The first yield generating NFT product on BNB Chain
ApeSwap has created a new way for users to be a part of the long-term growth of the platform and for crypto projects to raise funds for their treasuries. These innovative yield-generating NFT products are called Treasury Bills, and they are designed to align the incentives of our organization, our community of users, and our network of partners with a focus on sustainable growth.
How Treasury Bills Work
Inspired by a combination of TradFi, DeFi, and NFT products, ApeSwap’s Treasury Bills allow users to purchase tokens at a discount in exchange for their liquidity provider (LP) tokens. Each Treasury Bill is a unique NFT that represents the purchased tokens, which vest over a certain amount of time.
ApeSwap Treasury Bills will come in two formats: BANANA Bills, and Jungle Bills.
BANANA Bills offer users the opportunity to purchase ApeSwap’s native token, BANANA, at a discount relative to the current market price. Behind the scenes, a bonding curve combines with supply and demand to determine the initial price point for the Bills. The discount amount varies based on a combination of market forces. To buy a BANANA Bill, a user must first create an LP token by adding liquidity to the DEX for the trading pair that corresponds to that type of BANANA Bill. For example, BANANA-BNB LP tokens are used to purchase BANANA-BNB Treasury Bills, which yield BANANA tokens.
Jungle Bills work like BANANA Bills, but instead of purchasing BANANA tokens, users can purchase tokens from select partner projects within the ApeSwap ecosystem using their LP tokens. This allows the partner project to raise additional funds for their treasury after their initial token offering or token generation event in the form of liquidity that is locked on the ApeSwap platform for a certain amount of time. Jungle Bills provide great fundraising opportunities for projects with unsold tokens, tokens carved out for liquidity incentives, or other idle token balances.
Jungle Owned Liquidity
Treasury Bills ultimately create protocol-owned liquidity for ApeSwap. Users who purchase a BANANA Bill with their LP tokens are selling those LP tokens to ApeSwap, and we retain control of those LP tokens (instead of renting liquidity through incentivized yield farming). We can then use those tokens to generate sustainable returns for the protocol as a whole by collecting liquidity provider trading fees, which allows us to scale our product offerings and create even more innovations for the community.
Increasing Emissions Efficiency
Back in January, GNANA voters passed this governance proposal, which included an agreement to allocate one of the eleven BANANA minted per block to help create Jungle-owned liquidity. Once the Bills product launches, ApeSwap will manually transfer 403,200 BANANA to the Treasury Bills contract every two weeks.
Leveraging one BANANA per block theoretically provides an approximate 90% Return on Emissions (ROE) from the sale of Treasury Bills alone. When combined with the effects that the LPs that ApeSwap receives for selling Treasury Bills receive trading fees, the ROE of the Treasury Bills program as a whole can be well over 100% over time, which represents sustainable growth for the ApeSwap ecosystem.
Not only are you the user getting a good deal, but this is what’s best for the overall protocol. ApeSwap needs and is incentivizing BANANA-friendly holders to buy bills, so we can minimize yield farming mercenaries buying and dumping the token on our community.
Generating Yield with Treasury Bills
Each Treasury Bill will be minted as an NFT, which instantly simplifies and creates a secondary market for this new product. Because we are minting a unique NFT for each Treasury Bill, we can easily evolve our Bills to make them as simple or complex as needed to meet the needs of our users and partners.
The secondary market for Treasury Bills allows for speculation as users can sell the bills to other users at any point in time. For example — imagine we offer a 90 day Jungle Bill from one of ApeSwap’s top partners. A user could purchase that Jungle Bill at the beginning of the quarter, and trade it throughout the quarter based on the speculation of the future cash flows of the vested tokens attached by discounting the tokens back to present value.
This example is very simple, but with thousands upon thousands of users testing and honing different approaches, these strategies will only evolve over time. Just like the market for bonds in the world of traditional finance, speculation will lead to innovation and evolve this product in perpetuity. We are simply providing the canvas and allowing users and partners to paint the picture.
The NFT Art
We use the canvas metaphor for a reason — our bills will also be a form of generative NFT art, but with a historical twist. Inspired by the history of cryptocurrency and the legends that paved the way, each component of the bond will correlate to a piece of artwork you are generating with your unique inputs.
To start, there will be five different historical components to each NFT:
- The Legend
- The Location
- The Moment
- The Innovation
- The Easter Egg
These Bill components will each correlate to one art component:
- Committed token
- Type of Bill
- Terms Section
- Vesting Period
- Maturation Date
Each of these will have ten options, as well as an OG version mark determined by the maturation date, meaning that there will be 100,000 unique options for your NFT! These version of the NFTs will not launch until the mid to end of April.
Purchasing a Treasury Bill
Pricing
Treasury Bills are dynamically priced directly proportional to demand, and inversely proportional to time. Accordingly, Treasury Bill pricing is determined by three primary factors:
- The price of the input LP tokens that are used to purchase the Bill
- The price of the output token (i.e., BANANA or a partner project token)
- The time since the last bill was purchased
- Demand for a specific bond
These factors combine to establish a discount on the output token, relative to the current market price on that output token.
Treasury Bills start out at a specific discount, set by ApeSwap. Over time, that discount will increase if the price of the LP tokens (#1) and the price of the reward token (#2) has no change in value, to make the Bills more attractive to purchase.
If the price of the output token increases, and the price of the input LPs decreases or stays the same, the discount of the Treasury Bill will increase, as you can now purchase the output at a larger discount (because the output token is worth more, and the input LP is worth the same or less). The two price points are diverging away from each other, increasing the discount.
If the price of the output token decreases and the price of the input LPs increases or stays the same, the discount of the Treasury Bill will decrease, as you can now purchase the output token at a lower discount, as the output token is worth less and the input LPs are worth the same or more. The two price points are converging towards each other, decreasing the discount.
In the rare case that a Treasury Bill’s discount amount goes negative, purchasing of that Bill will be disabled automatically until market forces result in a positive discount once again.
Pre-Launch Beta
Our first Treasury Bills will be available for purchase on April 12th, when we’ll release two types of BANANA Bills as a de-facto beta period to fine tune the product and gather data and user feedback. Please note this product is SAFU, has been audited by Paladin and rigorously tested.
Treasury Bills available April 12th: BNB-BANANA, BNB-BUSD
Please note all Treasury Bills will start with a limited-edition Obie Dobo artwork besides the variable token inputs. The historical generative art will become available at launch on April 22nd.
Before the NFT generative art launches in mid-April, we’ll continue to roll out new LP pairs available to purchase BANANA Bills.
Treasury Bills launching before April 22nd: USDC-BUSD, BNB-ETH
Official Launch
And then in mid-April we’ll launch our fifth BANANA Bill LP pair with the full set of NFT generative art available through our innovative Treasury Bills product.
Treasury Bill launching on April 22nd: BNB-BTC
What’s Next
After these initial offerings we anticipate opening up the Treasury Bills product to more APE-LP pairs and partner projects, allowing us to continually offer new Bills for users to take advantage of new yield generating opportunities.
We couldn’t be more excited to present this brand new yield generating NFT product on BNB Chain. We have endless ideas on how we can continue to innovate and expand with it —including a potential cross-chain expansion. We can’t wait to gather feedback from our users and partners to make this one of the most innovative products ApeSwap has created to date.
