Liquidity Mining ARA — Announcement, Important Links, and Step-by-step Guide
The TL;DR:
You can liquidity mine ARA now!
- Get ARA in the 🦊 MetaMask mobile app;
- Pool ARA with USDC in 🍣 SushiSwap to get SLP;
- Stake SLP in ARA’s 💦 Liquidity Mining Gysr to earn more ARA;
- Stake ARA for more ARA in the 💎 Hodl Gysr
You can stake in the Gysrs now. Rewards begin 2021-July-24 00:00:00 UTC.
Contract Addresses and Links
0xa92e7c82b11d10716ab534051b271d2f6aef7df5 ARA
0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0ce3606eb48 USDC
0x81ef0c70fa76c8e7563cb26ee34a2e7f2a77c410 USDC_ARA_SUSHI_LP
🍣 SushiSwap ARA/USDC liquidity pool
💦 ARA/USDC SLP -> ARA Gysr Fountain
💦 ARA -> ARA Gysr Fountain
Announcement
The Ara project is pleased to announce that we’ve chosen SushiSwap and Gysr as platforms for liquidity mining the ARA token (also called yield farming). 300 million ARA are locked in smart contracts, set to reward providing liquidity and holding ARA, over the next 10 and 200 weeks, starting 2021-July-24 00:00:00 UTC. Complete details follow.
Ara is not a DeFi project (We’re a decentralized web project and Ethereum blockchain project — check out our whitepaper and GitHub!) As such, we’re actually not trying to innovate in this area. Rather, we’ve chosen a simple and straightforward liquidity mining setup for ARA, arranging familiar, off-the-shelf DeFi platforms and tools in a common, recognizable way.
So if you’re already an experienced yield farmer, everything here will likely be familiar to you. And if you’re new to token swapping and liquidity mining, this project and guide may be a good place to start.
Our goals liquidity mining ARA are to: decentralize ARA (so lots of people have ARA and are using it, not just a few); enable swapping between ARA and other tokens (connecting ARA into the whole tokenized world); and incentivize liquidity (so swaps large and small work great).
Token Flow
Use MetaMask on mobile to swap freely between ETH, USDC, and ARA. Pool ARA with USDC on SushiSwap to get the ARA/USDC SLP pool token. Stake this token in the first Gysr to earn ARA as a reward. Additionally, you can stake ARA to earn ARA in the second Gysr.
Example moving tokens in:
- Take some ETH;
- Swap half of it to ARA, and the other half to USDC;
- Pool the ARA and USDC in the SushiSwap pool, getting the pool token for the pair, SLP;
- Stake the SLP in the Gysr fountain, earning ARA.
Example backing tokens out:
- Whenever you want, unstake your SLP from the Gysr fountain. You’ll get all your SLP back, as well as the ARA you earned during the time you were staked.
- Unpool from SushiSwap, turning in your SLP to get ARA and USDC back.
What if you have some additional ARA without USDC? Can you stake ARA by itself? The answer is yes, using the second Gysr fountain, which rewards ARA for staking ARA.
You can use the Sushi pool, either Gysr fountain, just one or some of those, or all three, and in whatever amounts you choose. You can move tokens in once and leave them pooled and staked for a long time. Or, you can periodically back tokens out, swap to adjust quantities, and move them back in again. The best strategy depends on your goals, and how many tokens everyone else has put in each pool. These details can’t be known beforehand, and will change over time.
Token Allocation
One billion ARA exist. 30% of them (300 million ARA), are allocated for mining. One quarter of these (75 million ARA), are locked in the ARA -> ARA Gysr, rewarding the hodl 💎. The remaining three quarters (225 million ARA), are locked in the ARA/USDC SLP -> ARA Gysr, rewarding liquidity 💦.
Both Gysrs will release ARA for 200 weeks (nearly four years), beginning 2021-July-24 00:00:00 UTC. The second Gysr will reward evenly over this time period. The first Gysr will release two thirds of its rewards (150 million ARA), over the full 200 week time period, and greatly concentrate one third of its rewards (75 million ARA), over just the first 10 weeks.
ARA came to DeFi in January 2021 with an ARA/ETH pool on 🦄 Uniswap v2. Through that pool, about 42 million ARA were decentralized to the world. We now expect most liquidity to migrate from Uniswap to SushiSwap, as Sushi is where the Gysrs reward liquidity.
23 million ARA are in the hands of trusted partners to the project, who are assisting us with advice, outreach, and community, but are not developers or members of the core team. Team and advisory distributions are under 25%. The remaining ARA (depicted as open starfield in the diagram) is in reserve.
A decision made once-per-project; Gysr’s on-chain guarantee
300 million ARA are locked in Gysr’s smart contracts, which will reward them over the 200 week duration. This is an on-chain guarantee — no one (not you, not us, not the Gysr team) can change how the Gysrs work. No one can remove the ARA or shorten or lengthen the time periods. As someone who’s used personal computers since nearly their inception, setting up the Gysrs was an interesting experience — there is absolutely no ‘Undo’ button here.
For this reason, setting up liquidity mining is something a project gets to do one single time. This part of the Ara project is finished. We won’t create or fund additional liquidity mining or yield farming pools, even if newer (even potentially better) options exist in the years ahead.
