April 2023: Community Update

TL;DR: It’s the second month of the Protocol. The Archimedes team is focused on learning from users and building V2. Growth and serving our existing users is equality important:

• lvUSD/3CRV Curve Pool: ~$6.1M TVL and ~23% average APY, with ~90% wallet retention
• Borrowers / Leverage Takers: ~$5.1M in TVL and ~50% average Gross APY
• ARCH: Avg. price of ~$10 with total monthly volume of $3.3M, currently tradable in Uniswap V2 and MEXC.
• Other important developments:
  — LlamaRisk & Curve Risk team assessment, response, and actions.
  — V2 progression, including veARCH and Governance ideation and feedback from community
  — Partnerships progression, with closed partnerships already announced or to be announced soon.
  — Now moving to 60 days lifetime positions with 0.1% origination fee for better Borrower profitability.

Fellow G(r)eeks, we have made great headway in the project development and continue to listen to our users, and learn, while “devs do something” (aka, move fast). While April was a month of research and planning, a lot of the results will be seen in May and June.

As usual, let’s take a look at what we were able to accomplish in our second month of product being live:

• Validating learnings: Both our novel Leverage Engine and Dynamic Emissions have worked as designed for the second month, with no unexpected behaviors. Both lenders and borrowers of Archimedes are earning top of market yields, with April averages at 22% APY and ~50% Gross APY respectively.
• State of Lending: We currently have ~$6.1M in our 3CRV/lvUSD Curve pool, and we continue to offer top of market APY. Our curve pool has largely remained balanced in the past month.

Source: LP Dashboard in Dune Analytics

• State of Borrowing: We have had 3 Rounds of Leverage in April (vs. 5 in March) and have had 5 users taking leverage with a total sum of ~1M lvUSD (leverage) taken and, as expected, no liquidations have happened. We have moved from 370 days lifetime of position to 31 days, and we’re now moving to 60 days with similar fee values to allow for faster breakeven times and better user profitability.
• Community: Our community continues to give us great feedback, both constructive and positive. We continue to listen to our users and our wider community, so that we can build a better product and community.
• LlammaRisk: The Curve Risk team made a thorough and fair risk assessment on Archimedes’ lvUSD, which we have responded to and have already started addressing the issues identified by the team. From their feedback, we have addressed the Documentation discrepancies and the Access Control and Timelock related issues, with other issues being addressed in V2.
• Partnerships: The team has made great progress on the partnership side, with Harvest Finance and Beefy already launched, and other partnerships already closed and to be announced soon. If you wish to partner with us please fill up this form.

What is coming next?

As we move towards V2, our users’ voice is key in our prioritization process. Our team is currently working on improving the product for all stakeholders involved: lenders, borrowers, and ARCH holders.

We are currently working on incremental changes and on our V2.

Incremental changes

With the intent of moving fast, there are changes that require little to no engineering, and therefore less code audits and faster turnaround time. The implementation of the following will depend more on strategic timing than on effort itself and you may see them repeated in future updates.

With the intent to move fast, we’re working on:

• Scoping and Building additional utility for ARCH:
  — We have ideated the ARCH staking and veARCH mechanisms and are currently implementing it. The community should expect a roll out in a matter of weeks.
  — With veARCH, the community should also expect our first step towards a DAO transition.
  — Allowing ARCH stakers to receive boosted yields and participate in DAO Governance
  — Currently, our team is building and discussing additional utility for ARCH, such as Leverage allocation to the different strategies via the voting process.
  — Scoping and building veARCH integration into Archimedes V2. More information on this to follow.
• Adding more CEXs: we are in contact with different CEXs to increase our exposure to retail and help deepen ARCH liquidity.
• Diversified LP rewards: Deploy partnerships with projects such as Alchemix, Convex, Aura, StakeDAO, etc.
• Opening new Liquidity Pools for both lvUSD and ARCH in Curve, Balancer, etc.
• Potential Airdrop: The DAO may consider an airdrop in the future.

Archimedes V2

With the objective of improving Archimedes scalability, our team has already started refactoring our code, and we are also working to add new things:

• Adding new strategies for borrowers with higher APY than we can currently offer, such as: Convex pools such as stETH, FRAX, sUSD, alUSD, etc. This will not only make our yields more attractive to borrowers, but also for lenders from diversified real yield.
• Ability to change their leverage multiplier to lower (or higher) multipliers.
• Adding a liquidation mechanism: While liquidation mechanism is currently seen as a big risk for borrowers, Archimedes’ liquidation mechanism should not liquidate the entirety of the user’s principal. This is important as this will reduce risk for the protocol and for LPs, which are the ones providing the funds to enable Leverage Taking. More details to come ahead of liquidation mechanism launch.
• veARCH Holder and ARCH LP Real Yield implementation: Besides boosted yield in the form of ARCH emissions, ARCH LPs and/or stakers may be eligible for additional yield from Balancer Gauge as well as Protocol Revenue share program, aka Real Yield.
• lvUSD LP Yield diversification: Our goal is to diversify yield for Curve LPs. The ways we will achieve this is through CRV rewards via Curve Wars and potentially adding governance tokens from Leverage partners as rewards.

In addition to those, we’re also considering other changes down the road, such as going to more affordable chains (L2s). The Archimedes team continues to work hard to improve the product and the user experience.

You haven’t had the chance to tell us what you think yet? There are a few ways to do so:

• Tell us about your experience with Archimedes in less than 2 minutes: here
• Submit suggestions, here: https://archimedes.nolt.io/
• Prefer a more personable approach? So do we! Join our Discord, submit your suggestion there or reach out directly to the team.
• Schedule time with our Head of Marketing & Business Development

Learn more about the Archimedes project and how it generates real, stable top of market yields for users by visiting https://archimedesfi.com/ and following on Twitter, Discord, and Telegram.