Founded in late 2021, Aurigami is a decentralized, non-custodial, native money market on Aurora Network, the EVM chain of NEAR Protocol. It enables users to lend, borrow and earn interest with their digital assets in a fun, gamified ecosystem.
What Is Aurigami?
Aurigami’s inspiration come from the Japanese word “Origami”, the art of paper folding, which is a fun and creative activity. In Origami, the artist masterfully orchestrates the paper’s movements to create an art piece that is more than the sum of its parts.
Similarly, the team behind Aurigami also wants to do the same for customers’ crypto assets, by allowing them to maximize returns while at the same time making it a fun and interactive experience through gamification.
While depositors provide liquidity to the protocol to earn a passive income, borrowers are able to borrow in an over-collateralized fashion. In addition, Aurigami users may simply deposit assets that support the protocol to generate rates ranging from 8% to 12%.
The Aurigami protocol supports the nine largest assets in the Aurora ecosystem and has already established itself as one of the leading protocols on Aurora with over $900+ million in total value locked.
The protocol supports assets such as ETH, Wrapped BTC, and stablecoins such as USDC and USDT.
Aurigami played a crucial role in identifying and solving a critical gas limit issue that hampered the Aurora network this year. The platform has escaped unscathed from the recent Flux oracle issue that resulted in faulty liquidations, which affected many other protocols.
This was a result of the implementation of the system from the very beginning as the Aurigami team recognized the risks involved in DeFi and was constantly vigilant about staying ahead of the security curve.
Aurigami Features
Tokenomics
The Aurigami native token is $ PLY which aims to incentivize ecosystem participants and share a vision of alignment between various stakeholders within the Aurigami ecosystem.
As such, by holding the token, PLY HODLers (#Papeurhands) also will have the ability to govern the ecosystem.
PLY on Aurora: 0x09c9d464b58d96837f8d8b6f4d9fe4ad408d3a4f
PLY on Ethereum: 0x1ab43204a195a0fd37edec621482afd3792ef90b
A total supply of 10 billion PLY is allocated as follows:
- Liquidity Mining – 40%
- Strategic Investors – 19.5%
- Team – 19%
- Treasury – 12.5%
- Initial Exchange Offering – 5%
- Exchange Liquidity – 4%
LLT (Liquid Locked Token)
PULP is the biggest USP in the Aurigami protocol, also known as the concept of Liquid Locked Token. PULP is a representation of locked-PLY. By holding PULP, users will be entitled to redeem it for PLY at a later date.
Meanwhile, the locked-PLY or PULP, like other liquid tokens, is free to be traded or exchanged for other digital assets which makes PULP a “liquid-locked-token” (LLT).
In the past, some protocols have successfully enabled liquidity for locked, vesting assets through the use of financial NFTs.
There was a demand that the need to accommodate a slew of parameters warrants the use of NFTs, which are capable of being encoded with complex information that otherwise cannot be achieved with the usual ERC-20 tokens.
On the other hand, Aurigami’s PULP was able to be devised as an ERC-20 token to represent locked-PLY, allowing the team to approach liquid locked tokens in a simple way.
LLT Innovation
Aurigami pioneered the Liquid Locked Tokens (LLT). Distributing a combination of LLTs (i.e. PULP) and the underlying protocol tokens (i.e. PLY) in liquidity mining disincentivizes the typical “farm and dump” approach adopted by mercenary capital.
As a result, this allows protocols to align their long-term interests with their users.
The market for PULP and PLY will be governed by Game Theory, where users are empowered to employ investment strategies as they feel suitable. Buyers will be able to enter long-term positions in PLY at a discount through PULP, while PULP owners can sell off in exchange for immediate liquidity.
Moreover, the prolonged release of PLY into circulation also helps to distribute the selling pressure that plagues a lot of incentive programs, opening up speculations for savvy investors.
LLT is a new design that can solve a point that early liquidity mining programs failed to address. Being similar to veTokens, LLT is what protocols can incorporate to align long-term interests between users and protocol.
There are already many cases when OTC deals are made between protocol treasuries and investors involving a discount on the token, in exchange for a fixed lock-up period where the underlying token cannot trade.
The mechanics of LLTs mimic this exactly which is expected to allow the potential for future deals in the emerging crypto industry.
How to Get Started with Aurigami?
In order to interact with Aurigami, first of all, users deposit their preferred assets supported by the protocol. This not only enables users to interest-earning based on the market borrowing demand, but users also use deposited assets as collaterals to borrow other assets.
In that, interest earned from deposited assets will help offset the accumulated interest from borrowing.
- User deposited funds are allocated in Smart Contracts.
- Both depositors and lenders will be issued tokenized yield-bearing tokens, called auTokens, which will be used for on-demand withdrawal of deposited funds from the pools. In addition, auTokens are also tradable and transferrable.
- In order to deposit the digital assets, users will need to go to the Market page, select the asset, then click “Deposit” and input the amount of asset to be deposited.
- Finally, click “Approve” and wait for the transaction to be confirmed. There will be no minimum or maximum deposits imposed.
- Then users will start earning interest on the deposited amount.
- Depositors will receive continuous earnings on their deposited assets and the earning rates adjust algorithmically for each asset based on their market conditions.
- In that, the auToken is a representation of the user’s asset balance supplied to the Aurigami protocol.
Users can withdraw assets as long as those funds are not actively being used to borrow and withdrawal of those assets would not cause a liquidation of their loans.
- To withdraw the digital assets, under the “My Account” section, you will need to navigate to the “Deposits” tab. Click “Withdraw” and input the amount of asset to be withdrawn, then click “Withdraw” again.
- To borrow assets on Aurigami, a user is required to deposit an accepted asset to be used as collateral.
- The maximum amount that can be borrowed depends on the number of collaterals on the user’s account, shown as “Borrow Limit” under the “My Account” section.
- On the other hand, repayments can be done directly at “Borrows” under “My Account”. To do this, under “My Account”, you will need to navigate to the “Borrows” tab.
- Click “Repay” to the amount of asset to be repaid, making sure that your wallet has sufficient balance to do so. Then, click “Repay” again.
- In order to bridge assets to Aurora from Ethereum. You will need to go to https://rainbowbridge.app/transfer.
- Select transfer from Ethereum and transfer to Aurora, connect your wallet, and click “Begin” new transfer. Then, click “Show” all tokens to select desired tokens, and input amount, and click “Continue”.
Have Fun Farming With Aurigami
Compared to its competitors, the Aurigami protocol offers a smooth and simple UI to make depositing and borrowing more easier for users.
Also, its yield farming is one of the highest rates of deposit and lowest rates of borrowing on Aurora. Any developer on Aurora can use Aurigami as a building block for their product by accessing its liquidity.
