Recap of AMA with Yield Yak
On the 30th of July 2021 @ 12:00 PM ET, An AMA session was held on Avalanche Telegram with special guest from @yieldyak_. Below we present to you an excerpt from AMA with questions and answers. It was wonderful and very informative, Enjoy reading :)
Nicolas | Avalanche
Welcome @yyakman !
Yak Man | Yak
hi! thanks for having me!
Nicolas | Avalanche
As usual before diving into the questions can you present yourself to the community and share some background on how you became lead developer at Yield Yak ?
Yak Man | Yak
Well… starting a defi application has been a dream as an ethusiast from Ethereum. I was an early user of the Avalanche C-Chain and found some items missing, so it was a chance to build some smart contracts for myself and friends to use
The first one was an autocompounder for yield farms, which is the simple concept that brought us to the #2 TVL. We recently released a dex aggregator to get traders best prices.
If you haven’t used YY yet, the autocompounders help yield farmers earn more yield and save time. If you compound without YY, it’s a long process that costs transaction fees and time. For most people, it is impossible to optimize returns due to time and cost. Yield Yak depositors get close to optimal compounding without any time commitment in exchange for a fee.
You can always learn more on our links:
- Website: https://yieldyak.com
- Docs: https://docs.yieldyak.com
- Telegram: https://t.me/yieldyak
Nicolas | Avalanche
Excellent thank you ! Let’s now start taking the questions from Twitter
So our first question comes from FiN_Petch1: Why chose Avalanche over other EVM chain?
Yak Man | Yak
Avalanche has been love at first tx! It’s super fast, super decentralized and has immediate finality. Those are incredible traits for a chain
With its speed, Avalanche makes it possible to create applications for everyone whereas other chains are slow or frustrating to use.
And with the Avalanche ecosystem, there is something else special happening. A few months ago, the C-Chain was pretty empty, but now it’s hard to keep track of new projects. Since we build on top of other defi platforms (like dexes and farms), that growing ecosystem is very good for our project and our users!
Nicolas | Avalanche
Second question is by darkseid89931: When can we expect $YAK token to be launched in the market?
Can you explain more about your tokenomics?
Yak Man | Yak
wen YAK? The Yield Yak platform makes money by taking fees in exchange for optimizing compounding and saving users’ time. We use the fees to pay contributors and promised almost from the beginning to give a lot of the fees back to our early users. Our users are critical to the platform’s success, so it’s natural we put the platform in their hands.
YAK is going to be out soon, along with a full governance and staking program. Part of the time spent on the token release has been putting this full system in place of governance, staking, rewards, etc.
what makes people go crazy for YAK is that there has been no way to buy it (it had to be earned) and YAK will have a fixed supply of 10,000 tokens. A full 1 YAK will even be hard to come by.
In terms of the token utility:
1. YAK stakers receive a voice in governance
2. YAK stakers receive farming rewards paid in AVAX
We will incentivize single-asset YAK staking and YAK-AVAX LP staking. All stakers will have BOTH a voice in governance, plus earn AVAX rewards at the same time.
Nicolas | Avalanche
You are probably asked wen YAK several times a day ^^ Third question by makelz03: Since Yield Yack is built natively in avalanche platform, what are the key advantages of this DeFi auto-compounder?
what are the most contribution of this platform to support and sustain the fast and growing avalanche ecosystem?
Yak Man | Yak
Yield Yak’s innovation is that the community does all the compounding.
We use cryptoeconomic incentives (i.e. we pay a bounty from the smart contracts) to whoever pays the gas to compound everyone’s rewards so we don’t have to do it as a team. It means we can offer a long-tail of farms, because even a single user sitting in a farm benefits and we do not have to pay the cost related to compounding for them X times per day. Big farms compound every 10 mins… smaller farms might compound every 2 days, but we know it’s optimal.
there is a story from the early days. we had a situation on a farm where it was profitable to reinvest it every 1 second… so every single transaction was profitable. Our community was generating a ton of transactions and we had reinvestors who did not want to leave the computer under those conditions… Now reinvesting is done mostly by bots and we learned how to set the rewards the best way to optimize user’s returns (which is itself led by a community group).
