Crypto Briefing: Understanding Zapper Finance and its DeFi investment analysis platform in one article

特邀专栏作者

2020-07-19 16:39 (UTC+8)

This article is about 5174 words, reading the full article takes about 8 minutes

Many DeFi investors will explore the wider crypto space to find and obtain opportunities with the highest return on investment, which gives Zapper Finance the opportunity to become one of the main beneficiaries of the Yield Farming boom.

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Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)Editor's Note: This article comes from

Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)

Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
, by Ashwath Balakrishnan, Liam Kelly, translated by Lu Jiangfei, published with permission.
Overview of key content

Zapper was born in a hackathon in 2019, and has now grown into one of the most commonly used tools for DeFi investors;

Zapper can not only help users track their own encrypted assets, but also allow users to quickly respond to new market trends;

Today, the maturity of DeFi and encryption technology is constantly improving. Some aggregation service platforms and top design teams have implemented a large number of measures to ensure user-friendly interaction. At the same time, they are also eager to cover their products in this fast-growing niche market as soon as possible Every part of it — Zapper Finance is one of them, the company was born in a hackathon in 2019 and has now become a dark horse in the field of DeFi and encryption technology.

Everyone in the DeFi field is chasing the best "harvest" (the best yields), so for Zapper Finance, it is now ushering in a new Yield Farming (yield farming) craze. Since the yield of DeFi changes every day, Therefore, Zapper Finance also has a place to play, and it has become an essential tool for many Yield Farmers (yield farmers).

This article takes an in-depth look at Zapper Finance, including what it does, how it works, and the team and thriving community behind the project.

secondary title

If you have no technical knowledge of Ethereum, or how the various decentralized financial protocols work, it may not be easy to understand DeFi. However, this problem can actually be solved - Zapper Finance not only effectively simplifies liquidity pool investing, but also develops a set of portfolio tracking tools for users.

Somewhat similar to another DeFi product, Furucombo, Zapper Finance's goal is to enable those who are "not too technically advanced" to obtain the benefits of DeFi. In fact, not everyone has enough knowledge reserves to understand the nuances in the non-custodial financial field. Therefore, in order to make DeFi services reach a wider audience, there is an urgent need for a method that can simplify "complex problems." transformation" tool.

A core function of Zapper Finance is to allow DeFi users to enter and exit the liquidity pool with one click. As a rapidly growing niche market, creating easy-to-use liquidity pools is essential if DeFi is to scale and cater to more people.

image description

Source: Zapper Fi
Using Zapper Fi, you can seamlessly "inject" or "take out" liquidity pools on Uniswap, Curve Finance, and Balancer. Later, they will add support for liquidity pools such as Opyn, Shell Protocol, and FutureSwap. The advantage of using Zapper Fi is that users can directly exchange ETH or ERC-20 tokens into the required tokens in different liquidity pools, thus eliminating the cumbersome process of pre-exchanging holding assets.
Below is an example of the process for depositing funds into a liquidity pool using Zapper Fi:
If there is no Zapper Fi tool, capital investment needs to convert half of ETH into sUSD tokens, and then convert the other half of ETH into USDC tokens;

If the user wants to deposit 0.2 ETH (according to the exchange rate of 1 ETH=238 US dollars, 0.2 ETH is about 47.6 US dollars) into the sUSD / USDC fund pool of Balancer according to the "50-50" distribution ratio, using the Zapper Fi tool, it will What is it like?

Zapper Fi starts, and divides the user's 0.2 ETH into two, each of which is 23.8 US dollars, and then becomes USDC worth 23.8 US dollars and sUSD worth 23.8 US dollars. At this time, Zapper Fi will transfer this from the user's address The tokens exchanged for the two funds are deposited into Balancer's liquidity pool, and then the tokens in the Balancer liquidity pool are credited to the same address.

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Source: Zapper Fi

In the above example operation, if the average gas fee of Ethereum can be maintained at 46 gwei, the user only needs to pay about $5.08 worth of fees, but if not using Zapper Fi, the user needs to pay at least $7-10 in fees.

Above: 5.08 transaction fees to add liquidity on Balancer following the example process above.

In addition to letting users no longer deal with tedious currency exchange work, Zapper Fi actually has other functions, the most notable of which is its convenient analysis platform Zapper Fi Dashboard, even those users who interact directly with the liquidity pool can also be used (as shown in the image below).
Block explorers can usually only show transactions to a single address, and tools like EtherScan can be slightly more powerful to show user holdings, but none of these tools can match Zapper Fi's analytics platform.
Zapper Fi's information analysis platform can track the activity of each address, and it also divides the activity into six categories, namely:
wallet holdings;
investment status;
liquidity pool;

Yield Farming;

This allows users to easily browse their portfolio and expand their investments through an allocation table that also shows users the percentage of their total invested funds they own in each category.

