SOON Token Rewards on the ShimmerEVM

With the upcoming deployment of the ShimmerEVM, it’s time to get excited about all the new possibilities that will be enabled by L2 smart contracts. The largest event that will occur on the ShimmerEVM shortly after launch is the SOON token liquidity mining program on Iotabee (https://iotabee.com/).

Please understand that this liquidity mining program can be used to “yield farm”. All yield farming on crypto platforms presents risks and uncertainties. Smart contracts may have vulnerabilities and users may lose what they put in. This article is meant to educate users on the specifics of the program and is not investment or financial advice.

The SOON token liquidity mining program starts with three pools on Iotabee being set up:

• sSOON / sMIOTA
• sSOON / sBTC
• sSOON / sETH

(Note: There’s a “s” in front of each token symbol because all tokens listed are not native to the ShimmerEVM and must be bridged there.)

Background

Normally, when a user provides liquidity to a pool on a DEX, they only get a portion of the fees generated by the protocol each time someone trades using the tokens in the pool. This is normally a relatively low return on your capital and even has potential to have a negative return due to something called “impermanent loss” (https://blog.shimmer.network/dex-vs-cex-part-3/).

Here’s what’s special about each of the above mentioned pools: 8 million SOON tokens will be allocated to each pool over the course of three years to incentivize users to provide liquidity for the new SOON token pairs. That’s a total of 24 million SOON tokens ($9 million+ USD at the time of writing) in rewards for liquidity providers on top of the trading fees.

One of the goals of having such high token rewards on top of trading fee income is to offset any potential impermanent loss a liquidity provider may experience. The other main goal is to bootstrap the liquidity of the SOON token to solve the cold start problem.

The purpose for providing rewards to incentivize yield farming is the same for every crypto protocol. To seed the network in order to gain traction. Right now the Soonaverse has a large paper value treasury, but after the liquidity mining program starts on the ShimmerEVM and we bootstrap the three liquidity pools, that treasury becomes 100x more useful. This means we can incentivize more projects to build on top of the Soonaverse and cause a massive network effect.

It’s a win-win scenario where the Soonaverse receives new active users and projects willing to integrate into the platform, and liquidity providers receive a high yield on their assets.

To learn more about yield farming, check out this article series promoted by the IOTA Foundation: https://blog.shimmer.network/beginners-guide-yield-farming-part-1/

How the Program Works

We didn’t want just a single SOON / MIOTA pool where the entire 24 million SOON token rewards are pointed. The reasoning is that if the only way to purchase SOON tokens was via MIOTA, then our audience and reach would be secluded to the IOTA space that we already operate in.

With the launch of the ShimmerEVM we have the opportunity to entice and bring in new users from other EVM chains and communities. In that spirit, we decided to create two additional pools with the most liquid and tradable tokens in the world. This should make entering the Soonaverse ecosystem easier than ever before.

That’s why there will also be incentivized wSOON / wBTC and wSOON / wETH pools.

If a user wants to earn some of the 24 million SOON token rewards, then they need to provide liquidity to one (or more) of the three incentivized pools, receive their respective LP tokens, and then stake those LP tokens into the custom Soonaverse smart contract on Iotabee for a predetermined amount of time. While those LP tokens are staked, they will be earning their portion of the SOON token rewards for that pool.

The schedule of rewards follows the same curve as solo SOON token staking on the Soonaverse where token emissions are higher in the beginning and then follow a downward curve. And just like the current solo SOON token staking program, all SOON tokens that are rewarded through this liquidity mining program are subject to a one year lock up period before they’re tradable. The SOON token rewards are distributed weekly.

The higher rewards in the beginning incentivize early participation to quickly bootstrap the network effect. This could result in the SOON token becoming the most liquid asset on the ShimmerEVM, which opens the door to unprecedented platform growth and many new possibilities in DeFi.

As mentioned the “Beginner’s Guide to Yield Farming Part 2” article (https://blog.shimmer.network/beginners-guide-yield-farming-part-2/), this program will employ a flexible liquidity lockup period to ensure stability and constant liquidity:

The user, when they go to stake their LP tokens, can choose to only lock for one week and receive the base amount of rewards, or go all the way up to 52 weeks and receive 2x the base amount of rewards that will be distributed each week.