We’re glad smart contracts provide these public and irreversible guarantees. They place many details of the ARA token safely and comfortably beyond our control, a compelling benefit of decentralization. While they run automatically on the blockchain, we’re looking forward to spending our time and energy working on the software, marketing, community and every other part of the project.
Project Summary
ARA directly connects creators and fans, enabling distribution and payment without platform fees and limits.
Content distribution, rights, and payment challenges that have existed since day one on the Internet still stand in the way between creators and fans. New distributed tools and technologies mean that it doesn’t have to be that way. We’re building Ara to let creators and fans break free of platforms that take too much value and control from both sides, and help platforms be better as a result.
Project Highlights: The Ara File Manager is a simple desktop app that contains a complete local Ara network node and wallet. Creators publish their content, set a price in the ARA token, and get a hash-based link of the mutable archive. Fans click this link, and purchase with ARA. Smart contracts automatically pay 90% or more to the creator, while rewarding up to 10% to peers who seed in distribution swarms. Full details of the software and economics are in our whitepaper.
Ara is truly decentralized: With the Ara File Manager, your machine is participating directly in peer distribution swarms and the blockchain. There are no gatekeepers, middlemen, or censorship.
Ara is 100% open source. With the Ara modules on GitHub, developers can integrate Ara into their own apps and sites, enabling their users to buy, sell, own, upload, and download content in a secure and decentralized way.
A current challenge with NFTs is longevity: While the blockchain keeps NFT metadata decentralized and permanent, NFT media content is not. Ara is well positioned to solve this problem, and the team is working on this and other NFT use cases.
Team & Partners: The core team brings together experience in media and decentralization from LimeWire, Spotify, Twitter, Amazon, and NASA. Guiding the project are advisors with leadership experience at Google, BitTorrent, Inc., The Libra Association, and ConsenSys. Business partnerships include major studios and labels like Sony, Disney, Fox, NBCU, and Warner Brothers. We integrated the ARA token into the Rad app on PlayStation.
Two CEXs have confirmed they will list ARA (one in Korea and one in the United States), and we’ve built relationships with many more. In DeFi, ARA is paired with USDC on SushiSwap. Liquidity mining on the Gysr platform is decentralizing the token.
Ara is a vibrant community of open source hackers, crypto and DeFi frens, influencers, content creators, their fans, and now, you, too! Join us in Telegram and Discord.
Considerations providing liquidity on Uniswap and SushiSwap
While you are a liquidity provider, your stake is a part of every swap. Every time there’s a swap on the pool, you’re stake changes in two ways: First, it grows, earning part of the 0.3% fee the swapper pays. Second, it changes, representing the new ratio of the two tokens in the pool.
DeFi communities have named this behavior, and the risks it represents, as Impermanent Loss, and there are many good articles, videos, and math-powered papers that explain and model the implications. But a simple way to describe it that we haven’t seen elsewhere is to focus on three possibilities, and for each, talk about the different ways someone might feel. Suppose someone pools some A (an example project token) and D (an example stable token, or something foundational like ETH), waits some amount of time, and then checks the current ratio in the pool. At any moment, the situation might be:
- More D and less A. (This happens when people have wanted more A, and have swapped more D into the pool to get it.) 😃 Someone in this situation might feel happy they can depool, and end up with more D than they put in. 😥 Or, they might feel unhappy they started with a significant share of A, and that quantity has become much less.
- More A and less D. (This happens when people have wanted less A, and have swapped A into the pool to get rid of it.) 😥 Someone in this situation might feel unhappy knowing that if they depooled right now, they would get back less D than they put in. 😃 Or, they might (simultaneously, even) feel happy that they passively grew their quantity of A much larger, without needing to choose when to perform a swap at the current ratio of any one moment.
- No change. (This happens if nothing has happened, or if combinations of the first two situations have restored the ratio to what it was at some earlier time.) 😥 Someone in this situation might feel unhappy because they were hoping for one of the things above to happen, and must either keep waiting, or depool to give up. 😃 Or, they might feel happy because they could depool and get back all the A and all the D they put in, and more from the 0.3% swap fee they’ve earned throughout. (This earning happens throughout all three situations, of course, but is easy to see when the ratio is the same.)
Every pool on SushiSwap and Uniswap has these risks. What are good ways to manage them?
- First and foremost: The most important rule of crypto: Never risk any more than you are willing to lose.
- Find good projects. Realize that even good projects, for reasons within and not within any individual or group’s control, can fail.
- Instead of holding all of example token D, or all A, or pooling all of both and holding all P, choose a mixture of these three methods that you like.
Let’s list out those three methods in more detail:
- If you hold all D, you’re not involved in the project (which is fine!)
- If you swap D to A, your quantity of A will not change, but how much D it represents may.
- If you hold all P, the ratio in the pool may change, representing more A and less D at one time, or more D and less A at another, or be the same. As this happens, how much D the A represents changes.
These risks are not specific to ARA — every token pooled on SushiSwap and Uniswap works this way. We hope with this description of different methods and possible situations in the pool, as well as additional materials and communities you find online (ours and those of other projects), you empower yourself to make the best choices for yourself.
Join the Ara community in Telegram and Discord, and as always, stay safe and have fun!
