One thing I have a mutual agreement with the team of Apricot is that the DeFi protocol itself should offer an integrated and risk-managed toolkit for users. Giving the fact most of the “real” users can never understand the philosophy and complex system behind DeFi, it’s protocol’s responsibility to make everything simple.
Apricot is a lending protocol building on Solana with a dedicated team from Wall Street, the traditional finance. Besides the basic lending module, Apricot offer “X-farm” and “Apricot assist” as novel functions to help the users, which I would like to emphasise in this article.
“X-farm” is the first product in the market that offers a cross-margin yield farming tool that ensures users don’t need to swap their collateral for leverage. Usually, margin yield farming protocol like Alpaca requires the user to deposit the farming pair as collateral. That’s said, if one would like to farm at USDC/USDT, he/she has to sell his BTC to the stable coin.
Apricot is currently offering “X-farm”, a cross-margin product that allows users to borrow the stable to farm. The user can now deposit $SOL (or other support tokens) and farm at Saber / Orca by supplying stable coin pairs (more options and pairs are on their road). Thus, by “X-farm”, users can maximise their portfolio farming outcome without exchange any token they predict will raise.
Another exciting function offer by Apricot is “Apricot assist”. It’s a powerful tool to help farmers prevent liquidation. One can set up the “Trigger Level” and “Target Level”, when the collateral’s price drop and borrowing limit is raised to the “Trigger Level”, Apricot assist will start to deleverage until it’s fit in the “Target Level”. However, I should point out that the deleverage might not be precisely in the ongoing price change.
The assist will redeem the LP token then pay back the loan to prevent the farmer from losing its collateral. That’s said, even the collateral price drop fast, "assist" can make sure no collateral has been liquidated. However, this not only required the protocol design but also needed capacity support from the blockchain. That’s also why Apricot is building on Solana.
In a nutshell, Apricot is offering an integrated toolkit for users to leverage their interests while graceful manage their potential risks. And it’s all based on its lending module.
After success in Testnet, Apricot should go Mainnet soon. You can go to Apricot.one to know more or even participate in Testnet.
However, the DeFi market isn’t mature yet. There is still lots of under surface part reminding discovery.
The beginner’s mind of DeFi is to enable those unserved by the traditional bank and reduce the financial frictions (although nobody mentions this word anymore). But nowadays, the products are getting more and more complicated and lack innovation. In the finance field, complexity and leverage mean more risks. The riskier it is, the more careful we should treat it.
Like I wrote in the beginning, the project should offer an easy-to-use integrated toolkit for users, helping them to yield also manage the risks. Lastly, I am happy that Apricot’s team offer me a chance to invest.
Website: Apricot.one
Twitter: @ApricotFinance
Telegram: ApricotOfficial
Medium: ApircotFinance