Cointime

Download App
iOS & Android

What I Talk About When I Talk About Airdrop Farming

From COIN DATA SCHOOL

If you are new to airdrop farming and need reasons and general guidelines to start, I recommend you to read this paragraph by coinershub.

In this article, I’ll talk about how I’m farming the Aptos ecosystem. I will not talk about the whys because I’m not here to persuade you. No reasons, no hypes, no fomos. I’m just documenting what I did and what I plan to do. That’s all.

Wallets & Bridging

I’m using the Petra Aptos wallet. Do NOT use Martian because they had a pretty serious issue in the past. I created two Aptos wallet addresses and bridged $1,243 and $2,003 USDC respectively from Arbitrum via the Aptos Bridge by LayerZero1. I also used the Gas on destination feature of the bridge to get a little Aptos for gas.

The USDC I got on Aptos is recognized by dapps as layerzero USDC. Alternatively, one can also bridge USDC from Solana via the Portal bridge2, and the bridged USDC will show up on Aptos as wormhole USDC. As we’ll see later, protocols on Aptos have different yields for different versions of USDC. But don’t worry, you can easily swap one version to another on Aptos. You may ask, “$1000 per wallet is too much for me, can I start with $200?” Yes, you can, but you really can’t do much with $200, and there are many juicy farms. Nonetheless, the date of the first tx matters a lot for farming the ecosystem airdrop since it marks the beginning of your journey on the chain. Usually the earlier you bridge, the better.

Swapping, Staking, Lending and LPing

After bridging, the first thing I did was to swap some of the bridged USDC to APT3. I primarily used SwapGPT as it’s an aggregator and usually gives the best rate. However, I also tried to make 1 swap on LiquidSwapbaptswap, and thala because usually an ecosystem gives more airdrops to wallets that interact with many dapps vs. not. You can find the major dapps ranked by TVL on defillama.

Next I staked 12 APT natively with a validator on aptostake.guru. This is similar to staking ATOM or OSMO in Cosmos. I also liquid-staked 6 APT with Tortuga and got tAPT as receipt and deposited it on Aries Markets, a lending market. I deposited some USDC too because the yield was greater than 17%. Also, by doing that, I created a margin of safety to borrow the max amount of stAPT allowed without worrying about getting liquidated. And the borrow rate for stAPT was only 0.12%. The following screen shows my positions before and after borrowing. Notice the net yield went up after borrowing. This is because the protocol is incentivizing borrowing with APT. Yeah, that’s right, the reward is paid out in APT, not some random shit token.

Now the borrowed stAPT also earns ~11% of the AMI token while sitting in wallet.

This leads us to the Amnis Retroactive Airdrop4. First, buy this NFT on wapal for 10c. It’s a cheap way to interact with a NFT protocol and it will boost anything you do on Amnis by 10%. Next, stake the NFT on Amnis website via my ref link (or not). Next, mint some amAPT and pair it with APT and LP on Liquid Swap: Enter amAPT/APT in the search box and pick the one with the highest APR, which was 30% when I did it. Remember to stake the LP, otherwise you won’t get the stated APR.

Let me summarize:

  • tAPT is a Liquid Staking Token (LST) from Tortuga. I got it by staking APT on Tortuga. I deposited tAPT to Aries Markets.
  • stAPT is a LST from Amnis. I got it by borrowing from Aries Markets against my tAPT and USDC collateral. I’m holding the borrowed stAPT in wallet.
  • amAPT is like a stablecoin for APT. I minted it from Amnis using APT. But I did not further stake amAPT to get stAPT. Instead, I LP’ed amAPT and APT on Liquid Swap.

Now there’s yet another LST called sthAPT from Thala Labs. While Amnis offers APT → amAPT→ stAPT, Thala offers APT → thAPT→ sthAPT, where thAPT is again like a stablecoin of APT. What I did with Thala was something similar:

  • I minted some thAPT with APT here.
  • I then LP’ed thAPT and APT in this pool on thala and I’m earning 57%. One caveat: to enjoy this APR, I had to get enough veTHL. I bought $1 of MOD and $4 of THL and LP’ed without staking them and locked the LP on the Vote Escrow page. It’s more 2.5x more efficient than lock THL alone.
  • I also LP’ed USDC and APT in this pool on thala. I’m earning 114%. (Once again, I had to buy $1 of MOD and $5 of THL and LP’ed without staking them and locked the LP on the Vote Escrow page.)

Domains & NFTs

Now we are done with the hard stuff. It’s time for some mindless transactions.

  1. Buy 1 domain from aptosnames and 100 subdomains over time. It’s super cheap to get a subdomain, so these are great for increasing the total number of txs over time. The keyword here is “overt time.”
  2. Mint, buy, and sell some NFTs at mercadotopazbluemove, and wapal. Wapal is announced airdrop and is giving out points (see details). There’s a relevant galxe quest and the deadline is 7 Feb 2024. Finally, snype organizes and presents NFT trading stats. The number one NFT project is Aptos Monkeys. I haven’t bought one but will if floor drops further.

