It appears that decentralized finance (DeFi) has not peaked despite a deluge of scammy projects and clear copy-cats of popular protocols.
Just recently, a new .finance project launched with the name of Pickle. Despite it being named after a food and having the logo of Pickle Rick from Rick and Morty, Pickle — or Pickle Finance — the coin has seen strong adoption within DeFi circles.
There are prominent crypto and Ethereum investors promoting the project, whose native coin, the aptly-named PICKLE, has rallied 1,000 percent in the span of 24 hours. This makes it likely the best-performing “legit” altcoin of the past day or two.
What is Pickle Finance?
Over the past few weeks, there has been a deluge of so-called food coins: we’ve seen SushiSwap, Kimchi, HotdogSwap, SpringRollSwap, and about every other popular food under the sun as developers have attempted to capture the DeFi craze.
Most of these food coins have failed: they pumped and rapidly dumped, never got off the ground, or were “rug-pulled” by their often-anonymous founders.
It seems that there’s one food coin that’s gaining quite a bit of traction, though, and that’s Pickle.
if you open up Pickle’s website, it looks extremely similar to any of the other food coins: a simple user interface with the price of the coin, supply, and the total value locked in the contract. But it’s aiming to be different.
The idea with PICKLE is to use incentives to reduce the premium users are paying for certain stablecoins like DAI or Synthetix USD, which both have traded around 2-4 percent over a dollar over the past month.
The idea is to balance the rewards of each liquidity pool to ensure that market pressures normalize the price of stable coins:
“More rewards are given to below-peg stablecoin pools and fewer rewards are given to above-peg stablecoin pools. This gets people to sell above-peg stablecoins and buy below-peg stablecoins,” the “PicoPaper” reads.
Moving forward, the project will transition to pVaults, which will offer users a place to deposit their stablecoins and PICKLE for an on-chain arbitrage system that will net profits while also normalizing the price of stablecoins.
Gaining traction
As absurd as this may sound, the coin is gaining quite a fair bit of traction.
There is currently $200 million worth of cryptocurrency locked in the contracts, making it the leading food project aside from SushiSwap.
Also, the project has been adopted by many in the DeFi space as aforementioned.
Dovey Wan, a founding partner of Primitive Capital, recently lamented about how she farmed PICKLE on the first day it was out but sold the coins for around 10 percent the current price:
“Sold over 10k $PICKLE at $5. wakes up found its at $60??? Isn’t this green coin???”
Sold over 10k $PICKLE at $5
😭😭😭 wakes up found its at $60??? Isn’t this green coin???
— Dovey 以德服人 Wan 🪐🦖 (@DoveyWan) September 14, 2020
As of Sunday evening, the coin had surged in excess of 1,000 percent in a 24-hour period, starting the day at around $5 and ending it at $70.
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