4. [MINE] Swaps + Pools
What is Pylon Protocol?
Pylon Protocol — a yield-based saving, payment, and launchpad platform built on Terra.
Pylon is the fifth application to be incubated by the TFL team directly, following Chai, Mirror, Anchor, and Nebula. Like all of them, Pylon infuses itself with the theme of “looking outwards,” where adoption, accessibility, and use cases that appeal to the average user are powered by Terra’s DeFi ecosystem and presented to a global user set with a friendly user interface.
Part of the concept behind Pylon Protocol was inspired by Korea’s “key money deposit” housing system — where renters would pay 3/4 of the fee of the house upfront, and the landlords could invest that money elsewhere for that period of time. The renter would receive it all back after their lease expires.
The main difference between Pylon and this system is that the principal is protected (i.e., the landlord can’t take out the principal to spend it elsewhere) and that the beneficiaries/landlords would be receiving stable, consistent yield to make this relationship more attractive — as opposed to redirecting that money towards other risky investments.
Why should users use Pylon Protocol?
The draw for users is that they can access the product/content offerings & easily withdraw their initial deposit.
For beneficiaries, the appeal is that of a stable income as a result of a min. lockup period & long-term relationships w/ their audience.
Win-win situation.
Post-lockup, users are free to reclaim initial deposits and redeem DP tokens. Deposited amounts can also be transferred across the protocol for different services/products.
Getting started on Pylon is simple:
- Users choose a service/product to deposit with Pylon.
- To deposit UST on the platform, users connect their UST wallets, which will then re-deposit onto Anchor.
- Users then receive redeemable DP tokens to access exclusive content.
Pylon Swaps
Pylon swaps are a mechanism that is used by various projects to conduct an IDO sale at launch. So far there have been 3 token sales:
- Pylon - MINE
- TerraWorld - TWD
- Valkyrie - VKR
NOTE: TerraWorld (TWD) swap sale was cancelled due to a user error with minimum deposit (was set to 20,000 instead of 2,000) and was later refunded to everyone but for this analysis we'll include it.
Looking a the the number of tokens swapped per sale, there are a couple of interesting observations
- For TWD and MINE, there were more tokens swapped than available!
- For TWD swap sale, only 200M tokens were available but 350M tokens were swapped.
- For MINE, 200M tokens were available but 204M tokens were swapped.
Most pool rewards haven't unlocked yet
Most of the Pylon Gateway pools launched after August which means that the 6-month pools would become unlocked first as the rewards are withdrawable after 3 months. This means that tokens for most pools other than MINE have not been unlocked yet.
However, PSI seems to be different as I found claim transactions but no information whether they were supposed to be unlocked.
So far, about 70M PSI and 13M MINE have been claimed out of the pools.