When it comes to passive income opportunities within DeFi, many have turned to Uniswap Liquidity Pooling as a fantastic way to seed their favorite assets.
For those unfamiliar with Uniswap LPs, users supply capital in exchange for a pro-rata share of the 0.3% fee earned from a given market pair.
While this mechanism is all good and well, there lacked a solid way to track your returns (both in USD and ETH).
That is until Pools.fyi came into the picture.
Pools FYI – a Uniswap analytics tool – is a project by Blocklytics geared at helping users see their profits and losses on LP positions in an intuitive fashion.
The product shares the top pools by liquidity, volume, and estimated returns over a given period of time (7, 30 or 90 days).
While this beta version of Pools has been a fantastic primer, the Blocklytics team has been searching for ways to monetize in order to further advance the product as a whole.
Today, Blocklytics shared their first revenue model – FYI Tokens.
FYI Tokens – we have minted a custom NFT to sell and manage advertising on https://t.co/nKltYCBKYw. The first FYI Token is now available in an @opensea auction. Any proceeds will be reinvested back into Pools. https://t.co/89EoIUtUSC pic.twitter.com/vPVB3uu6QM
— Blocklytics (@blocklytics) February 6, 2020
What are FYI Tokens?
FYI Tokens are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which give the owner the right to display a promoted pool on the Pools.fyi homepage.
Key features include:
- Dynamic pricing – FYI tokens are auctioned on OpenSea.
- Scarcity – Only one FYI token can be used for a given period time period. Scheduling conflicts and double-selling ads are not possible.
- Transparency – All interaction (such as content proposals and approvals) happen on-chain.
- Liquidity – FYI tokens can be resold with the underlying redemption rights.
- Immutability – Terms and conditions are posted on-chain to ensure they are not changed.
The price of the first FYI token starts at 1 wETH (wrapped Ether) with the auction set to run until Thursday, February 13th at 5PM EST.
How Does it Work?
FYI token holders are the only stakeholders allowed to propose ad content. All content must be approved by Pool.fyi while the core team retains the right to refuse any pool they see as unfit.
Token holders propose content at https://pools.fyi/#/redeem subject to approval by Pools.fyi. Content can be reset or changed at any time, with each FYI token lasting for a predefined period of time (2 weeks in the case of this first round).
Why FYI?
We’ve seen projects such as Synthetix and RealT offer incentives to users for adding liquidity to their respective Uniswap pools.
With FYI tokens, it’s possible for projects to promote a lesser-known pool that is currently seeding new liquidity.
Similarly, top-performing pools may seek to acquire FYI tokens to promote their pool in light of an important upgrade or announcement that is likely to incur high traffic.
Generally speaking, FYI tokens are geared directly at token products conscious of the power of Uniswap liquidity, with Pools.fyi playing a key role in attracting new LPs who are otherwise unaware of a given pool.
From the perspective of Blocklytics, FYI tokens pose an interesting experiment for fundraising in an unconventional manner.
The number of FYI “slots” is by no means capped at one token, and while the sale of the first FYI token *likely* isn’t going to be anything extraordinary value-wise, it does generate a strong experiment as to whether or not token projects actually care to promote their pools.
If one thing is for certain, we here are DeFi Rate are quite interested to see how this auction plays out, and will definitely be reporting on the winner of the first auction this time next week!
Cooper is the Editor of DeFi Rate and an active contributor to leading DeFi media outlets like The Defiant, DeFi Pulse, and Bankless. He works with early-stage teams through Fire Eyes DAO to incubate governance models and grassroots community development. He is an ambassador to Set Protocol and an author of a weekly publication called Token Tuesdays. To stay up with Cooper, follow him on Twitter.