Nicolas | Avalanche
Question 4 comes from huntsats: The number of DeFi projects and yeil farming protocols are growing steadily, and many are quite similar to each other. Among these projects, How will you innovate and survive?
Yak Man | Yak
i like this one. our community is great. A lot of projects say that, but our community literally runs the platform. And they build it.
We have something like 20 contributors that the network pays for their contributions. That includes smart contracts, UI/UX, translations, docs, etc.
YY developers have brought a lot of new code and ideas to Avalanche (YY is not a fork), which we’ve seen propogate to other projects. Now community developers are implementing their own ideas and features above and beyond compounding strategies. For example, the dex aggregator is a fantastic example of engineering.
This is how YY will continue to innovate. We bring unique products to market, and do very well. Fortunately, it does not rely on any one person and YY is what it is because of everyone who contributes, including our community who gives valuable feedback on everything we do.
Nicolas | Avalanche
Fifth question by matiiese: It is clear that you will help the farmers a lot in the future, but have you already started making plans for the future?
Yak Man | Yak
Lending is coming. For other defi ecosystems, this has created a boom. For YY, I’m very much looking forward creating strategies with the lending because it allows deposits in AVAX, stablecoins and other tokens without risk of impermanent loss
We plan to introduce Vaults, which are designed for “set and forget” longer-term users. We plan a few twists on that product which I am excited about and I hope the community will like
Nicolas | Avalanche
Question 6 by scientiaax: Glad to hear that “The Avalanche Foundation is joined Yield Yak Board of Friends.” Could you also tell about the Yield Yaks Board of Friends?”
Yak Man | Yak
The Yak Board of Friends is our multisig. We will be handing control to the Yak Board of Friends to execute platform needs, so that we as a team are in less control.
We are serious that the community runs everything, and we have convinced a great group of leaders from the community to technically control Yield Yak, including Ava Labs, Markr and Avalaunch.
Nicolas | Avalanche
Question 7 is by FiN_Petch1: Usually autocompounders create continues emission and distribute its token to stakers. But you choose to #HardCap option. How will you compete with these traditional compounders in terms of yield
Yak Man | Yak
Autocompounders which pay with a reward token are themselves farming the underlying farms. Then they ive you a better or worse deal using a token which adds a layer of complexity to the reward calculations
Sometimes the token can be mitted rapidly or over-reward certain farms to attract TVL. In those cases, YY can deploy strategies to let our users take advantage of that more easily (if you are a developer, reach out!)
This model has been a non-starter for us, which is why we intentionally made YAK a fixed supply token and proposed such a low supply !
Nicolas | Avalanche
Question 8: Will you guys running more validator node in the future?
Yak Man | Yak
we have a validator node running now. This validator node is part of our “Opinionated Treasury” — read more here: https://yieldyak.medium.com/the-opinionated-treasury-9c91574dc93f
I have been thinking a LOT about liquid staking. That is where we bring the AVAX rewards from the P-Chain over to the C-Chain.
C-Chain users benefit because they can access that base rate of 8–11% APR on AVAX without impermanent loss and without locking up AVAX in delegations.
This is my personal favorite project to think about and I hope to rally contributors to work on it following the YAK token and governance launch. There has already been a lot of work behind the scenes from community contributors, which began with us deploying that one validator.
Nicolas | Avalanche
Thank you for answering those questions from Twitter @yyakman
I will now open the channel for a few minutes and once there is enough questions I will let @yyakman answer them :)
Crypto Warrior
Are the staked on Yield Yak rewards only the native governance token (YAK) or would we have the option to choose ?
Yak Man | Yak
The deal is stake YAK -> earn AVAX. We have a fixed and very low supply, so it’s very difficult to give it away for every long… 🙂
Star Lord ∀
how to contribute to yield yak ?
Yak Man | Yak
hi friend! The best way is when you see something that can be improved or fixed, get hands dirty and do it. Most contributors are people who dropped a lot of work on the community. The ones who make a lot of promises usually don’t follow through on the work
Alican Çalışkan
How will you benefit from the new Avalanche Bridge?
