Solana_Daily hosts Apricot:#protocol #Apricot #SolanaDaily #SOL
Solanda_Daily Admin: Hello and welcome, how are you today?
Cecilia: Doing well. Very excited to be here and introduce Apricot!
Solanda_Daily Admin: Happy to hear! Ready to start our AMA?
Cecilia: Yep, let’s get started!
Q1: How did Apricot get started? What did the first few months look like?
Cecilia: So, the team behind Apricot has known each other for close to 10 years. We are good friends and we have diverse and relevant backgrounds in traditional finance, trading, start-up and crypto such that developing a DeFi project is a natural area to explore. We want to leverage our user experience, knowledge and our execution ability to create something that improves based on today’s market offerings.
The first months were fun, and it’s still fun haha. At the beginning, it’s more about getting used to the Rust coding environment and also getting to know the partners in the ecosystem. Gladly, we have received great support from the strong community and Solana team. We are able to learn and refine Apricot along the way.
Q2: How much have you fundraised? Any notable investors you can share?
Cecilia: We raised around $5m in total. We had support from a wide and strong investors including Delphi Digital, Solana Foundation/Capital, Lemniscap, CMS, Komorebi DAO and many others. We have had angels backing us including Darren Lau, Chris McCann etc.
Q3: How does a partnership/integration between APricot and benefit both communities?
Cecilia: We are an ecosystem player and love to integrate with other projects to really tap the composability of DeFi. So we have many partnerships, for example – with respect to Oracles, we are integrated with Switchboard and Pyth technically. Also, for Lend, we supported tokens from strong SOL projects as collateral (mSOL being the latest) and for X-Farm, we are highly integrated with Saber, Orca, Raydium and etc. We have also announced partnership with Terra, which makes us the first lending protocol to support USTw in Solana.
It definitely benefits all communities as users will have a much better and smoother experience accessing different products, and really getting the convenience and yields they should be getting, especially upon a fast network like Solana.
Q4: What inspired the idea behind Apricot? What did you see wrong or missing in the market?
Cecilia: Great qn!! You know, Apricot was really born out of the simple idea to have an easy DeFi tool with users’ interest in mind. Our mission is to help users maximize yields while minimizing risks. Borrowing/lending is the base of any financial activities and based upon that, there should be a tool that helps users generate returns with borrowed funds. But at the same time, leverage is also risky, so that’s why downside protection is important. Therefore, we are offering lend + x-farm +assist, which are highly integrated, and also new features in not only Solana, but also other ecosystems.
Q5: How do people benefit from using Apricot in ways they don’t elsewhere today?
Cecilia: Haha, I can perhaps talk about this all day long. First of all, welcome everyone to at least give Apricot a try if you haven’t already done so. Although we call ourselves a next-gen lending protocol, we are much more than just borrowing/lending. So specifically,
Under Lend: this is our base layer product as borrowing is financial primitive. Even under basic lending services, you will be able to see innovation like depositing your LP tokens to gain borrowing power (we will add more options on that later), and we will be the first to support USTw (check it out).
Things get more interesting with X-Farm. So this is first-in-market cross margin leveraged yield farming (LYF) – meaning that our LYF doesn’t require you to own any LP constituents or trade your original position to get you into wanted long/short positions. You can literally deposit anything we accept under Lend, and get up to 3x borrowing power to LYF to get higher returns without leaving our platform. This totally expands the usability of a lending protocol, b/c it’s added and one-stop use case for people.
Then Assist! We care about risks, and want to minimize downside risks for our users. So this is a truly auto-deleveraging feature that you can configure yourselves to stay protected from your portfolio leverage gets too high in light of market volatilities, so you can sleep better at night. This feature is never seen anywhere else, but we think it’s important for every DeFi user and it’s something that truly leverages Solana’s cheap and fast network.
Q6: When was the Mainnet launched and how’s it been?
Cecilia: We launched on mainnet on Oct 19th. It’s been a thrilling experience. We actually reached $100mm TVL within 20mins, and $200mm in the first 12hours, and the metrics are growing as we are adding more assets/pools (roughly close or more than 8 new assets being added now in just about 2 weeks). We are very appreciative of the support we received.
Think at first, to use our product involves a little more user education given our innovative idea and etc. Our testnet, which lasted for ~1month definitely helped on that. We are a very hardworking team and are very good at thinking and listening to advice. Despite being very underwater with different priorities and work, we are very keen to hearing from our community to see what we can do more and better. There are still many things on our to-do list, so we are just working through them as fast as we can to hopefully address people’s great feedback.
Q7: Can you share any details about your TGE? Date? Launchpad?
Cecilia: Haha, yes, it’s coming and coming very soon. You will hear some details on that in these few days to be honest. Public sale and token listing are top on our list, and we are definitely rolling them out as soon as possible. Stay tuned and follow us – more information will be released very soon.
Q8: How do you see the community using Apricot in 5 years?
Cecilia: Well, 5 years is a long time, even for the non-crypto world lol. It’s honestly very hard to tell things that far out. However, one thing I do hope for Apricot is that we have a strong and well-run community that has good governance structure and really loyal community base that has been with us since the early days. Don’t the mission/theme needs to be changed in anyways – to be a user-centric DeFi project that offers the best yields in a most convenient way with downside protection. So, I guess it’s just a matter of how to deliver that and what we can do together. There will for sure be new things coming out, and DeFi won’t look the same in 5 years. Regardless of future changes, best hope is for the Apricot community to learn and adapt as fast as we can and do the right thing.
Q9: How can we get real-time information of Apricot?
Cecilia: Yes, follow our social media channels and stay tuned for our latest updates.
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/ApricotFinance
Discord: https://discord.gg/C6JrtqZF5U
Telegram: https://t.me/ApricotOfficial
Telegram Announcement: https://t.me/apricotfinanceann
Website: https://apricot.one/
Solanda_Daily Admin: With this, we are now at the end of our AMA session with Apricot.
Time for wrapping up, any last words you would like to say to our community?
Cecilia: Thanks SolanaDaily community for having me here today. Apologies for not being able to go through all questions, but feel free to reach out to us on Twitter, Discord and Telegram. Would love to hear from you
Solanda_Daily Admin: Thank you so much for spending time with our community & all the very best for Apricot.
Source : cryptodaily.io
