A New Chapter

Dear Apricots,

We recently announced our plan to support Aptos network as we embark on a multichain journey. We want to hereby provide some color on the decision itself as well as updates on our development status.

<Lessons Learnt>

Apricot Finance launched on Solana mainnet around 16 months ago. It certainly felt like ages apart as the industry hardly survived through a series of disastrous events such as the LUNA crash and FTX bankruptcy etc.

Operating a Solana DeFi protocol during such a tumultuous time had taught us many lessons. The team certainly faced numerous unexpected challenges, some of which were fundamentally technical and difficult to solve. For example, Apricot Assist was an innovative feature we hoped to help users automatically manage their leveraged positions and reduce losses when needed. The team had plans and high hopes to significantly improve and expand Apricot Assist. However, the Assist feature in practice turned out to often get stuck and stop working due to network congestion during market volatility and therefore failed to achieve its intended mission even in its basic form. There were other similar restrictions the team faced and learnt as we grew together with the Solana ecosystem.

Another important lesson for the team is product focus and market fit. The team simply wanted to do too much as we believe that real cool stuff could be created with DeFi given its trustless and composable nature. Apricot was initially designed to be a one-stop leverage platform where people could generate yield through lend/borrow and cross-margin farming. However, having multiple product lines meant that we were more likely to lose focus, and a more complicated underlying contract (with accompanying risk control measures) made us less flexible to respond to changes. Some features such as cross-farm turned out not to be used much at all. In hindsight, the team could have focused on one aspect and done better at meeting users’ evolving demand.

<How About Aptos? What Next?>

The team’s interest in multichain was seeded even before Apricot Finance was born, even though the action day came later than expected. Our dev team did a technical survey across various L1s and chose to spend more time on Aptos; we were not only impressed by it but also became comfortable over time with its ecosystem and development based on the Move language.

We internalized many lessons learnt from developing Apricot on Solana and are very excited to bring a renewed lending service to Aptos! In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out a series of testing for our service on Aptos. Meanwhile, Apricot on Solana will be retiring various under-utilized features such as cross-farm and Assist so that we could focus our energy on the more recent development. We’ll provide more updates at each major step, and please stay tuned!