One more WEN bites the dust. The Llama Lend UI is officially live at https://lend.curve.fi/
Let’s take a look.
Here we are browsing the UI mostly from the fresh and [hopefully] final deploy of the contracts, but occasionally using a slightly older draft of the UI from the older set of contracts.
We also masquerade as Mich’s wallet, so you can see what the site looks like in active use, as opposed to simply landing on the page as an anon.
Borrow
Land onto the website and see this:
The default landing page is for borrowers… that is, users who want to supply collateral and take out a position with the soft liquidation protection users have come to desire.
By default you also land on the “long” markets, or markets where you supply a cryptocurrency as collateral in order to borrow $crvUSD. At the moment all markets must have $crvUSD as one of the tokens. Therefore, the markets are all grouped by the non-$crvUSD token. The launch markets are currently $CRV, $tBTC, and $wstETH, though anybody may launch their own directly as we demonstrated in a prior tutorial:
Why “long”? When you lend collateral to take out $crvUSD, you are hoping that the price of this collateral rises sufficiently. If so, then in the future you have the ability to buy back your collateral at the original price + interest, with the rest as pure profit… so your “long” position was successful. If it goes down in price, it means you bet wrong and you have to go through the headaches of soft liquidation or hard liquidation.
This contrasts with the “short” position, which you can access by flipping the toggle at the top, or on any of the individual markets.
For the “short” markets you supply crvUSD and borrow the cryptocurrency.
If you’re not familiar with how short markets operate, it’s the same mechanic as “long” but in reverse. One presumes $crvUSD stays the same price, so you look at the price of the borrow asset. If you borrow $CRV, you hope that the price of the much maligned token death spirals. If so, then you are able to buy back your initial $crvUSD deposit with fewer $CRV tokens, the rest of which you can sell off at a profit. If $CRV inexplicably goes up, then you enter the bad scenario of liquidations.
The markets are a bit empty at the moment… so let’s zoom in on the only market with a position, Mich appropriately longing $CRV.
The preview shows all the key statistics of Mich’s loan (30K debt in pretty good health), as well as the broader stats about the availability of the market.
In the $crvUSD infrastructure, the borrow rate was set based on the stablecoin’s peg in an effort to stimulate borrows or repayments. Llama Lend having no influence on the peg, the borrow rate is instead informed by the utilization of the pools, shown in the bottom right.
Above the borrow rate is quite low, but a screenshot from the testing phase shows the system in a state of higher rate/utilization (24% and 82%)
Clicking on the market brings up a more detailed view of the market writ large.
And at the moment Mich is the market so it’s a bit redundant, but a second tab shows off details about his loan specifically which has accrued two cents worth of interest.
Once again featured prominently in both tabs is the distribution of capital across a range of bands. This was a more generous spread during the testing phase:
Supply
The flip side of this… what if you want to supply to these markets? On the original page, we flip the toggle to “Supply.” Supply means that you are the lender of the market, providing the “supply token” that users may borrow and earning the “Lend APY” plus potential other rewards for yourself.
Again, we see Mich is the market… in the case of crv-long, literally borrowing from himself.
Here the borrow rate is replaced by the marginally lower lend rate, along with information on incentives. Lenders take on some extra risk of bad debt. Further, lenders cannot withdraw their position when users are borrowing against it, so they may find their position locked. Therefore, lenders may be rewarded extra in the form of receiving streaming rewards from the Curve DAO, like LPs in regular Curve pools. No such rewards are yet hooked up, but one imagines this will happen SOON™️
Suppliers also introduce the concept of “vault shares,” analogous to LP tokens and capable of handling any fluctuations these vaults will experience. Similar to pool LP tokens, shares can be staked into a gauge and unstaked when you want to withdraw.
Again, the markets can toggle between the “long” and “short” markets from the buyer point of view — although this nomenclature may not be strictly analogous from the supplier point of view.
Clicking into the market, we can see what life looks like as a supplier.
Here the information about borrower bands disappears in favor of more information specific to suppliers, like total supplied amount, vault share information, and staking/rewards.
Note that suppliers may not be able to fully withdraw their position, depending on utilization. Here Mich has provided 266K shares, but can only withdraw 236K thanks to his borrow from himself.
This again highlights the importance in receiving rewards for serving as a supplier, to incentivize the headaches that may come with the lent token being locked up.
With the UI live, what happens next is anybody’s guess. We have an idea that gas will be cheaper
We know the plan is to deploy this to all the L2s, so
Some are expecting it will cause Mich to move his lending habits in-house, although who knows… maybe it would be a bearish move?
As usual, the system is in beta, so there may well be a variety of issues that pop up and potentially even redeployments if more bugs are found. If you do have bugs or UI requests, simply drop them into any Curve chat and mods will tun it up the ladder accordingly.
Remember to always ape responsibly. When putting money into experimental products, make sure to only put in funds you are expecting to lose completely!\