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Source: Zapper Fi

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What products can compete with Zapper Fiance?
When DeFi Zap and DeFi Snap merged, Zapper Fi was born. Under the current circumstances, Zapper Fi can aggregate the inflow and outflow of funds in the liquidity pool into one platform for execution, so Zapper Fi has quickly become one of the most popular portfolio analysis tools in the DeFi field.
Pools.fyi is an interface that displays information about liquidity pools, and also links users to the front end of the protocol, allowing them to more easily increase or decrease invested liquidity (funds). However, Pools.fyi does not have the native liquidity supply function that Zapper Fi has;

Zerion, a platform that supports native analytics platforms to track DeFi portfolios, could be a real competitor to Zapper Fi. Like Zapper Fi, users on the Zerion platform can also directly enter and exit liquidity pools on Uniswap and Bancor. Not only that, Zerion's scope of services is not limited to liquidity, by integrating with 0x, Maker and Compound, Zerion's users can choose to lend funds, loans or exchange assets from a single platform.

image description

Source: Zerion

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But what sets Zapper Fi apart from the competition?

Although Zerion seems to provide more functions and allows users to obtain a full set of DeFi services "under one roof", it still has shortcomings. Zerion only supports borrowing funds on Maker and Compound, and lending funds can only be realized through Compound. It is precisely because of these shortcomings that Aave has "the opportunity to take advantage of". At present, Aave has become the strongest competitor of Compound and Maker.

At this stage, DeFi lenders always go to iEarn Finance and RAY by Staked to check and understand interest rate information, but the shortcoming of these platforms lies in asset exchange, and asset exchange is actually the most critical and meaningful one in the DeFi field service function. In this case, DeFi lenders have to seek support through 0x, a DeFi liquidity aggregator that can split transactions and source liquidity from various DEXs.

Zapper Fi takes a more refined approach, not only focusing on one segment, but doing a great job in that segment!

Ampleforth's AMPL-WETH incentive pool on Uniswap requires liquidity providers to first deposit equal amounts of AMPL and ETH / WETH on Uniswap, and then the corresponding tokens in the Uniswap liquidity pool can be locked in Ampleforth's Geyser / Beehive program middle. On Zapper Fi, the entire process can be completed with one click, which means that Zapper Fi not only allows users to access more liquidity pools, but also greatly reduces the cumbersome operations for users to add tokens to the incentive pool.

In addition, Zapper Fi is expected to support Compound and Aave soon, which shows that Zapper Fi does not always focus on individual segments, but will gradually promote business integration step by step. Although this process may be slow, gradually integrating DeFi protocols is reliable and meaningful from a security perspective.

Another product advantage of Zapper Fi is that it can save transaction costs. At present, there is no similar product on the market that can convert funds into the tokens required by the liquidity pool as easily as Zapper Fi. Unless users already hold the required tokens and can inject funds directly into the liquidity pool, Zapper Fi is definitely a smoother and more affordable option.

potential disadvantage

It should be noted that Zapper Fi is now only focused on one market segment, namely liquidity supply, which means that the product may not appeal to a wider range of DeFi users. While liquidity provisioning is one of the core areas of current DeFi activity, other areas such as money markets and synthetic assets are expanding rapidly. Also, like Furucombo, Zapper is a DeFi product — not a Def protocol, which means that even though ZapperFi is completely non-custodial, it cannot achieve true decentralized governance.

But even with these problems, it seems difficult for us to see real flaws on Zapper Fi, because it does not need to trade off decentralization and efficiency, nor does it need to worry too much about security.

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Zapper Finance Team and Community

The DeFi community seems to have been rejuvenated since the Zapper Fi product came out, especially after the Yield Farming craze, and having a tool that supports so many variable token portfolios is obviously very useful. Moreover, users can check which investment portfolios have the highest yield on an analysis platform, but it would be even better if users can "cash out with one click"!

Although there are many new one-stop DeFi shops in the market, Zapper Fi has formed the largest and longest community. People can easily learn a lot about the community on Twitter, Telegram and Discord. Industry practitioners also make substantial contributions to the Zapper project. It is based on these cooperations that people can better glimpse the interconnection between the DeFi and Ethereum communities.

The three co-founders of the Zapper Finance project are: Seb Audet, Suhail Gangji and Nodar Janashia, who have extensive experience and strong work backgrounds in UX design, encryption technology development, and financial management.
Before founding Zapper Finance, Seb Audet built DeFi Snap, an analytics platform that allows users to view their entire DeFi activity in one simple interface. Suhail Gangji and Nodar Janashia co-founded DeFi Zap, a DeFi Snap-like product that allows users to create bundled transactions and interact with multiple smart contracts simultaneously. Users only need to answer a few personal assessment questions related to investing, and then DeFi Zap can create "zaps" for them to express cryptocurrency investment sentiment.

In November 2019, the DeFi Zap team took home the top prize at Kyber's DeFi Hackathon, also winning $5,000 worth of KNC tokens. Later, Nodar Janashia launched a training program called "DeFi tutorials" and met many like-minded people along the way, and eventually he recruited two people: Dipesh Sukhani (now a blockchain developer at 1x.exchange in Singapore) developer) and Tosh Sharma.
RabbitHole founder Brian Flynn provided Zapper Fi with design assistance;