Banana-rama — Love In The First Degree
Thought I’d start off with a picture today by sharing the price action of the $BANANA token for ApeSwap. There has been a steady uptrend for the past week and prices have hit beyond $2 at the time of this writing.
However, today we will be focusing on another aspect of the Apeswap platform and that is their recent, rather nondescript, expansion to the Polygon /Matic chain.
ApeSwap is rather well known on the Binance Smart Chain as a viable and serious alternative to PancakeSwap. It is always touted as having a hardworking core team that focuses a lot of continuous improvements to the platform as well as building a huge number of partnerships with other projects. Some of these projects like CryptoBlades, BIRB and HiFi Gaming Society have been identified as crypto gems and are currently seeing huge surge of interest! On top of that, the community behind ApeSwap have seemingly spawn a sub-culture of their own. From the main chat in Telegram, the users have spinned off sub-chats, all with different purposes and focuses, but with topics intricately linked to the health and well-being of the DEX.
So now that’s on the Binance chain.
On 22 June 2021, ApeSwap expanded to the Polygon chain, bringing a bevy of close partners to bear on the new platform. In around one day after launch , the new DEX managed to hit $50 Mil TVL. Not bad considering big names like SushiSwap and QuickSwap had already laid their roots deep in Polygon way prior.
The expansion also brought a new consideration to investors who wanted to ape into the new DEX. There wasn’t a new $BANANA token on the new chain and they had to go through the exercise of bridging the BSC native $BANANA over. Going from BSC to Polygon was a free service without requiring any $BANANA payment, however going back the other way requires a 2.5 $BANANA fee.
https://multichain.xyz/swap?pairID=bananav5&src=56&dest=137
The initial rush was a huge exercise in building one’s patience. These days, bridging is just a 1–2 minute affair but when ApeSwap launched, it would have taken upwards of 12 hours for someone to deposit $BANANA at the BSC side and receiving the same amount at Polygon after.
One huge factor was naturally the APRs on the new farms. It’s not everyday you find a farm in Polygon rewarding both the native token as well as WMATIC, and it was a huge draw then and still is today. All other farms were also rewarding in the same manner — $BANANA + WMATIC. But, there was a slight catch for investors, there wasn’t any single $BANANA pool to put $BANANA to work on the ApeSwap platform. In the early moments, they only had a few choices, which was to create more LP tokens in order to keep farming. Or sell the rewards.
As a volunteer moderator in the ApeSwap Telegram, I had to answer the same queries as they popped up and slowly I realized why there wasn’t any single ApeSwap pool that minted $BANANA. It was because using the same token on both chains meant that it simply wasn’t possible to double-mint and screw the emissions rate as well as you couldn’t possibly have 2 of the same smart contract on both chains.
Thankfully, in a short span of time, ApeSwap partners came to fill in the gap and started to offer single $BANANA pools on their platforms. Although the rewards aren’t in $BANANA still but it fulfilled a need from the users. They could still farm with their tokens and reinvest the rewards in however way they wanted it.
While there hasn’t been much new lately coming out from ApeSwap on the Polygon chain, you can see from the screenshots above that it is still a viable option for yield farming and/or staking. Consider that on Binance chain, the LP farming APY on Aperocket.finance is at around 830% vs the 1700% on Polygon.
Similarly, though single $BANANA staking may not yield in $BANANA for easy recompounding, on Polygon it is almost free to do a few extra steps to swap the rewards for more $BANANA. If you put this additional effort in, you’ll stand to earn 214% APR on Polycrystal vs 118% APR on the native ApeSwap pool.
There has been a growing demand for $BANANA lately as many felt that the token has been heavily oversold and it was just a matter of time before the inevitable pump.
To further compound that, ApeSwap has also been touted as a Top 10 contender for the Binance Most Valuable Builder award.
There is also a huge community driven initiative called the 100K $GNANA challenge where users compete with each other to see who will be the first to accumulate 100K $GNANA tokens.
You get the gist. There is so much going on at ApeSwap that typically does not exist in any other platform, be it BSC or Polygon. I’ve been with the apes since March 2021 and it didn’t take long for me to feel part of the troop. I hope you can consider dropping by to say “Hi!” at the main Telegram channel — https://t.me/ape_swap
In closing, you may also be wondering why the hell did I title this article the way I did and why link it to a music video from the 80s. The reason is :
“I stand accused, of love (ApeSwap) in the first degree”.
Derek(JP)
