Yield farming, also known as Liquidity Mining, is the opportunity to earn additional returns for providing liquidity (in addition to trading fees) by staking your Liquidity Pool tokens.

Just as “$ALEX Staking” incentivizes locking up your $ALEX tokens for a selected number of staking cycles, yield farming on ALEX incentivizes locking up liquidity pool tokens.

How to Yield Farm

Yield Farming involves staking liquidity pool (LP) tokens, so the first step is to acquire LP tokens by adding liquidity to the ALEX pools. Please see “How to Provide Liquidity on ALEX”.

Next select the “Farm” tab on the top menu bar to view the farming pools:

Select the farm that corresponds to the LP tokens you hold. For this example the STX/xBTC LP token farm, and select “Stake LP.”

Let’s breakdown the information displayed (if you’ve staked $ALEX the above screen will be familiar to you):

My Staking

This panel displays information relevant to LP you are currently staking. If you have not begun staking, the fields will all read 0. If you are actively staking you can see:

• Active Staking: This is the amount of LP token that is currently locked into a staking cycle.
• Average APR: APR (Annual Percentage Rate) is the yearly interest minus fees. APR does not include any compounding effect from your initial investment.
• Reward to Claim & Principle to Claim: Rewards are the incentives your earned from the staking cycles, and Principle is the original amount you locked up. Selecting “Harvest All” will transfer the claimable amounts to your wallet.
• Cycles: Displays information on the current and upcoming staking cycles, the amount that’s staked, the APR for that cycle, and the amount (or estimated amount) available to claim at the end of each respective cycle. As far as how long the cycles take: 1 cycle = 525 Stacks blocks = approximately 3 days. So 12 cycles is roughly one month and 32 cycles roughly three months.

Harvesting and Re-Staking Rewards To Maximize Returns

At the end of every staking cycle (approximately 3 days) there will be rewards available to harvest. If you wish to maximize your returns, we recommend harvesting the rewards after every cycle and re-staking those rewards to generate compounding returns. If you don’t harvest or forget to harvest, your rewards will just sit idle until claimed. This process can not be automated as smart contracts require direct user action in order to be executed. Unclaimed rewards do not generate returns, so please be mindful to earn as much as possible.

What is the “IDO” icon and APower reward?

ALEX Staking Power, or APower, is a special incentive awarded only to $ALEX stakers and yield farmers. APower is a non-transferrable and non-tradable token, that provides special access to future IDOs on ALEX. See “What is ALEX Staking Power?” for more information.

Earnings Yield Curve

This curve displays the APR earnings for different periods of staking cycles. The longer the staking cycle, the higher the APR. After completing your selection of reward cycles, the next cycle will be “skipped” as it is a cool down period during which rewards can not be received.

• Sold blue line: Shows the staking cycle APR curve currently selected.
• Dotted grey line: Estimated future APR curve based on your staking cycle selection. Selecting staking cycles shorter than the maximum of 32 will decrease future APR. This is because at the end of a staking cycle there is a missed “cool down” cycle where rewards aren’t received. The shorter the staking cycle, the more frequent the “cool down” period occurs, resulting in lower APR.
• Sold green line: This is the maximum reward curve, applies only to the 32 cycles selection.

Add Stake

This panel is where you can enter the amount of LP tokens you wish to stake as well as selecting the number of staking cycles you’ll lock up your LP tokens for.

Selecting the down arrow will show staking details such as:

• Cycle numbers: which numbered cycles you are committing to
• Start block: The block number when your staking cycle begins
• End block: The block number when your staking cycle ends
• Start time: The date on which you start staking

Please note that during staking your LP tokens (and the ability to remove the liquidity you are providing) are truly locked away and inaccessible until the conclusion of staking cycle period.

Having made your selection regarding the amount to stake and for how many cycles, select “Stake” to continue. A confirm panel with transaction details will appear next:

After confirming details are correct, select “Confirm” which will take you to a final smart contract confirmation window:

After selecting “Confirm” a final time you will should see that your transaction has been broadcast, with a “View in explorer” link to verify your transaction status.

Please note, that it may take up to 20–40 minutes for your balance to updated in your wallet and on ALEX. ALEX is built through Stacks smart contracts which settle on the security and finality of Bitcoin, and this transaction time reflects the Bitcoin block speed as well as processing on the Stacks network.

Your updated staking balance should then be visible in the “My Staking” panel.

Thank you for successfully yield farming on ALEX!

Support:

If you can have any issues or questions, you can email us: contact@alexgo.io

You can also reach out live to our Community Managers on our Discord and Telegram Channels.

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