Pickle Finance: More Than Just A Meme

Disclosure: Pickle is currently on our radar, so we wanted to share this note with all our members. Pickle is an early-stage project with numerous risks (financial, technical, competitive). These risks are described in more detail at the end of this note but should be fully understood by readers. A few members of our team own Pickle or are farming it. At this time, Delphi Ventures does not hold Pickle (and is not farming it). 

Executive Summary

Pickle is a new protocol with the basic goal of using farming incentives and strategies to bring stablecoins back to their pegs. This strategy is cycle agnostic and can generate alpha in DeFi bull or bear markets and its overall goal has substance vs the majority of flash in the pan yield farming food tokens. We believe Pickle will quickly expand beyond stablecoins to stabilizing/arbing 1-1 assets (variations of Bitcoin) and place the majority of its focus on the creation of active strategies (pJars).

Pickle has a $15M market capitalization ($40M FD, down from $230M post-issuance change), ~$160M in locked assets, and one of the most impressive and engaged communities I have seen to date. Despite its progress, the project still faces risks although we believe these risks are potentially mitigated, in part, and we will expand on each.

If you have an understanding of Pickle, you can jump to the discussion section at the end of this report.

How It Works

Pickle’s first iteration offered Pickle rewards (from issuance) to Uniswap LP’s of various stablecoin pools (listed below). If a stablecoin is above its peg, fewer Pickles are allocated to that pool to incentivize sell pressure to bring that stablecoin back to its peg. The reverse occurs if a stablecoin is below its peg.

• DAI-ETH
• USDC-ETH