SnowSwap Introduction
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SnowSwap lets you swap yield-farming tokens of the top DeFi Projects and maximize your APY by adding an additional layer of yield.
Our goal is to allow yield farmers to more easily switch into the highest yielding token at any time, avoiding withdrawal fees, and high gas costs arising from withdrawing, unwrapping, and depositing into other products. The APY paid by comparable yield earning vaults is always changing but often it is too costly to switch between vaults for the highest yield. We aim to change that.
Currently, SnowSwap provides a DEX (decentralized exchange) for yield farming tokens. It features multiple liquidity pools for swapping between yield farming assets of similar worth, such as:
different flavors of wrapped tokens (including yield generating wrapped Ethereum & Bitcoin).
Users can swap tokens in one of the pools, or can earn SNOW governance tokens by providing liquidity and staking in these pools (i.e. liquidity mining), typically earning APYs between 20–200% depending on demand. The highest earning pool is usually Rudolph’s Pool, which at times has offered 100%+ APY.
In the future, we will be launching more features and products to make it easier to invest in DeFi.
SnowSwap is designed for low slippage stablecoin swaps and is based originally on Curve’s AMM. Our first pool for yVault stablecoins, allowed traders to easily swap between different yEarn V1 vaults without paying withdrawal fees and to exit positions cheaply by swapping into vaults with sufficiently large token reserves and then withdrawing.
The easiest way to understand SnowSwap is to see it as an exchange. Its main goal is to let users and other decentralized protocols exchange specific kinds of yield farming coins with low slippage. Unlike exchanges out there that match a buyer and a seller, the behaviour of SnowSwap is different; it uses liquidity pools like Uniswap. To achieve this, we need liquidity (tokens) which is rewarded by those who provide them.
SnowSwap users can also diversify their yield across multiple stablecoin vaults by acting as LPs (liquidity providers). When you go to the deposit page and deposit one coin, it then gets split between each token in the pool. That’s something you have to keep in mind because if you were to deposit 1000 DAI in the yVault USD pool, you would get ownership of all the assets in the pool at the current ratio which changes constantly as people trade and arb the price.
Our first pool supported yVault USDC, DAI, USDT, and TUSD. Our second pool supported yUSD and ycrvBUSD. Vanilla stablecoins can be deposited via a zap contract and the corresponding yVault token will automatically be minted and supplied to the pool. (This feature is currently under repair but will be re-launched soon.) Upon successful deposits, LPs will receive the ySNOW token, which can be staked for additional SNOW rewards.
SnowSwap offers various liquidity pools to help you maximize yield on your DeFi assets.
For instance, our first pool was designed for users of yEarn Finance V1 stablecoin vaults. The yield on these vaults often changes, but it is difficult to switch from one vault to another, because doing so incurs paying for the gas to withdraw and deposit, as well as paying commission for the pool which is charged at the time of withdrawal. It is much cheaper and simpler to swap one yEarn liquidity provider token for another on SnowSwap, incurring the gas for only one transaction, and avoiding the commission fees.
We now bring this same strategy to other DeFi projects and tokens, namely: making it cheap and easy to swap into similar tokens with higher yield.
It can be difficult to enter into some kinds of vaults or pools because tokens need to be wrapped multiple times in different projects, which can be confusing, time consuming, and expensive.
By using our pools you can take wETH or wBTC and easily swap into yield bearing tokens which have been wrapped and deposited in several different projects.
The various pools in SnowSwap frequently have arbitrage opportunities for traders. It is possible for savvy traders to write programs which interact programmatically with the pools today. However, we will be releasing developer docs soon and adding additional APIs in the future.
Fundamentally, on SnowSwap you may either pay a small trading fee to swap tokens in one of SnowSwap’s pools, or provide liquidity to the pools to earn a percentage of trading fees and SNOW (governance token).
Due to unclear legislation around the DeFi industry, the SnowSwap team is currently anonymous. At some point this will change. Rest assured your funds are safe from rug pull and smart contracts are being audited by a top-tier auditing firm (details will be announced very soon!)
The SnowSwap team is hard at work implementing new pools, making it easier to invest in DeFi, and focusing on other important issues like scalability and governance. Please follow us on Twitter, Medium, Telegram, or Discord for the latest information. As new features are implemented they will be added to this manual.
