Beam me to the Moon Scotty with MoonBeam Part 1:
Introduction and Dexes
Disclaimer: I am not a certified accountant, lawyer or financial advisor. Everything I write is for educational purposes. Before conducting on any of the information, please be sure to consult an expert.
I discussed a little bit about Moonbeam with my article about staking DOT with lido finance. It is basically an EVM layer-1 solution for the Polkadot ecosystem. In this article, I plan on speaking about this emerging L-1 solution. I’ll explain how to acquire GLMR coins, the dapps in the ecosystem and much much more.
How to get GLMR tokens
Initially I had suggested that you simply bridge assets over and use faucets. In my article about Parallel Finance, I was speaking negatively about the swap feature. Basically you could only swap a handful of assets. Now you can acquire GLMR through Parallel Finance thanks to its swap feature.
As far as bridging your assets, you’ll need to go to https://apps.moonbeam.network/moonbeam. Press the deposit button. Then transfer your assets from your polkadot address to your Metamask wallet.
Moonbeam Ecosystem
Currently I am not enthusiastic about the moonbeam ecosystem at the moment. Like most of the Polkadot ecosystem, there is still a lot of need for growth. However, there are some mainstream Ethereum projects that are working on moonbeam such as Sushiswap and Curve and they both currently suck on moonbeam. Luckily, there are other projects and forks of other projects being brought over to moonbeam.
Staking GLMR
So a nice opportunity with Moonbeam is the staking opportunities. If you aren’t interested in investing into the larger ecosystem but just want to have Moonbeam in your portfolio, you can always stake it to increase the rewards. The Moonbeam foundation has released some documentation on how to stake. I didn’t see anything about slashing. As of writing, the average APR% is 16%
Dexes
You simply cannot deny at this point no Ecosystem can be truly complete without some dex. By good fortune, they actually have plenty of dexes to use.
Stellaswap
This is basically another Uniswap fork. This dapp seems to be the mainline dex for Moonbeam. It doesn’t feel a lot like uniswap but more like spookyswap from the fantom ecosystem. As of writing this article there are some decent yielding and farming opportunities here. First I’ll speak about the farming yielding opportunities. The current system allows for far a fair amount of yielding opportunities. It should be understood that most of the yielding opportunities are going to provide Stella as their main rewards. First let us cover StellaX staking rewards.
Stella Staking
So in the xStella staking protocol, You stake your Stella token and receive xStella tokens in return. The current APR on Stella is about 50% at the moment. The underlying benefit is to reap the benefits of the underlying economic activity on Stella swap.
The StellaX staking protocol also allows additional yields to earn project tokens. This has the same effect as dual yielding. Here are the following yields as of writing:
xStella ~91% APR (Stella ~40% APR, xStella ~50% APR)
Crystl ~163% APR (Crystl ~112% APR, xStella ~50%APR)
Poop ~318% APR (Poop ~267%APR, xStella ~50%APR)
If you are feeling comfortable with the protocol, the safest is likely going to be yielding additional xStella tokens. If the Moonbeam ecosystem picks up mainstream adoption, Stellaswap is likely to be a blue chip coin in the ecosystem. Part of my reasoning is the Polkadot Decoded 2022 conference, which had a lecture regarding the Stellaswap protocol. When you have a lecture for a dapp within one of the most important conferences for the polkadot ecosystem, it tells you they are trying to prime credibility. My only complaint is that much of the team prefers to be anonymous, which is a bit of a big no no according to Charlie and Miguel. This may make some of us Moongangers walk away from the project.
The Crystl project can be an interesting but dicey play. If you review the performance on the charts, it launched in the middle of the bull market and has been going down. The project is somewhat anonymous but there isn’t a lot of information to do research on. It also has very little community support. However, if you are looking for a degenerate play and have money you can afford to lose, it does offer some opportunities. Part of this play is a partnership with Stellaswap to create vaults for boosted APR and incentivize Liquid Pooling incentives for Stella Swap. If I was to place my LP tokens into this system, it would only be the GLMR-Stella LP(610% APR) or the GLMR-Well LP(401% APR). In their ultra farms you can find interesting opportunities such as GLMR-Stella(391% APR), XCDOT-GLMR(74% APR), GLMR-WELL(259% APR).
