Breaking Down the Golden Banana
https://apeswap.finance — aka How to PvP the DeFi way
Sink your teeth into the exquisite Golden Bananas from ApeSwap, a home for yours truly as well as many like-minded apes in the world of Decentralised Finance.
If you are new to ApeSwap, you may be wondering why there are 2 native tokens on the platform - the $BANANA that everyone is so familiar with and is being hoarded like the eighth wonder of the world and $GNANA, the Golden Banana, that lives in a nondescript section of the main website under the ApeZone section.
Here is a complete reveal of the $GNANA token. All that you need to know about from a user’s perspective. If you are reading this first, before falling for the hype in the ApeSwap Telegram, good for you. You are a smart ape who is out to figure out stuff for him/herself.
Here’s what everybody knows.
$GNANA earns 2% reflect bonus just by having it in your wallet. No, this does not work if you have it staked in a pool.
It’s also used for participation in Initial Ape Offerings (IAO) when ApeSwap launches a new token into the BSC ecosystem.
There are staking pools that exist with higher APRs for holders of $GNANA to stake in.
Getting in requires a 30% upfront “loss” to your investment. Do note that in actual fact, it is a gain, but more on that later.
Exiting $GNANA will result in a 1:1 redemption for $BANANA. However, I believe no one will redeem by the time you read through this article.
Another point to note is that for every transaction that is performed with $GNANA, there is a 2% fee to be paid in $GNANA, where the fees will be automatically redistributed to all other holders of $GNANA. This means that if you sent me 100 $GNANA, I would only receive 98. And when I sent those 98 $GNANA back to you, you would only receive 96.04 $GNANA.
At the same time, other $GNANA holders are rejoicing having shared the 3.96 $GNANA just from our 2 transactions.
$GNANA will train you to be more prudent and conservative with what you do. Think carefully and mid/long term whenever you make an action with $GNANA because of the 2% fee that will be incurred. Personally, I don’t do anything with my own stash of $GNANA until I am sure that whatever action I do will net me at least 4% back in rewards - 2% to execute the action, 2% to return to my current state.
Let’s now take a look at a real world example of $BANANA vs $GNANA.
So I’ve added 10 $BANANA into everyone’s favorite Banana Pool on ApeSwap.
I’ve also swapped 10 $BANANA into $GNANA. And deposited into the GNANA exclusive MOONLIGHT pool. Let’s take a look at their stats below.
As you can see, with the same USD value of both the tokens, you will be able to actually gain more in $GNANA by leveraging on the higher APR of the exclusive GNANA staking pools.
Though there was a 30% cost of entry but because of the increased value of $GNANA (1.389x value of $BANANA), you actually gain more by investing into $GNANA. (In reality $GNANA is only 4.6% lesser if you used the same USD$ amount to compare)
Now, if you have come this far, you may be wondering what else is there? There is actually a few more considerations than being careful with transactions.
Being a reflect (RFI) token that has higher APR staking capabilities, it is expected that most users of $GNANA would likely lock up their tokens in a staking pool on ApeSwap to maximize returns. That is a given. However, there are times when there will be windows of opportunity to earn reflect bonus, which can actually be quite substantial.
Think about it, if you know that in the next few hours, a huge percentage of the $GNANA holders will be transacting with their $GNANA, would you want to put yourself in a position to earn all the reflect fees from them?
Scenarios like Initial Ape Offerings (IAO), where there will be increased $GNANA activity is a good time to have your $GNANA sitting in wallet just to earn the reflect bonus.
Another good time to have $GNANA at the ready is when a popular $GNANA pool is ending and you know the $GNANA in there is just waiting to be unstaked.
These are some good examples above and leave it to you to optimize it. There are min/max legendary $GNANA apes in the ApeSwap Telegram and they have willingly shared a lot of their strategies. However, I’ll leave it to you to know the basics and join us in that chat to discuss more.
I would definitely hope to receive any feedback or thoughts about this article. I’m very active in the ApeSwap Telegram group at https://t.me/ape_swap @jpmoregain. Feel free to join me there.
And if you feel I have given you some useful insights with this article and would like to send me some monetary encouragement, do join the ApeSwap community and buy a few bananas off the exchange and stake them, that’s the best monetary encouragement I could have.
Thank you for reading through everything.
Actually, I’m not done. This article was supposed to be a reveal of all the dirty little secrets on how to maximize $GNANA. And I wouldn’t want you to leave the article thinking that you just spent a few minutes of your life without getting any value out of it.
Therefore, here’s the full dirty little strategies for min/maxing your $GNANA.
IAOs (Initial Ape Offering)
Get ready to have $GNANA in your wallet some time before the IAO starts. The value sucking power is at it’s greatest during that 1 hour timeframe where users will be constantly committing their $GNANA to the IAO pool.
Don’t commit your $GNANA at the start. There is 1 hour for you to extract all the fees from others. If you have a good internet connection during IAO, leave your commits to the last minute and jump in then. Make sure you approve the transaction with a slightly higher gas fee to make sure you get in fast and clean with all the additional $GNANA you will have earned up till this point.
BUT it doesn’t end there! Immediately after the IAO sale ends, refresh the IAO page until the “Claim” option appears so that you can be the first one out of the gate (again, increase gas to make sure BSC processes your request first) and collect all the fees of the outgoing folks.
What I like to do is to just take note of how much additional $GNANA I have collected during the sale and keep my $GNANA in my wallet after I’ve claimed to collect at least 50% of that amount before I restake my $GNANA in the staking pools.
For example, if during that 1 hour sale my $GNANA stack increased by 30 $GNANA, I would only restake in a pool after I minimally collect another additional 15 $GNANA from the folks coming out of the IAO.
Exclusive $GNANA staking pools
Remember that SPACE pool example above? It is good practice to manually unstake from $GNANA pools near their expiry. Don’t wait for it to expire and then unstake at a later time. Get out 5 - 10 mins earlier so you will be in a position to again extract value from others who you know will be unstaking.
There are a lot of users who will stake all the way to the end but the additional $GNANA value you can get from fees is so much more than the additional few minutes of staking rewards you will get.
Similarly, it is better to extract value from folks staking $GNANA into a new pool instead of diving in immediately when a new pool is announced. Though initial APRs will look very juicy and inviting, it will fall fast once there is a substantial amount staked and it usually doesn’t last long. In that case, might as well extract some $GNANA first and then go in later. It probably will cover the 2% fee for yourself too!
That’s all I have for the reveal! I hope that was some additional strategy on $GNANA that you have picked up today. Be nice though and share this to others who will benefit. Information is free and it helps everyone out!
Thanks again for reading up to this point! Now you can fall for the hype!
Derek (JP)
