Polycat Finance: our first adventure on Polygon

5 min readMay 2, 2021

Let us introduce ourselves. We are here to stay.

Polycat Finance was born out of disillusion in the way things were going on Binance Smart Chain. It made us sad to see the amount of rugpulls, scams, exploits and hacks that were going around. Not only did it make us sad, it also made us afraid of launching any project there.

Learning

We did most of our testing on Binance Smart Chain’s testnet, we preferred to take our time to have the necessary knowledge to come up with decent strategies.

Since we preferred to be slow and consistent rather than fast and unreliable, we never found a good time to launch a project on BSC that would be up to our standards.

The opportunity

We had been aiming to launch our projects on ETH’s mainnet. Unfortunately the high gas fees made us reconsider and push back that decision several times. Then suddenly, MATIC rebranded…

It was a match made in heaven. A Layer 2 scaling solution built on Ethereum that’s incredibly fast and almost free to use? Yes please!

We are not only excited to be one of the early players on Polygon, but we’re also excited about the things we are preparing which we will talk more about further in this article.

The team

The team at its core is made up of two people. We receive support from contacts and friends, but it’s just us two who do the majority of the work.

We both have backgrounds in programming, and an immeasurable passion for it. We have been quite good at evenly sharing the workload so far.

We believe that this is one of our big strengths. We are dedicated people with experience. Which can and will make a difference.

Enough about us!

Polycat Finance

You can find out more here, but let’s recap.

We forked our contracts for Polycat from one of BSC’s biggest players, Goose Finance. And we added some our own custom code to it. You can read every line of our contracts on Github.

The migration function is therefore gone and rest assured, Goose’s contracts have been audited many times and we have not made any major changes to them. We will of course still get our own audit.

The extras in the code

Referral program
Users can refer other users and earn AN EXTRA 2% of the earnings of the people they have brought in. This means that those extra 2% are freshly minted for referrers, therefore referees do not have those 2% taken from them.

Burning vault
Instead of taking all the fees and burning them directly, we have opted for a slow and growing burn.

Say we have $10,000 in fees to burn. Most other yield farms would just take that some of that ($1,000, for example), buy back their own token, and send it to a burn address. This ends up with $9,000 leftover in fees and a bump in the token price temporarily.

What happens here is that eventually, there won’t be any more fees to burn and the price of the token will eventually trickle down to nothing as there is now no price incentive to farm.

Here’s what we do differently…

Our methodology instead is to take some of the burning fees and stake them in a vault, say AAVE-USDT, and burn the earnings from the vault.

So if we go back to our $10,000 example…

We would set aside $3,000 for direct burning when needed and take the remaining $7,000 to a vault that would generate a small $30 per day, but it would ALWAYS AND CONTINOUSLY generate that $30 per day.

As more gets deposited, the vault will only grow and generate more to burn. This way, the price doesn’t slowly die and our farm stays sustainable for the long term.

The long-term vision

Like we said, Polycat is only our entry into Polygon. It’s our first project, our first challenge. But we are way too ambitious to just stop there.

Yield aggregator

We want to take advantage of three things: the current hype around Polygon, our early entry and the positive impact Polycat might have.

Our smart contracts for vaults and yield aggregation are ready! But Polygon isn’t quite yet. We’re lurking in the shadows, always looking for good pools to auto-compound and add into our vaults. The possibilities are endless.

AMM

This is the one we are currently working on while we work on Polycat as well.

Some AMMs currently available on Polygon have proven to have some issues and be slow and congested several times a day. We want to make something better. We’ll reveal more details in the coming days/weeks.