Detailed Popsicle Finance Crypto app Review by DeFi Teller

Name: Popsicle Finance
Item: Popsicle Finance
Author: Kate Stormina

Last updated: Dec 22, 2023

What is Popsicle Finance?
How does Popsicle Finance work?
How to use Popsicle Finance?
The ICE token
Is Popsicle Finance safe?
Partners
What's next?
Links

What is Popsicle Finance?

Popsicle Finance is a multichain yield optimization platform that primarily addresses the needs of liquidity providers.

Initially launched on Ethereum, the platform has soon expanded to BNB Smart Chain and Fantom, with some products also expanding on Arbitrum and Polygon layer 2 solutions. The team shares a chain-agnostic vision of Popsicle’s future aiming to connect the platform to more networks.

Popsicle Finance was launched in March 2021. In August 2021, it suffered from a hack that resulted in a loss of around $25 million worth of users’ assets. Mainly locked at the time in Uniswap v3 optimizator’s pools. The team later compensated each LP affected by the hack from the platform’s own reserves.

How does Popsicle Finance work?

The main farming product of the platform is called Popsicle Stand. It allows users to stake their LP tokens from different AMMs and protocols earning ICE rewards in return. Popsicle Stand operates on Ethereum, Fantom Opera, and BNB Smart Chain through a set of farming contracts called "Sorbettiere".

The next product line called Sorbetto is tailored for users wishing to become liquidity providers on advantageous terms. It requires depositing pairs of certain tokens that are later supplied to the liquidity pools across different DEXes on the supported blockchains.

Sorbetto comes in two versions: Fragola and Limone. Sorbetto Fragola is a yield optimizer designed specifically for Uniswap v3 utilizing the DEX’s concentrated liquidity concept to allow users to choose their preferred price ranges and to put their liquidity into the most traded pools that bring the highest fees. Sorbetto Fragola is live on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Polygon as it needs Uniswap v3 to be deployed on-chain.

The next generation of this product, though still in development, is called Sorbetto Limone and is meant to expand Popsicle’s multichain reach onto the BNB Smart Chain and Fantom networks.

Popsicle Finance’s next product dubbed Frapped.io is marketed as the first official non-custodial wrapper for Tether’s USDT stablecoin. It allows using tethers on the chains where they are not natively supported in the form of fUSDt tokens. Those are already integrated with BNB Smart Chain and Fantom Opera with other chains to be added soon.

How to use Popsicle Finance?

The Popsicle Finance app can be used by connecting a wallet to it and selecting the product of choice. Note that as of the time of writing this article the Sorbetto Fragola UI - Popsicle Finance’s v3 optimizer is only available on Ethereum or Arbitrum.

Popsicle Finance wallet support currently includes MetaMask and all wallets supporting the Wallet Connect Protocol. The only fee Popsicle Finance collects is a 20% Performance fee on the Sorbetto Fragola product. The company states that the Popsicle Finance team collects fees manually from each contract and sends them to the governance address from where the funds are used to market buy ICE tokens. This is done at least three times per week with no further information disclosed “to avoid running issues”.

The ICE token

The native utility token on Popsicle Finance is ICE. It is minted on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-20 and bridged to all the other supported chains. The token has a maximum supply of 69 million.

The ICE token has a staking form of nICE. The token is also expected to be used for governance after the team’s efforts on the decentralization of the platform are fulfilled.

Is Popsicle Finance safe?

The Popsicle Finance team is mostly anonymous, with “a long history and great experience in cryptocurrency” as stated on the project’s website.

The team is led by the platform’s founder Daniele Sesta who is involved with the Wonderland and Abracadabra projects besides Popsicle Finance. He is most active on Twitter, while his Linkedin page greets visitors with a portrait of a frog showing a middle finger.

Other team members include Twitter users Squirrel, GeorgiyXo, WIMPZ, Romy, and Flachy. Popsicle Finance audits can be found in the protocol dashboard on this webpage.

The Popsicle Finance hack happened in August 2021 and resulted in $20.7 million worth of (at the time of the attack) tokens stolen from user funds held in the platform’s Sorbetto Fragola pool. The attacker exploited a vulnerability that tricked the Sorbetto Fragola liquidity pool into believing it owns the hacker fees equal to the total TVL of the entire pool.

In October 2021, the company announced that the victims of the incident will be reimbursed by it with nICE tokens in order to save on gas fees. The incentive also gave a 20% bonus to users who kept holding 100% of their nICE tokens despite the Popsicle Finance hack.

Partners

As a part of its strategy, Popsicle Finance is actively using a number of decentralized exchanges. While the main source for providing liquidity is Uniswap v2 and v3, the protocol is also active on Sushiswap and PancakeSwap. More will be added to this list with the expansion of Popsicle onto other networks.

The project also relies a lot on the Anyswap Network’s bridges to connect the ICE token with other chains.

Another partner of Popsicle is Tether, whose USDT stablecoin wrapper is a distinctive product of the platform.

In its documentation, the Popsicle team also mentions Yearn Finance, Raydium, Cream Finance, and Blockchain Research Lab as partners. The collaboration with Raydium will allow Popsicle users to bridge their liquidity to the Solana network, while Yearn and Cream teams share their experience in creating various yield optimization strategies and cross-chain lending opportunities respectively. As for the Blockchain Research Lab, they partner with Popsicle in the field of ongoing research of the DeFi market, particularly focusing on liquidity providing strategies and LP movement cross-chain.