QuickSwap | 0.548 |
ADDY on QuickSwap | 0.00038 |
IMX/QUICK on Adamant | 3.969 |
ADDY on Adamant | 0.029 |
WMATIC on Adamant | 0.000029 |
camWMATIC on Mai Finance | 0.000007 |
debt on Mai Finance | 0.0000035 |
At this point, the "debt" on Mai Finance will be used to increase the MAI/USDC LP positions on both QuickSwap and Impermax, and the system is completely primed.
The daily routine is composed by the following transactions
Harvest IMX on Impermax
Harvest QUICK on QuickSwap
Create new IMX/QUICK LP pair on QuickSwap
Deposit the remaining QUICK on Dragon's Lair to get dQUICK
Deposit dQUICK on Dragon's Syrup to get additional ADDY
Harvest ADDY on Dragon's Syrup
Deposit harvested ADDY on Adamant vault
Deposit IMX/QUICK LP tokens on Adamant
Harvest ADDY on Adamant from LP pair
Harvest WMATIC dividends on Adamant
Deposit WMATIC on AAVE and get amWMATIC
Deposit amWMATIC on Mai Finance and get camWMATIC
Deposit camWMATIC on Mai Finance's vault
Borrow 50% of the deposit as MAI stable coin on Mai Finance
Swap 50% of the minted MAI for USDC on Mai Finance
Create new MAI/USDC LP pair on QuickSwap
Deposit 90% of the new LP tokens on QuickSwap liquidity pool
Deposit 10% of the new LP tokens on Impermax liquidity pool
Leverage the new position on Impermax to match the position on QuickSwap
| Month | dQUICK | IMX/QUICK | ADDY | WMATIC | Debt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | $4.25 | $32.56 | $2.32 | $0.03 | $0.02 |
2 | $8.36 | $68.34 | $9.65 | $0.28 | $0.15 |
3 | $12.48 | $108.86 | $22.30 | $0.98 | $0.49 |
4 | $16.59 | $154.78 | $41.34 | $2.41 | $1.20 |
5 | $20.71 | $206.83 | $67.50 | $4.86 | $2.42 |
6 | $24.84 | $265.83 | $101.73 | $8.70 | $4.34 |
7 | $28.97 | $332.74 | $145.11 | $14.31 | $7.15 |
8 | $33.12 | $408.63 | $198.87 | $22.14 | $11.06 |
9 | $37.29 | $494.73 | $264.40 | $32.70 | $16.34 |
10 | $41.48 | $592.45 | $343.28 | $46.57 | $23.26 |
11 | $45.71 | $703.39 | $437.33 | $64.40 | $32.19 |
12 | $49.97 | $829.37 | $548.59 | $86.94 | $43.46 |
After a complete year, the final state of our investment would be
| Reward type | Value in dollars |
|---|---|
dQUICK on QuickSwap | 50.689 |
ADDY on QuickSwap | 4.325 |
IMX/QUICK on Adamant | 851.968 |
ADDY on Adamant | 568.972 |
WMATIC on Adamant | 91.209 |
camWMATIC on Mai Finance | 91.220 |
debt on Mai Finance | 44.30 |
Note that the WMATIC in Adamant is collected daily so they're not part of the final revenue generated via this process. Also, the ADDY that have been generated via the QuickSwap farm haven't been harvested daily and added to boost the ADDY rewards on Adamant in this simulation (it is already complex enough).
Finally, after one year, the generated revenue is worth $1,567.174. If we consider the initial investment was $1,000 worth of MAI/USDC, this leads to a final APY of 156.71% on our stable pair.
This Lego game allowed us to generate an impressive APY from stable coin farming, with very little risk exposure. Of course, this simulation makes a few assumptions that are 100% incorrect, but it illustrates how we can combine different DApps to maximize yield farming. It also showcases that it's not a necessity to sell tokens that we farm, and that there's certainly a was to use them efficiently if you take the time to research possibilities.
This guide is definitely not financial advice, it was made with an educational goal in mind. You need to pay attention to price variations, supply and demand, reward programs end dates, impermanent losses etc ... The goal wasn't to propose recipes that can be followed blindly, so please do your homework and your own simulation, and only invest what you're ready to possibly lose.
Keep in mind that a strategy that works well at a given time may perform poorly (or make you lose money) at another time. Please stay informed, monitor the markets, keep an eye on your investments, and as always, do your own research.
