Someone call the doctor, I don’t think the PolyCrystal team has slept at all in the past 2 months!
That’s probably a slight exaggeration, but it shouldn’t be too far off the truth. I previously covered PolyCrystal in two separate articles, giving a quick overview of the project 3 weeks after they went live and their launch of the PolyCrystal Portal barely 2 weeks after that.
In the second article, I made a comment about how the PolyCrystal team aren’t one to rest on their laurels. Just under 2 months old, they’ve become a relative heavyweight in the Polygon space, boasting over $15m in TVL, an impressive, combined total of over 60 $CRYSTL pools and LP farms offering up to 2000% APR and the continued development of an end-to-end service that helps BSC projects go cross chain onto Polygon.
Today, very much true to form, they’ve proven themselves once again with the launch of their latest offering — Auto Compounding Vaults.
Auto Compounding Vaults
The concept of a vault is by no means a new one. On the BSC we’ve got the likes of ApeRocket and PancakeBunny, while projects on Polygon are served by vaults like PolyCat and many other BSC vaults expanding into the Polygon space.
The premise, and thus draw of a vault, is simple. Instead of having to manually harvest and reinvest your earnings every day, a vault does it for you automatically. Oftentimes the vault also compounds your earnings at a much greater frequency, with some projects offering vaults that compound hourly!
“How then, is this latest offering from PolyCrystal any different from all the other vaults out there?”, I hear you asking. Great question!
PolyCrystal’s Auto Compounding Vaults
While the basic premise of PolyCrystal’s vaults are similar to those in the market, they’ve included their own twist on their vaults, fitting it amongst their catalogue of existing products and making sure it complements the PolyCrystal ecosystem like another piece of the overall puzzle.
Combating Inflation
In addition to their soft cap of $CRYSTL, the vaults play an important role in the fight against $CRYSTL inflation. Instead of selling 100% of the rewards from the farm that is being “vaulted” in order to buy and compound the relevant LP tokens, PolyCrystal vaults take a 5% cut of the earnings in order to market buy and burn $CRYSTL.
The effects of this are obvious. Less supply of circulating $CRYSTL paired with vaults providing consistent buy pressure causes the price of $CRYSTL to appreciate, benefitting all existing $CRYSTL holders and partners, which leads us to our second benefit.
Partner and Join the #GoodVibeTribe
It’s clear that PolyCrystal fully understands the age old adage “United we stand, divided we fall” and have structured the system in a way that will benefit both themselves and their partners. In fact, they’ve already partnered and launched vaults for premier projects like ApeSwap and Barbershop.
As a potential partner reading this, you might be wondering how an appreciation of the price of $CRYSTL and vaults will benefit your project? And can you really afford to miss out on joining the #GoodVibeTribe?
The latter is something you’ll have to decide for yourself, but the answer to the former is threefold:
- Buy pressure for your token
- Higher farm APR/APY’s
- Stickier liquidity
#GoodVibeTribe Benefits 1 — Buy Pressure & Higher farm APR/APY’s:
Let’s assume you’re the owner of a project who’s native token is called $TOKEN. You’ve now partnered with PolyCrystal and expressed your desire to increase $TOKEN-$MATIC liquidity in order to attract more users to your project. PolyCrystal does this by creating a farm (or a “Mine”, to use the proper PolyCrystal terminology) for $TOKEN-$MATIC that pays out rewards in $CRYSTL.
With the price of $CRYSTL growing as a result of the 5% burn mechanic from vaults, the APR/APY of your $TOKEN-$MATIC farm increases, thus incentivizing more users to purchase $TOKEN and pair it with $MATIC to create liquidity.
This results not only in more liquidity for your $TOKEN, but also increased buy pressure from investors who are looking to participate in the $TOKEN-$MATIC farm!
In addition, because PolyCrystal uses a soft cap system for $CRYSTL instead of a hard cap, it very well might come to pass once the vaults have large enough TVL that the total amount of $CRYSTL burned would be greater than the daily emissions.
As the image above suggests, daily emissions will be increased should the circulating supply drops below a certain threshold, further boosting the APR/APY of your $TOKEN-$MATIC farm!
#GoodVibeTribe Benefits 2— Stickier Liquidity
Liquidity locked in vaults are just stickier than that of in farms, of that there is no doubt. And for good reason! Given the added convenience of having the harvesting and compounding process automated, investors tend to be more willing to leave their funds in vaults and watch it grow.
In addition to stability, this also results in the optimal conditions for liquidity growth. With TVL’s of projects oftentimes used as a measure of it’s stability or legitimacy in the market, liquidity growth is something every burgeoning project could use!
Security is Paramount
With all the high profile exploits in the market recently, it’s worth mentioning that the PolyCrystal team are leaving nothing to chance when it comes to the safety of their investor’s funds.
To ensure the vault is as secure as it can possibly be, the team have chosen not to reinvent the wheel and have forked the PolyCrystal vault’s contract from the PolyCat code with minimal changes. PolyCat’s vaults are a tried and true model that has been battle tested in the market for quite some time now, and have proven itself to be relatively safe.
For a more detailed look into the few changes the PolyCrystal team have made to PolyCat’s vault code, check out their Gitbook for more info! The team has even included a diff checker that automatically highlights any line of code that’s been changed.
As an added measure of security, PolyCat’s code has also been audited by Obelisk, giving investors the peace of mind that the PolyCrystal vault’s code is as safe as it can possibly be. You can find the complete audit reports here and here.
Closing Thoughts
It’s often-times said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is very much the case with this article. If there’s one thing you take away from this article, let it be the following image that succinctly summarizes everything I’ve covered so far.
It’s amazing to see how far PolyCrystal has come in a mere 2 months. With the addition of vaults to their ecosystem of services, they’ve truly become a one stop shop that can offer an end to end service for any project looking to bridge over from the BSC. As a writer who’s covered them since launch, I’m very excited about what the future holds for PolyCrystal and to see what they bring us next!
Signing off for now.
Useful Links
- Website: https://polycrystal.finance/
- PolyCrystal Portal Sign Up Form: https://forms.gle/HS9zAx6ffCgQDWX96
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/PolyCrystal
- Matic Faucet: https://polycrystal.finance/faucet
- Medium: https://polycrystalfinance.medium.com/
- Gitbook: https://polycrystal.gitbook.io/polycrystal-finance/
If you liked the article, check me out here on Twitter and Medium where I write about other crypto topics I stumble across.
Note: The views expressed are my own and should not in any way be taken as financial advice.