APY.Finance (APY), a next-generation DeFi yield farming aggregator, today announced it has closed a $3.6 million private round of funding from Alameda Research, Arrington XRP Capital, Coingecko, Cluster Capital, the LAO and other prominent DeFi thought leaders, including Santiago Roel Santos (Parafi Capital) and George Lambeth. APY is building an automated investment service that offers DeFi novices and institutional investors a way to “yield farm” autonomously across a variety of DeFi protocols using complex investment strategies in a risk/reward optimized way.
The proceeds will be used for platform development, complex audits, and insurance for risk coverage, amongst other operational expenditures. The funding announcement kicks off APY’s official go-to-market launch that includes an upcoming public liquidity mining program, Token Generation Event (TGE), and an alpha launch later this year.
APY Wants to Solve Yield Farming Growing Pains and Complexity
Liquidity farming has exploded in popularity in recent months with over $9 billion total value locked (TVL) in various protocols. Despite this growth, there is still a vast learning curve involved and many risks from unaudited platforms, user error, and a fast moving industry.
Coined the “Wealthfront for Yield Farming”, APY is targeting both crypto and institutional investors of varying levels of sophistication. APY will act as a robo-advisor, finding risk-adjusted yields for investors that simply want exposure without the complexities currently found in the market.
APY CEO Will Shahda states, “Yield farming today presents users with a high barrier-to-entry, cost, and risk. APY solves these pain points by giving users a low-cost frictionless way to pool their liquidity and allocate it across a portfolio of strategies that optimizes for risk-adjusted yield.”
APY COO Delos Chang states, “The APY token will give our community the power to govern how liquidity is deployed to various DeFi protocols via risk scores, strategy proposals and more.”
Ninor Mansor from Arrington XRP Capital says, “Crypto-native yield generation is an extremely fragmented market encumbered by high gas costs & variability. The space is wide open for an innovative aggregator like APY Finance to build & deploy automated allocation strategies. The team has built an incredibly simplified experience for users seeking capital efficiency in DeFi.”
Liquidity Mining Program to Reward Community With APY Tokens
APY will generate a native governance token, APY, to help govern the protocol’s system parameters such as fees, risk scores, and strategies. The TGE and public sale of APY tokens is slated for September 2020, planned as an Initial Dex Offering (IDO).
APY.Finance is soon launching a liquidity mining program to reward product users from the community with APY tokens. The first public liquidity mining rewards announced will allow users to lock their assets into the initial APY.Finance liquidity proxy contract and receive APT liquidity provider tokens as an IOU (similar to Balancer BPT tokens).
When strategies are enabled, this contract will deploy underlying capital to other contracts and begin yield farming. After the TGE, the team will distribute APY tokens to holders of APT LP tokens. The team hopes to incentivize a fair distribution of APY in this manner to the community.