Poop is probably not worth it for most people. Poop is the ticker symbol for Raresama, an NFT platform. As it stands, it only exists as a governance token. Unless you believe NFTs are going to dominate the market on Moonbeam, you can easily walk away from this coin.
StellaSwap Farm
There are two ways you can view the StellaSwap farms, benefactorial impermanent loss and degenerate yielding. Because you are making the choice to farm yield using your LP tokens, you have to be in this field for either gaining more coins you want or try to increase your position. It should also be noted that most of the farm yielding rewards are stella tokens, which is why I explained the opportunities about Stella staking first to let you devise a strategy on what to do with your Stella tokens.
This first series of LP tokens are for providing liquidity for different ecosystem tokens. That is, you are willing to take an impermanent loss if it means you can obtain more coins in either ecosystem:
GLMR/DOT.xc (47.91% APR/ Reward:Stella, GLMR)
ATOM/GLMR (61.47% APR/ Reward: Stella, GLMR)
AVAX/GLMR (55.71% APR/ Reward: Stella)
MATIC/GLMR (32.72% APR/ Reward: Stella)
GLMR/FTM (48.67% APR/ Reward: Stella)
The main strategy here is to increase your position in both ecosystems as you earn swap fees. The one thing you must concern yourself with is the underlying bridging technology that is being used. When you use Intra-Layer-0 ecosystems to transfer coins, such as Cosmos or Polkadot, you are using their protocols the way it was intended. When you go inter ecosystem trading, you need to be cautious.
The second series of LP tokens I think are reasonable to take a risk on impermanent loss are the following LP tokens:
GLMR/aUSD.xc (120% APR/ Reward: Stella, ACA, GLMR)
ATH/GLMR (221% APR/ Reward: Stella, ATH)
WELL/GLMR (134% APR/ Reward: Stella, WELL)
MAI/GLMR (103% APR/ Reward: Stella)
The first pool is the most appealing. If you are using the Moonbeam system, you might as well gain more GLMR in return. It is also a tri-coin reward system and probably the safest on Stellaswap. ATH is also an interesting protocol that is going to fly below the radar for most people. If you are familiar with the Synthetics protocol on ethereum, this is basically another Synthetics assets protocol. Well has some interesting properties worth obtaining rewards in. At the face of it, WELL is just a fork of compound. However, I’ll go into greater detail about this protocol later. MAI is the native stable coin of Stellaswap. It is very similar to MakerDAO and collateralizes the MAI token with Wrapper GLMR and xStella Tokens.
Beamswap
Again, another uniswap fork with yield farming. Very similar to Stellaswap except a little more watered down. In fact, I would recommend Stellaswap over Beamswap at the moment. There are a few complaints I have about this DEX. As a native dex, it is second to Stellaswap in terms of liquidity and it doesn’t seem that impressive. Hopefully as we research Dexes in the moonbeam ecosystem, the opportunities start to improve.
One of the problems is zero information on the team. I tried looking into the team and all I could find were their Linkedin profiles. This makes it very hard to trust the project when you cannot trust the team.
Another problem is the farm yields. A great amount of the APY% is coming from a token called “rtide.” The problem with “rtide” is that there are no liquidity pools to buy or sell it. When I was researching this token, I found out it isn’t even a Moonbeam project, it is a token for the Kava network. It is a token called sutfswap. It could indicate some interoperable features between Kava and Moonbeam. I’m honestly not too sure what to make of yielding for rtide tokens.
It has a staking program very similar to Stellaswap. When you stake your Beamswap token(Glint), you receive SHARE tokens which represent the amount of Glint you pooled. It takes the swap fees to buy more GLINT off the exchange. You can also lock up your SHARE tokens similar to StellaX and earn rewards on your stake. As of writing, you can only receive POOP coins.
The farm yields generally don’t appeal to me. There are only three pools I find any appeal in; Multi4Pool, GLMR staking and xcDOT/GLMR pool. The first is just a stablecoin pool, the second is Moonbeam staking rewards with additional rewards for staking with beamswap, and the xcDOT/GLMR is an Liquidity Pool of Dot and Moonbeam.
Conclusion
This is the first article regarding the Moonbeam ecosystem. With the exception of a few projects, I do not find this ecosystem all that appealing at the moment. However, things could easily change within one to two years once the next bull market comes around. This is why you need to keep your eyes peeled and there are reasons why it could. This is also just part 1 of my research for the moonbeam ecosystem.
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