Archimedes: Project Update
We are very excited to share more about our project and provide updates on what we have been working on.
A lot has changed in the past months: new branding with a fresh website (please go check it out at www.archimedesfi.com), the team has been growing and working hard on building, security audits are scheduled to start soon, we’re getting ready for launch (more to come soon).
In this article you should expect to learn more about our product and what we are doing differently to set us apart.
Why Archimedes?
TL;DR: Archimedes is a doxxed (publicly known) team of technology, business, and finance professionals that strongly believes in the opportunity DeFi brings to the world and we are proud to be part of it. Among other great values DeFi brings to the table, tokenization of assets should democratize access to investments in the future and Archimedes’ vision is to support that via our tokenized position.
Additionally, our product is built on a very solid basis: transparent, backed by collateral, and is engineered to generate high returns to our users while mitigating a lot of the existing risks of the current DeFi ecosystem. On top of it, sustainability is a priority for us and we focus on quality rather than quantity.
What’s in for leverage takers?
- We have high yield, relative to risk
With Archimedes, our average user will walk out with more upside than the average observed in the market. We provide you with up to 10x leverage.
You don’t need to manage and jump to higher APY assets, which saves you time, gas, and the risk of investing in a risky poorly managed asset. So “cost of position” is lower with us as you don’t need to manage it.
Do we have liquidation risk? We sure do, but your liquidation risk with us is relatively lower than the market. Our incentives as a project are aligned with our users’ best interest: we make money off of ongoing healthy lending & borrowing activity. We do not make any money from liquidation.
Let’s give you an example in which you want to build a leveraged OUSD position. To start, you will invest your OUSD with us. We will then borrow enough lvUSD (our stablecoin) to get you leveraged OUSD. This is done by swapping lvUSD for 3CRV and 3CRV for OUSD.
When you unwind your position, we need to return the lvUSD we used for creating your position. We will then swap (just) enough OUSD from the position to repay your lvUSD.That’s when some risk comes into play — if lvUSD loses peg to below $1.00. If our lvUSD/3CRV pool is imbalanced, the exchange rate might eat into the principle.
So we do have risk, but the liquidation risk is lower than what we see in the market and because of that overall risk is relatively lower, while return is still high.
- We have superior collateral
Archimedes reduces your risk as much as possible by choosing to work with the best projects in the space.
We only support a battle tested and handful of projects that we have personally vetted for quality even if that means slower growth. We prefer fully or overly collateralized meta vaults (like: OUSD). Whenever selecting a partner, those are hard criteria for us to maximize the value to our users.
- We provide tokenized positions
We make it easier to trade your position without the need to unwind it. It also reduces risk. If the main path to unwind (Curve) isn’t available you can always exit a position, though, probably for a discount.
It also works the other way around and it can bring you additional trading upside. Leverage is scarce and if you are a fast mover, you might be able to trade your position for a premium.
Once you have a position with us, we wrap your leveraged position with an NFT. NFT sales might incur secondary royalties that might go to the LPs as ETH.
Additionally, this can save you money because transferring ownership of a tokenized position costs much less gas compared to unwinding your position.
- We provide true stability
We’ve chosen our launch partner to be Origin Protocol with their OUSD stablecoin. OUSD has been pressure tested by being live on different economic (bull or bear) scenarios. They’ve proven to be a truly stable project.
- We are Open Source & Transparent
There are no hidden tricks or traps of any sorts.
As a fully doxxed team, we are open and transparent with our community. We’re biased, but our team is formed by amazingly smart people.
Discord is where our community lies and we engage with them on a regular basis. As a leading project anchored on trust and transparency, we show our faces on our community video calls, we openly engage with our community members to address technical challenges, and to ask for their opinion about our main decisions.
We have a very strong community formed of smart, engaged people. We ask them for input and feedback and that way we boost our strengths even further.
Our code is open for anyone to see: https://github.com/thisisarchimedes.
We are also performing a security audit prior to launch to ensure technology risks are mitigated.
Additionally, we chose to use “Timelock” smart contracts to allow for seamless and fair governance. Timelock is a smart contract that delays function calls of another smart contract after a predetermined amount of time has passed. Timelocks are mostly used in the context of governance, aiming to add a delay of administrative actions to give enough time for broader community contribution.
And that way we build transparency and the trust we need to succeed.
What’s in for Liquidity Providers:
- We provide sustainable high APY
We enable Curve to scale, which provides sustainability to our products in the marketplace. We lend this liquidity and we pay 3CRV/lvUSD LPs with ARCH, stablecoins, meta vault protocols, governance tokens, and ETH.
We can take large amounts of dollars without compromising our Curve pool. This is possible because we don’t depend on CRV emission that reduces as more liquidity is added to the pool.
But how do you do this? Please see our whitepaper for more details.
- We are relatively low risk
We mitigate your risk by supporting over collateralized tokens only. Additionally, it is highly likely that you won’t get locked in the pool:
- We carefully regulate the leverage cap. When we allocate more leverage it is always a small percentage of the total 3CRV in the pool
- We control the on-going fees leverage takers pay. We can incentivize leverage takers to close a position
- We also have a treasury that we can use to replenish liquidity in our pool
- We are working hard to create partnerships with large LPs to commit to provide liquidity to our pool. If our partnership vetting process fails and the partner protocol starts failing, we’ll liquidate position (or introduce other stability mechanism)
- We provide real diversification
As we grow, we will support more protocols similar to OUSD to increase opportunities for diversification. Thus, you are basically investing in a blue-chip index of the best stablecoin meta vaults and you will be able to diversify your risk.
Interested in learning more? Follow us for more information. Join us: Discord, Twitter, and Telegram