Trading

Econia powers at least four dapps: swapGPTkanalabsgator trade, and aries trade. We used swapGPT previously. Let’s now use the other three protocols to place some limit buy or sell orders of APT. Make sure you use the trade tab! Doing so will probably get us some future airdrop from Econia.

Merkle is a perp dex that I primarily use for leverage trading. It has the best product among the 6 perp dexes. I funded one account with $900 USDC and traded for a month and got ~732 MKL tokens and ~6 APT. My current PnL is $294. Feel free to use my ref to give it a try.

For the other account, I simply deposited ~369 USDC into MKLP, the counter party of the traders, to earn 110% ~ 120% APR.

Referrals

I got a bags OG on Solana. I’ve no idea what it is but all the Solana degens I know that were early to JITO and Tensor and Bonk and WIF bought it. It only cost 1.5 SOL iirc. If you also want one, you can use my ref link.

Comments

All Comments

Recommended for you

  • Putin: Russia "supports" Harris, calls her smile "contagious"

    According to foreign media such as TASS and Russia's Sputnik News, Jinse Finance reported that on the afternoon of September 5th local time, Russian President Putin said at the plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum 2024 that Russia will "support" the US Democratic Party presidential candidate and vice president Harris as recommended by the US President Biden in the upcoming US presidential election. When asked how he viewed the 2024 US election, Putin said it was the choice of the American people. The new US president will be elected by the American people, and Russia will respect the choice of the American people. Putin also said that just as Biden suggested his supporters to support Harris, "we will do the same, we will support her." The report said that Putin also joked that Harris' laughter is "expressive and infectious," which shows that "she is doing everything well." He added that this may mean that she will avoid further sanctions against Russia.

  • An ETH whale repurchased 5,153 ETH with 12.23 million USDT 20 minutes ago

    A certain high-frequency trading ETH whale monitored by on-chain analyst Yu Jin bought 5,153 ETH with 12.23 million USDT 20 minutes ago.

  • CFTC: Uniswap Labs has actively cooperated with the investigation and only needs to pay a fine of US$175,000

    The CFTC has filed a lawsuit against Uniswap Labs and reached a settlement. It was found that Uniswap Labs illegally provided leveraged or margined retail commodity transactions of digital assets through a decentralized digital asset trading protocol. Uniswap Labs was required to pay a civil penalty of $175,000 and cease violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA). The CFTC acknowledged that Uniswap Labs actively cooperated with law enforcement agencies in the investigation and reduced the civil penalty.

  • Federal Reserve Beige Book: Respondents generally expect economic activity to remain stable or improve

    The Federal Reserve's Beige Book pointed out that economic activity in three regions has slightly increased, while the number of regions reporting flat or declining economic activity has increased from five in the previous quarter to nine in this quarter. Overall employment levels remain stable, although some reports indicate that companies are only filling necessary positions, reducing working hours and shifts, or reducing overall employment levels through natural attrition. However, reports of layoffs are still rare. Generally speaking, wage growth is moderate, and the growth rate of labor input costs and sales prices ranges from slight to moderate. Consumer spending has declined in most regions, while in the previous reporting period, consumer spending remained stable overall.

  • Puffpaw Completes $6 Million Seed Round with Lemniscap Ventures as Participant

    Puffpaw has announced the completion of a $6 million seed round of financing, with participation from Lemniscap Ventures. The Puffpaw project plans to launch a blockchain-enabled electronic cigarette aimed at helping users reduce nicotine intake through token incentives. The project encourages users to quit smoking by recording their smoking habits and rewarding them with tokens. Puffpaw's token economics aims to cover 30% of the cost of users' first month of using their product and provide social rewards. The project also considers possible system abuse, but the issue of users potentially reporting smoking habits dishonestly is not yet clear.

  • Affected by Ethervista and others, Ethereum Gas temporarily rose to 33gwei

    According to Etherscan, due to the influence of contracts such as Ethervista, Ethereum Gas has temporarily risen to 33gwei, with the top three being EthervistaRouter, UniswapRouter, and BananaGun.

  • The probability of the Fed cutting interest rates by 25 basis points in September is 55%.

    The probability of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates by 25 basis points in September is 55.0%, while the probability of a 50 basis point cut is 45.0%. The probability of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates by a cumulative 50 basis points by November is 32.1%, by 75 basis points is 49.2%, and by 100 basis points is 18.8%.

  • Nvidia: No subpoena received from the US Department of Justice

    Nvidia (NVDA.O) stated that it has not received a subpoena from the US Department of Justice.

  • Aptos chain transaction volume exceeded 550 million, with a monthly growth of more than 10%

    According to official data from Aptos Labs, the on-chain transaction volume of Aptos has exceeded 550 million transactions, with a monthly growth rate of over 10%. However, the active staking amount has decreased to approximately 862 million APT, and the current total supply of APT on the entire network is 1,090,635,266.

  • The transaction volume on the Aptos chain exceeded 500 million, and the active pledge amount dropped to approximately 869 million APT

    According to official data from Aptos Labs, the on-chain transaction volume of Aptos has exceeded 500 million, reaching 516,298,051 at the time of writing. However, the active staking amount has decreased to about 869 million APT, and the current total supply of APT on the entire network is 1,087,203,622.