Basic info
Last updated: Aug 16, 2023
Reaper Farm is a platform for auto-compounding yield by leveraging compound interest. By depositing LP tokens to the farm, it makes sure whenever a reward is emitted to swap it for more liquidity tokens and put them back to generate profit.
Although the company has not released any plans for launching a token, it claims the initial goal is to build the community “organically” and create a “revolutionary” product before thinking about tokens and governance. Make sure to check well if you come across a source mentioning a potential airdrop from this project.
The platform has a vault in which users need to deposit their LP tokens in order to gain access to the benefits of the protocol. The rate at which the compound of assets is performed is adjustable from faster for higher APR farms to slower for lower APY farms. Each harvest performs around 17 transactions, the gas for which is paid by the Reaper Farm, however, there is a 0.45% gas fee taken from the profit earned by the platform’s crypts (vaults). Currently, auto-compounding occurs every 15 minutes and is being executed by super-efficient AWS lambdas.
Since the project is controlled by a DAO, all fees go towards building financial infrastructure on Fantom, as was intended by the initial team, and are factored into the APY measurements provided. In case a target farm provider has any fees, users receive a warning before connecting to it.
The project claims they have the broadest farm support on Fantom and are constantly working on adding more. The team has worked on creating a simple and neat UI giving all needed information at a glance, and combining it with “industry leading on-chain analytics”.
In order to use Reaper Farm, wallet such as MetaMask needs to be installed and configured to connect to the Fantom Opera network. Once the user has acquired LP tokens, they can be deposited to the Reaper Farm app, through the protocol’s “crypt” (vault) where they start compounding rewards.
Reaper Farm fees include 4.5% on crypt profit which goes directly to the treasury, along with it the company takes a 0.1% security fee on all withdrawals and then distributes it back to holders in the crypt. There are plans for promotional periods in the future, where lower fees will be implemented to incentivize users’ participation in other projects within the Fandom Ecosystem. Currently, fees are capped at 5% to allow the project to stay competitive in the constantly changing Fantom landscape.
Reaper Farm doesn’t have a token.
The Reaper Farm team is made of developers from ByteMasons. The team is native to Fantom and is committed to creating secure, public projects with long-term value. They claim the motivation behind the project comes from the agitation of having to manually harvest “20 times on 3 different websites” in order to reinvest the gains.
As seen in the official documentation released by the company, the team is composed entirely of Kernel0x security developers, two smart-contract, and two front-end developers. The way they prove their trust in the protocol is by putting their own funds into it, as they believe in its “bug-free smart contract”.
Another interesting claim by the team is the implementation of fail-safes in the contracts which are intended to help protect users’ funds from 3rd party security failures. The company has made sure that if a farm provider decides to exit scam or gets exploited, all funds can be withdrawn and returned to the vault so that users’ can remove them from the system.
The Reaper Farm platform looks over all contracts they integrate to ensure their farms don’t have any backdoors and alerts its users for any potential vulnerabilities when they add them to the website.
The v1 of the protocol was built on Yearn.Finance’s architecture, and has since been audited by Solidity.Finance, the Reaper Farm audit can be found in the protocol dashboard on this webpage.
In September 2021, due to developer error, the protocol deemed about $2M locked into FTM, USDC, DAI, BTC, and ETH single-sided crypts unsalvageable. The co-founder Justin Bebis wrote in a Medium article that the mistake happened by the accidental deletion of “a line of vital code” while testing the platform’s contracts. The result of the mix-up was that users with more than a couple of thousand dollars weren’t able to withdraw their funds. Since the protocol is safeguarded with fail-safe mechanisms, the developers were not able to deleverage and return everyone’s assets.
After the incident, the team got the support of the community and put up a $100,000 bug bounty for help in rescuing the funds. Soon after the announcement was made, there were ideas being thrown at the core developer team. Although one of the proposed methods for salvaging the funds seemed promising, it didn’t bring the expected results fully, leading to some changes in it being implemented by the team. Later, the funds were withdrawn but it required some complicated programming to return them to users without inflicting financial damage, because of the principles on which leveraging is based.
As the ByteMasons claim that one of their goals is to bring DeFi to the masses, but this is viewed as a long, iterative process that requires many layers of abstraction, by building bridges between highly technical protocols and not so technical potential users. Here abstractions are viewed as layers of simplification boiling down many of the more complex aspects of a program into simpler, easy-to-use ones. One of the so-called bridges is the company’s partnership with Clover Finance – an app specializing in abstracting away the more complex aspects of DeFi for its users and delivering a simpler experience to them.
Recently, ByteMasons created Byte Masons Security, a company providing security solutions and auditing services. The team believes that because of their experience with Reaper Farm and background in security engineering their passion for safeguarding crypto projects will pay off for the whole DeFi sector. Some of the projects to start using the newly founded company’s services are Revenant Finance, Robo-vault, SCREAM, Beethoven-X, and Granary Finance.
The company is also partnering with the Yearn Academy DAO, into developing next-generation financial products, and teaching consumers how to use them.
The team announced on their discord in December 2021 that they will release their future plans with the community in January 2022. However, it is known that they are currently working on developing their token, which will be a “novel algorithmic coin” designed to capture value in a safe and efficient way. As said by the Reaper Farm co-founder Justin Bebis – the only thing left is the preparation for an audit.
The company’s artist – Reaper Noob is collaborating with Young Seebi of Gantomstones to create a line of NFTs.
Following the September 2021 incident, the team hired ten new team members and reorganized their business to prepare for growth and make sure their developers aren’t overloaded and making mistakes because of that. With the development of the protocol and deeper dive into the DeFi field in general, the ByteMasons placed a $200k bug bounty program with the intention to also implement stricter auditing and testing practices in the future.
The aforementioned system is a work in progress and aims to give more of the control of the platform to its users. The decentralization of the protocol was planned to be achieved before its token’s first mint, in order to facilitate that, the company has been working as a DAO ever since its creation, however in the near future it is planned to get even more decentralized, without further details shared.
The team is also currently working on redoing the vault architecture to support more robust analytics, and possible NFT integration, as well as focusing on the development of novel, composable strategies which users “won’t find anywhere else”.
Besides the already described goals, the developers are also keeping some “interesting software systems on the backburner” while working on the more important implementations. These systems are expected to be released with the v2 update of the protocol.
The ByteMasons claim they have many more innovations planned for 2022, but will announce them gradually as they get closer to releasing them during the year.
https://docs.reaper.farm/reaper-farms/introduction/master
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Last updated: Aug 16, 2023
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