What Is Aurigami (PLY): Fast and Easy Lending and Borrowing

The world of lending and borrowing has come a long way when it comes to overall access to capital. While it was previously only available to traditional financial institutions, anyone with digital assets today can lend and borrow as long as they meet the necessary margin requirements. This lets investors with spare capital lend out their assets so they can earn interest on the side. 

Conversely, those who plan to make leveraged investments have easy access to extra assets while paying a fraction of what they normally would to traditional lending institutes. Thanks to money market protocols like Aave and Anchor Protocol gaining popularity among savvy DeFi investors, it's no surprise that the Ethereum scaling solution, Aurora, has its own app for users to lend and borrow with ease. 

Aurigami is Aurora's first and only money market protocol. It lets users effortlessly earn interest with their digital assets. Keen on learning about what Aurigami and its native PLY token bring to the DeFi space? Read on to learn if Aurigami is a good investment for long-term investors — and how you can take advantage of Aurigami's potential growth with its PLY token.

What Is Aurigami?

Aurigami is a decentralized, noncustodial liquidity protocol on Aurora that takes advantage of NEAR Protocol blockchain’s high throughput and scalability. The protocol lets users effortlessly lend, borrow and earn interest with their digital assets. Depositors provide liquidity to the protocol to earn a passive income, while others are able to borrow in an over-collateralized fashion.With Aurigami, users will have access to lending and borrowing their crypto at favorable rates. To get started, users can simply deposit assets supported by the protocol to earn yields ranging from 8%–12%. Currently, assets like ETH, Wrapped BTC, and stablecoins such as USDC and USDT are supported, with more in the pipeline as Aurigami matures into a trusted Aurora protocol. 

Depositing assets into Aurigami entitles users to interest earning based on the market borrowing demand. For those willing to take on more risk, deposited assets can be used as collateral to borrow other assets. Interest earned from deposited assets will help offset the accumulated interest from borrowing, creating a profitable loop that the Aurigami team affectionately terms folding. Users repeat the cycle of borrowing and depositing, maximizing the effect of looping to obtain more rewards and mine more PLY tokens. This is similar to the way in which an artist creatively folds a piece of paper to create beautiful Origami.

With its goals of becoming a keystone protocol of Aurora and bringing together various points within the Aurora ecosystem, Aurigrami imitates its paper folding counterpart by ensuring it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Despite only recently launching on the mainnet, Aurigami has already amassed more than $700M in liquidity. This is because of the many intentional protocol design decisions that empower Aurigami users and allow them to expand their DeFi options on the platform. With no minimum or maximum deposits imposed, and withdrawals limited by users' margin requirements, both borrowers and lenders are free to experiment with flash loan functionality and fixed lending rates so they’re able to devise the ultimate yield gaining strategies.

What Are PLY and PULP Tokens?

Unlike other money market protocols, Aurigami has decided to do things differently when it comes to their tokens. The team recently announced The Papermill – a gamification event that lets users determine the amount of PLY tokens they’ll receive based on how long they hold and how much they mine. Before delving into specifics, it’s important to understand the tokens involved.

PLY tokens are the native tokens of Aurigami. By buying and holding them, PLY token holders determine the future of Aurigami as a money market protocol, as they’re granted perks like governance voting rights.

Conversely, PULP tokens are maturing tokens. Functioning like PLY vouchers to be redeemed in the future, PULP tokens can be transformed into PLY once they’ve aged sufficiently.

What Is The Papermill?

Now that we’ve covered both PLY and PULP tokens, it’s time to explain the Aurigami Papermill anti-dumping gamification event. Immediately after PLY’s token generation event, the game will start. Users can begin to claim their pre-mined tokens but will do so at a disadvantage, since this results in a 5% PLY/95% PULP token split. Alternatively, waiting until week 48 grants users a split of 99% PLY/1% PULP tokens. Ultimately, hasty claims from investors with a short-term outlook will receive more PULP than PLY, leading to a longer wait on PULP maturation as PULP tokens represent liquidity for locked PLY tokens.

The unique game theory system of The Papermill supercharges Aurigami’s token unlock, and grants users the freedom to decide how and when to claim their tokens. By leaning upon this structure of reward distribution, HODLing is heavily incentivized, as greater rewards await users who wait the longest.

PLY Tokenomics

Overall, there’s a maximum supply of ten billion PLY tokens that will be released over the next few years. 40% of PLY tokens are dedicated to liquidity mining.

Eager PLY token investors can check out the Bybit Launchpool, where 200 million PLY tokens can be earned through staking BitDAO (BIT) tokens or taking part in the PLY token lottery with USDT after signing up on Bybit.

Are PLY Tokens a Good Investment?

Wondering if Aurigami is worth investing for the long haul? If investors are taking into account innovative anti-dumping mechanisms like The Papermill, it’s clear that Aurigami is in good hands as the team continues to introduce innovative ways of stirring up community interest and involvement, while encouraging a long-term investing mindset.

Moreover, participating in Aurigami’s IEO/IDO now represents a rare opportunity for retail investors to get their hands on PLY tokens at the same valuation as private-round VCs. This is very attractive, as Aurigami’s private round was co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Polychain Capital, with participation by other blue-chip VCs such as Mechanism Capital, Alameda Research, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto and others.

Additionally, to decide if PLY tokens are a good long-term investment, we can refer to the team’s road map on growing Aurigami. One noteworthy goal is that Aurigami is focused on cross-chain integration and interoperability. From integrating the ETH-AURORA Rainbow Bridge into their interface to future plans for Layer 0 lending thanks to seamless cross-chain interactions, Aurigami has its sights set on attracting more liquidity into the growing ecosystem of Aurora — and boosting overall TVL numbers.

The Bottom Line

Aurigami is shaping up to be a solid project that stands out from the rest of the money market protocols. From rewarding depositors with passive income to the ability to loan assets in a safe, over-collateralized manner, Aurigami is slowly becoming the de facto money market protocol of the Aurora ecosystem — as more users flock to Aurigami for its value proposition and user-friendliness. This ultimately makes PLY tokens a good investment if you’re confident in NEAR Protocol, and in Aurora’s future in the crypto space. 

With strong backers, interesting features like The Papermill gamification event and the vision of becoming the key liquidity gateway for Aurora, Aurigami has the potential to truly revamp the way investors look at money market protocols.