What I Talk About When I Talk About Airdrop Farming

Aptos

If you are new to airdrop farming and need reasons and general guidelines to start, I recommend you to read this paragraph by coinershub.

In this article, I’ll talk about how I’m farming the Aptos ecosystem. I will not talk about the whys because I’m not here to persuade you. No reasons, no hypes, no fomos. I’m just documenting what I did and what I plan to do. That’s all.

Wallets & Bridging

I’m using the Petra Aptos wallet. Do NOT use Martian because they had a pretty serious issue in the past. I created two Aptos wallet addresses and bridged $1,243 and $2,003 USDC respectively from Arbitrum via the Aptos Bridge by LayerZero¹. I also used the Gas on destination feature of the bridge to get a little Aptos for gas.

The USDC I got on Aptos is recognized by dapps as layerzero USDC. Alternatively, one can also bridge USDC from Solana via the Portal bridge², and the bridged USDC will show up on Aptos as wormhole USDC. As we’ll see later, protocols on Aptos have different yields for different versions of USDC. But don’t worry, you can easily swap one version to another on Aptos. You may ask, “$1000 per wallet is too much for me, can I start with $200?” Yes, you can, but you really can’t do much with $200, and there are many juicy farms. Nonetheless, the date of the first tx matters a lot for farming the ecosystem airdrop since it marks the beginning of your journey on the chain. Usually the earlier you bridge, the better.

Swapping, Staking, Lending and LPing

After bridging, the first thing I did was to swap some of the bridged USDC to APT³. There’s an aggregator called SwapGPT but only use it to find the best route. Do NOT swap on it because it takes up to 5% haircut regardless how much slippage you set. Thanks to reader Volker for pointing it out.

Use SwapGPT to find the best route and then go to the dex directly to make the swap. Usually, LiquidSwap gives the best rate.

I also made at least 1 swap on baptswap and thala because an ecosystem often gives more airdrops to wallets that interact with many dapps vs. not. You can find the major dapps ranked by TVL on defillama.

Next I staked 12 APT natively with a validator on aptostake.guru. This is similar to staking ATOM or OSMO in Cosmos. I also liquid-staked 6 APT with Tortuga and got tAPT as receipt and deposited it on Aries Markets, a lending market. I deposited some USDC too because the yield was greater than 17%. Also, by doing that, I created a margin of safety to borrow the max amount of stAPT allowed without worrying about getting liquidated. And the borrow rate for stAPT was only 0.12%. The following screen shows my positions before and after borrowing. Notice the net yield went up after borrowing. This is because the protocol is incentivizing borrowing with APT. Yeah, that’s right, the reward is paid out in APT, not some random shit token.

Now the borrowed stAPT also earns ~11% of the AMI token while sitting in wallet.

This leads us to the Amnis Retroactive Airdrop⁴. First, buy this NFT on wapal for 10c. It’s a cheap way to interact with a NFT protocol and it will boost anything you do on Amnis by 10%. Next, stake the NFT on Amnis website via my ref link (or not). Next, mint some amAPT and pair it with APT and LP on Liquid Swap: Enter amAPT/APT in the search box and pick the one with the highest APR, which was 30% when I did it. Remember to stake the LP, otherwise you won’t get the stated APR.

Update: As of Feb 15, the amAPT/APT farms on Liquid Swap are expired, and without the farm incentives, we can’t earn 30%, but we can still LP there to earn a meager 2% ~ 6% in swap fees. The alternative is to LP on Pancake swap and stake the LP to earn ~20% in both APT and CAKE.

By the way, you want to LP amAPT/APT instead of stAPT/APT because the former gives you more Amnis Retroactive Airdrop points:

Let me summarize:

• tAPT is a Liquid Staking Token (LST) from Tortuga. I got it by staking APT on Tortuga. I deposited tAPT to Aries Markets.

• stAPT is a LST from Amnis. I got it by borrowing from Aries Markets against my tAPT and USDC collateral. I’m holding the borrowed stAPT in wallet.

• amAPT is like a stablecoin for APT. I minted it from Amnis using APT. But I did not further stake amAPT to get stAPT. Instead, I LP’ed amAPT and APT on Liquid Swap or Pancake Swap and staked the LP to earn rewards in addition to swap fees.

Now there’s yet another LST called sthAPT from Thala Labs. While Amnis offers APT → amAPT→ stAPT, Thala offers APT → thAPT→ sthAPT, where thAPT is again like a stablecoin of APT. What I did with Thala was something similar:

• I minted some thAPT with APT here.

• I then LP’ed thAPT and APT in this pool on thala and I’m earning 57%. One caveat: to enjoy this APR, I had to get enough veTHL. I bought $1 of MOD and $4 of THL and LP’ed without staking them and locked the LP on the Vote Escrow page. It’s more 2.5x more efficient than lock THL alone.

• I also LP’ed USDC and APT in this pool on thala. I’m earning 114%. (Once again, I had to buy $1 of MOD and $5 of THL and LP’ed without staking them and locked the LP on the Vote Escrow page.)

Domains & NFTs

Now we are done with the hard stuff. It’s time for some mindless transactions.

1. Buy 1 domain from aptosnames and 100 subdomains over time. It’s super cheap to get a subdomain, so these are great for increasing the total number of txs over time. The keyword here is “overt time.”

2. Mint, buy, and sell some NFTs at mercado, topaz, bluemove, and wapal. Wapal is announced airdrop and is giving out points (see details). There’s a relevant galxe quest and the deadline is 7 Feb 2024. Finally, snype organizes and presents NFT trading stats. The number one NFT project is Aptos Monkeys. I haven’t bought one but will if floor drops further.

Trading

Econia powers at least four dapps: swapGPT, kanalabs, gator trade, and aries trade. We used swapGPT previously. Let’s now use the other three protocols to place some limit buy or sell orders of APT. Make sure you use the trade tab! Doing so will probably get us some future airdrop from Econia.

Merkle is a perp dex that I primarily use for leverage trading. It has the best product among the 6 perp dexes. I funded one account with $900 USDC and traded for a month and got ~732 MKL tokens and ~6 APT. My current PnL is $294. Feel free to use my ref to give it a try.

For the other account, I simply deposited ~369 USDC into MKLP, the counter party of the traders, to earn 110% ~ 120% APR.

Referrals

I got a bags OG on Solana. I’ve no idea what it is but all the Solana degens I know that were early to JITO and Tensor and Bonk and WIF bought it. It only cost 1.5 SOL iirc. If you also want one, you can use my ref link.

1. by using this bridge, we may get some $ZRO airdrop from layer zero.

2. by using this bridge, we may get some $HOLE airdrop from wormhole.

3. Aptos token ticker.

4. Campaign details.