Yak Man | Yak
The new Avalanche Bridge is great. Kudos to the team for delivering such an improved product. Avalanche has a lot of attractive yield and products once you are here, but it’s hard to get here… Bridge will no doubt grow ecosystem
Salma Grande
What do you see as the core challenge today that would be needed to be overcome in order to reach the holy grail of decentralization for yieldyak ?
Yak Man | Yak
We’re pretty decentralized in terms of the community compounding for each other. That has been so impressive and unexpected to be honest. The Yak Board of Friends is the next part of this where we hand control of key platform upgrades over to a larger group so people don’t have to trust or rely on us as much
Ramesh Gattu
- How the timelock protect the users YAK?
- Can you breifly tell us the Reinvest process in YAK?
Yak Man | Yak
1. Timelock makes it so we can’t change our fee structure without giving users time to withdraw and opt-out of the changes. That’s a good feature for any defi platform
2. Reinvest is a button that pays whoever presses it X% of the underlying farm reward (e.g. PNG tokens) to compensate them for the gas they spent (e.g. 0.08 AVAX transaction fee). It’s turned into a very competitive game and very effective system. Our docs have deeper info
Batuhan ∀
There have been a lot of people waiting for Yak with great anticipation and they really have high expectations, do you think you can meet this expectation or what plans do you have to maintain these expectations?
Yak Man | Yak
YY has a good product, creative and responsive developers, and overall helpful community that helps solve problems. It will be ok
✎҉_F₳ᛔᛙѦᚻ ⅯⱤ๏.∀
At the moment, YIELDYAK’s performance development options consist of growing the AVALANCHE ecosystem or do you also plan to build on other blockchians networks or use bridges to make them compatible with the new protocols in farming?
Yak Man | Yak
Cross-chain has always been on our list, but we focused on some other areas more recently. We’ve mentioned a lot of the upside of community, but one of the downsides is that we can be at the mercy of contributors who have capacity for these things. For context, YY has no full time team members, including me.
Gabbar
Second #YY airdrop distribution has not sounded musical to few of your investors.
Can you explain as to what has changed and why aren’t they happy with second airdrop distribution?
Yak Man | Yak
We do things differently. We are completely transparent with our community because it leads to good results. In this case, there was a math error in the first airdrop spreadsheet.
btw, if you want to QA data quickly, send it to 2,000 people 🤣
in the second spreadsheet, which fixed the math errors, some people lost or gained tokens relative to the first spreadsheet. Which was wrong. We put the community in charge of making sure things are right here, which is slightly nerve-wracking but turning out in a good way so far because we want a comletely fair calculation
Darkseid
Yield Yak. Quite an interesting name.
Why this particular name was chosen?
Yak Man | Yak
Legend says that small villages each have one yak to share for farming. No one can afford an entire yak, so it is a community resource.
Gabbar
“Yield Yak smart contracts are unaudited”, Yield Yak relies on smart contracts from other platforms which may also be unaudited.
That may expose the investors to very high risks. Are you planning on any Impermanent loss protection for investors to have more faith on @yieldyak_?
Yak Man | Yak
i think we’ve taken an experimental, build-first approach that has deeply resonated with people. we don’t oversell what we’re doing. we typically over deliver. so i would not change how we got here, even if some projects are flashier 🙂
Crypto Warrior
I’m not very familiar with Yield Yak yet but I was wondering if you will have Liquidity Pools or/and Governance staking ?
Yak Man | Yak
once the token is deployed, we will have thse things 🙂 we have a very unique way to do farming rewards and governance that fits extremely well with our autocompounders 😉
Nicolas | Avalanche
Thank you so much for taking your time to answer these questions @yyakman !
Our links:
- Website: https://yieldyak.com
- Docs: https://docs.yieldyak.com
- Telegram: https://t.me/yieldyak
About Yield Yak
Yield Yak providers Avalanche DeFi users with easy-to-use tools to earn more yield. Yield Yak is a product of its community, which has built and maintained the best, cheapest and most diverse autocompounder on the market.
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About Avalanche
Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Avalanche is able to process 4,500+ transactions/second and instantly confirm transactions. Ethereum developers can quickly build on Avalanche as Solidity works out-of-the-box.
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