Alpha Finance Labs Project Insight: De-Fi Research and Innovation

Alpha Finance Labs is fully focused on pioneering the innovation of DeFi and enhancing DeFi adoption by the crypto community.

Introduction

The DeFi revolution currently going on throughout the world has seen an influx of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that develop innovative applications using blockchain technology. One of such brilliant startups is Alpha Finance Labs. 

What is Alpha Finance Labs

Alpha Finance Labs is a DeFi research company whose vision is to develop and deploy transformative financial products that are interoperable across different blockchains. Beginning with Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) networks, Alpha Finance Labs is on a mission to identify existing gaps in the DeFi space. Simultaneously, the team aims to develop user-friendly and novel approaches to solve these needs.

Alpha Finance Labs hopes to assert its dominance and relevance in DeFi by creating an ecosystem of solutions for issues that have been yet to be addressed. The protocol is not interested in adding itself to the number of existing solutions providers; instead, it focuses on market gaps that are yet to be clearly addressed. In this way, the company hopes to carve a niche for itself and stay at the forefront of market dominance, value, and leadership. In the long term, the platform wants to expand the adoption of DeFi through its unique Alpha products. 

What Lapses in DeFi Does Alpha Hope to Address

As a matter of policy, Alpha Finance Labs intentionally focuses on segments of the underserved market to pioneer novel solutions. Particularly, Alpha addresses these two major issues:

The near-monopoly that Ethereum blockchain has over the market. A large proportion of Dapps are developed on Ethereum platform, and the network is getting increasingly saturated. The Ethereum network saturation resulted in an increase in blockchain transaction fees, leading for a despite need of alternative solutions or blockchains with lower fees. 

Low liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXes) often contributes to price volatility, which increases the exposure of liquidity pool providers to impermanent loss. 

The development of every Alpha solution aims to minimize risk exposure and maximize net gain for users; these two goals are embedded in every design process.

Product Devolpment

Every solution developed by the platform is a product of innovation and research. Two strategies are at the core of the product development process. 

Statement of the problem: A particular part of the DeFi spectrum is studied, questions with no clear existing solutions are identified and defined. 

Solution Statement: identified problems are continuously iterated to eventually arrive at a unique solution that will fit the issues identified. 

These strategies are essential parts of the research method and are at the heart of Alpha’s operational guidelines. 

Key Products of the Alpha Ecosystem

  1. Alpha Lending

This was the first project developed in the Alpha ecosystem. It was launched in September 2020, and was built on the Binance Smart Chain Testnet as a decentralized lending protocol. This protocol’s interest rates are algorithmically adjusted, and this platform is designed to be a crucial block on which other Alpha products will be built on. 

Major Services offered by Alpha Lending include:

Binance Smart Chain: the fast processing time and the low gas fees of the Binance Smart Chain are leveraged upon by Alpha Lending. This is an incentive that encourages more people to adopt DeFi. 

Perpetual Loans: Lending is a core service of Alpha, but the protocol is unique in that it enables a user to access liquidity credit without a payment schedule. All the user needs to do is to deposit an asset as collateral.

Tokenization: this feature enables users to receive tradable and transferable interest-bearing tokens.

Cross Chain Assets: Tokens supported by the platform are not limited to BSC tokens. Alpha Lending supports tokens across different blockchains. 

This product is still in testnet

  1. Alpha Homora 

Alpha Homora is an Ethereum-based yield farming protocol that enables a user to leverage a position in yield farms and liquidity pools. It simplifies leveraged yield farming and enhances it for the maximum benefit of a yield farmer. Such enhancements optimize the lending protocol for higher lending interest rate, improved annual percentage yield (APY), etc. 

Launched in October 2020, Alpha Homora, is the first DeFi product to offer leveraged yield farming on Ethereum. Participation in Alpha Homora can be done as Yield Farmers, Liquidity Providers, ETH Lenders, Liquidators, and Bounty Hunters.

Version 2 of Alpha Homora, which extends the Homora’s utility and allows users to yield farm on Curve, Balancer, SushiSwap, and Uniswap with leverage, was launched on 1st February 2021. The Alpha whitepaper has a great description of Alpha Homora V2, including a guide on using the platform, and associated risks. To learn more, reference here.

  1. AlphaX

This is a novel product that lets Alpha Homora users hedge their yield farming/liquidity providing positions. The testnet went live in December 2020 while the mainnet is scheduled to be launched in early 2021. More details on AlphaX can be found in this documentation

Other new products are in various stages of development. None of these products are live on the Binance Smart Chain mainnet, but we can expect to see some of these products shortly.

ALPHA Tokenomics

ALPHA is the governance token of all products of the Alpha Finance ecosystem. Holders can stake their tokens to earn more tokens, and vote on governance proposals. As the Alpha ecosystem grows, more use-cases will be added to the token’s utility.The ALPHA token has a total supply of 1 billion ALPHA, and was launched with an initial circulating supply of 174.1 million tokens.

The breakdown of the total supply of ALPHA tokens is as follows:

Binance Launchpad Sale: 10.00% of the total token supply

Binance Launchpool: 5.00% of the total token supply

Private Sale: 13.33% of the total token supply

Liquidity Mining: 20.00% of the total token supply

Team & Advisors: 15.00% of the total token supply

Ecosystem: 36.67% of the total token supply

Team tokens are locked until August 2021 and will be fully vested by March 2024.

The Alpha token is currently trading on major centralized and decentralized exchanges such as Binance, Hotbit, Uniswap, Sushiswap etc. A history of the token’s market performance can be found here

Concluding Thoughts

Alpha Finance Labs is fully focused on pioneering innovation in DeFi and enhancing DeFi adoption by the crypto community. Lots of groundbreaking products are in active development and expected to come on stream during the year. As the DeFi space keeps developing, Alpha Finance Labs has positioned herself to be at the forefront of DeFi innovation.

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