For example, let’s assume it’s the first week of the program and the wSOON / wBTC pool is about to do its first weekly distribution of SOON token rewards to users who have staked their wSOON / wBTC LP tokens. The first weekly distribution amount is 127,184 SOON tokens. User #1 and User #2 have both provided $1 million in liquidity into the wSOON / wBTC pool and received their LP tokens. User #1 stakes his LP tokens for 52 weeks (2x base rewards) while User #2 only stakes for one week (1x base rewards). In this scenario, each user would receive the following reward during the first week’s distribution:

• User #1: 84,789.33 SOON tokens
• User #2: 42,394.67 SOON tokens

As you can see, since User #1 staked for 52 weeks, they get double the rewards that User #2 received. The higher reward is to reflect the higher amount of risk User #1 is taking by having a longer lock up time and contributing to the stability and constant liquidity of the SOON token.

Please note once again that the SOON tokens received by the users in this example are locked for one year. The tokens are not immediately tradable and subject to this locking period to discourage mercenary yield farmers from taking advantage of the liquidity mining program and immediately selling the SOON token rewards as they receive them. This reward locking mechanism ensures that the only users who benefit from the program are active participants in the Soonaverse community.

Overcrowding One Single Pool

It’s important to remember that there’s three separate liquidity pools with the denominators being wMIOTA, wBTC, and wETH. And each pool has its own separate 8 million SOON token reward schedule that’s not influenced at all by any of the other two pools.

This means that if a user decides to become a liquidity provider for the wSOON / wBTC pair, then they’ll receive a portion of all trading fees from people buying and selling SOON and wBTC out of the pool. In addition, they’ll also earn a portion of the 8 million SOON tokens that are released each week.

Since the 8 million SOON token rewards per pool is a fixed number, but the amount of liquidity provided in the pool is variable, the pool in which a user provides liquidity is a decision that can affect how many total SOON tokens can be earned.

One pool may have a lot more liquidity provided to it than another one, so there’s some strategy involved in deciding which pool to choose because your total SOON token rewards may drastically increase if you provide $1,000 of liquidity to the wSOON / wETH pool with only $1 million in total liquidity as opposed to providing $1,000 of liquidity to the wSOON / wMIOTA pool that may have $5 million in liquidity.

In that scenario, a user would receive 5x the amount of SOON token rewards for providing the same dollar amount of liquidity to the wSOON / wETH pool instead of the wSOON / wMIOTA pool.

How to Participate

The steps outlined below assume that the user already has a MetaMask wallet connected to the ShimmerEVM network. Here are the steps:

1. Acquire both tokens needed for the pool you’re looking to participate in and hold them in your wallet on the ShimmerEVM network.
2. This can be either wSOON and wMIOTA, wSOON and wBTC, or wSOON and wETH.
3. Go to Iotabee’s farming page and click the “Add liquidity” button.
4. For Token 1 choose the wSOON token from the dropdown. For Token 2 choose either wMIOTA, wBTC, or wETH. This choice will determine which pool you’ll provide liquidity to.
5. Type in the amount of SOON tokens you wish to provide liquidity with. The amount of Token 2 you’ll need will automatically populate.
6. Note that you’ll need to provide the same dollar amount of each token to create an LP token.
7. Click the “Add” button and the subsequent “Confirm add” button to create the LP tokens (you’ll need to sign in MetaMask as well).
8. Click the “Import LP token to your wallet” button if you want to see your LP token balance in your wallet.
9. Once you have your LP tokens, click the “Stake” button on the Iotabee farming page.
10. Choose how many weeks you want to stake your LP tokens, click the “Stake” button, and then the “Confirm stake” button (sign all the transactions in MetaMask).

Just like that you’ll begin earning rewards from the SOON token liquidity mining program!

Testing on Iotabee

Before the ShimmerEVM is released, we want to make sure that the Soonaverse community has time to test out this new liquidity mining program on the testnet. To do this, please visit https://earlybee.iotabee.com/ and follow the instructions above.

For additional information on how to use Iotabee you can check out their Start Guide: https://dexguide.iotabee.com/