Pickle Finance Wants to Bring Stability to DeFi

Just when farmers thought food coins had run their course, perhaps the most absurd project yet is leveraging pickle memes to help mitigate stablecoin volatility.

Pickle Finance, a project incentivizing liquidity on the four largest DeFi stablecoins, saw $53M in 24-hour volume this weekend as its native governance token, PICKLE, traded as high as $85, according to CoinGecko.

Touting the tagline "Off-peg bad. On-peg good," Pickle Finance offers more rewards to below-peg stablecoin pools and fewer rewards to above-peg stablecoin pools. As illustrated in the Pickle PicoPaper, the aim is to get people to sell above-peg stablecoins and buy below-peg stablecoins.

“Too many farming projects don’t actually do anything for the community,” the project’s whitepaper reads. “Pickle is an experiment that actually gives a shit.”

Pickle’s token liquidity pools are boasting what have become the typical returns for DeFi; 4,000% annualized yields for ‘Pool 2’ PICKLE/ETH LPs, for example.

Pickle Governance

As is all but required for new DeFi projects, PICKLE token holders can vote in a governance process. Pickle is innovating in this area by using quadratic voting — which takes the square root of each vote instead of counting it nominally— to prevent whales from having too much influence. The project’s governance structure prompted a response from Vitalik Buterin himself.

DAI Proposal

Two days after its hyped-up launch, and seeing that DAI was trading significantly above $1, Pickle governance voted to shift incentives to try to bring MakerDAO’s stablecoin closer to its peg.

It’s unclear whether it was Pickle or something else, but DAI is now trading at $1.02, from as high as $1.05 yesterday, according to CoinGecko.

Stablecoin Arb

But, Pickle’s ambitions don’t stop there. In the coming weeks, Pickle Finance will seek to deploy pVaults, a way to stake PICKLE and earn profits from flash loan arbitrage opportunities on stablecoins trading off their peg.

Backed by a unique quadratic voting implementation, thousand-percent yields, and top-tier memes, it’s no wonder farmers are flocking to the latest absurdity. In a world of foodsanity, projects like Pickle are somehow finding ways to add ‘value’ to a sleepless DeFi sector.

—By Cooper Turley

[This story was written and edited by our friends at The Defiant, and also appeared in its daily email. The content platform focuses on decentralized finance and the open economy and is sharing stories we think will interest our readers. You can subscribe to it here.]