It took me a while but I did get moving on staking CUB and PolyCUB. Here is the story of baby steps
In CIB#1, I wrote about staking CUB to participate in PolyCUB. The real excitement lies in the numbers around PolyCUB staking.
PolyCUB (POLYCUB) is the native token for the PolyCUB yield optimizing platform. Users can earn POLYCUB by participating in any of the Kingdom vaults or by staking it into xPOLYCUB to earn the 50% fee penalty generated by other farmers who harvest their yield before the X block locking period.
When I started the process these were the APY's (current rates (Mar 16) in right hand column)
| What to Stake | Initial APY | Mar 16 APY |
|---|---|---|
| xPolycub | 2,129% | 828% |
| PolyCUB/USDC | 3,466% | 2,001% |
| PolyCUB/WETH | 3,675% | 2,017% |
| PLEO/WMATIC | 829% | 646% |
Those numbers are hard to ignore unless of course PolyCUB and xPolyCUB fail and have zero value. That is a risk factor. While the momentum flows and people want to buy PolyCUB to participate, there is value in providing liquidity to the pools. There is a way to mitigate the risk in staking - more about that later.
That was enough for me to put some ETH I mined in 2018 and 2019 to work. Those ETH were mined at between $200 and $500 = feels like free money.
Staking PolyCUB
APY's on staking PolyCUB (were) are attractive. The important part of the staking is the multiplier between Polycub and xPolycub. When I started, the best APY's were in direct staking of POLYCUB at a little over 2,000%. The hard part was buying PolyCUB - liquidity is low and for me fees are high coming from ETH. I took a multi-pronged approach to get started.
- Use LEO and stake in the PLEO-WMATIC farm. My plan is to stake every 50 LEO I earn from LeoFinance (was 829% APY) rather than power them up on LeoFinance. That can come later.
- Buy PolyCUB and stake in the XPolycub staking (was 2,129% APY)
- As it was hard to buy PolyCUB, I looked at staking WETH/WBTC - I kind of like that model as the value of the underlying moves somewhat in sync with each other. This is the risk mitigation - if PolyCUB does prove to be a failure one is still holding ETH and BTC in wrapped form.
What follows are the baby steps I took- it feels like adult steps. All I have done is listed the steps and the tools I use. There are plenty of how to's to cover specific steps - Google those if you get confused. Write the sequence of steps down is the best way to keep on top of the complexity
Setting Up
First there are some setup things to do.
- Add Polygon Network to your Metamask account.
- Fund the account with some MATIC to pay fees. You do get some free when you transfer stuff to Polygon but it is not enough to pay the fees. Transfer in enough to be able to set up any WMATIC pools as well. Fees are charged on every step of the way not just for the transfers - like authorising a contract, like unlocking a coin to transfer, etc.
- Get the coins you want to exchange for PolyCUB onto the Polygon mainnet
Staking PLEO/WMATIC
I had LEO tokens not powered up. This was the easy place to start.
As Polycub is on the Polygon network, you need to get your tokens across there in the right form. These are the steps to get staking
- Convert LEO to PLEO using https://wleo.io/polygon - you may need to add PLEO to your Metemask token list. This is the correct contract address for that
0xF826A91e8De52bC1Baf40d88203E572DC2551aa3 - To use ETH in the Polygon network, swap ETH on Ethereum mainnet for WETH on Polygon. I used Celer Bridge
- Convert WETH to WMATIC using SushiSwap
- Now you have PLEO and WMATIC on the Polygon network, create LP on SushiSwap off the Polycub site.
- Deposit the LP and you are staking to earn xPolycub
Part of the flow for the stage above
Staking Polycub
Next step was to stake PolyCUB directly
- Buy Polycub on SushiSwap using coins you have moved to Polygon Network - I used WETH. WMATIC or MATIC will work. - be sure to use the correct PolyCUB contract when you set up the swap - there are fakes around
This is the correct PolyCUB contract
0x7cc15fef543f205bf21018f038f591c6bada941c
- Stake on XPolycub tab
Staking WETH/WBTC
This proved to be the most challenging process as ETH and BTC are on their own networks and need to be wrapped to get across to Polygon
- Bridge ETH from Ethereum mainnet to Polygon mainnet to create WETH. I used Celer Bridge
- For WBTC, I sold ETH for WBTC on Binance and transferred the WBTC to Metamask Ethereum mainnet - that is all Binance supports
- Transfer the WBTC from Ethereum mainnet to Polygon mainnet. I tried Polygon POS Bridge but they were having depositing problems last weekend. I finally got it done on Zapper.fi. Pay careful attention to ETH gas fees - they are large - make one transfer only so the % hit is less painful. The fees make a test transaction really hard - just be sure to get contracts and mainnet addresses right
This transfer took two and a half days
- Create LP in Polycub under WETH/WBTC Kingdom tab - add liquidity button - that happens in SushiSwap.
- Once that is approved, deposit the WETH/WBTC LP and you are staking.
Staking WETH/PolyCub (Farms)
Once I had got all that working, I decided to stake WETH/PolyCUB to grab the high APY
- Buy PolyCUB using WETH - using Paraswap failed. Landed up at SushiSwp - small difference in price
- As I already have WETH in Polygon mainnet, next step is to create LP from Polycub, using SushiSwap
- Once confirmed stake LP - APY was 2,154% - 3 times higher than PLEO/WMATIC and more than double PolyCUB staking - note: LP staking only gets half the credit for the airdop based on the amount of PolyCUB staked.
What's Next?
Anyone can claim their earned POLYCUB from harvests whenever they want. If they want to claim it before the X Block Staking Period has unlocked the claim though, they will pay a 50% harvesting penalty (50% of their POLYCUB that they unlock will get sent to the xPOLYCUB Pool).
50% harvesting penalty feels high but those staking APY's are way higher (823%). And there is the multiplier between PolyCUB and xPolyCUB (11.66 at the time of writing) = 1xPCUB = 11.66 PCUB. It all swings as to which coin one thinks has more value.
I must say I do not understand this yet.
Key Links
Polycub https://polycub.com/
Polycub Airdop Info https://polycub.com/airdrop
Staking PolyCUB for xPolyCUB https://polycub.com/staking
PolyCUB Farms Stake PolyCUB-USDC, PolyCUB-WETH, PLEO-WMATIC https://polycub.com/farms
PolyCUB Kingdoms Stake WETH-WBTC plus a few others https://polycub.com/kingdoms
Buy PolyCUB Polycub includes links to buy the coins you need - mostly they go to SushiSwap - you can buy them their directly - just make sure they are on the Polygon network. https://app.sushi.com/trident/swap
Tutorials PolyCUB tutorials are here - some are locked - not sure why. The most important page is there is a list of the Contracts for the various tokens - use this list to populate any swap or bridge engine you use. https://docs.polycub.com/
Bridges There are a range of bridges available - Zapper worked best for me on Polygon network. Polygon POS Bridge is an alternate. https://zapper.fi/bridge
Celer Bridge worked best for getting tokens from Ethereum mainnet. https://cbridge.celer.network/#/transfer
Anyswap provides a bridge and a router - looks interesting as it combines features of a few other places. I have not used it. https://anyswap.exchange/#/dashboard
Swap Exchanges Polycub uses SushiSwap. Paraswap optimises swaps and finds the best route - it is useful to check if SushiSwap is a good deal. It does find better swaps than PancakeSwap for example https://paraswap.io/