To be honest, I was about to post recommend "IRON" yesterday just before it was crashed down. So it was a busy morning to clear up all funds sitting in IRON, and then edit all compliments that I HAD for it. Everyone who had invested in IRON must have encountered some losses even with the stable coin farming. So I decided to summarize what had happened to IRON and this should be a good lesson for some farms on which you already had a high confidence may not be as good as you thought.
Let me brief on IRON a little bit before. Just last month I knew IRON farm which was available on both Binance Smart Chain and Matic Chain, TVL on Polygon $1,800,000,000 in round number was much more than TVL on BSC $90,000,000, and stable coin farm on Polygon offered much higher APR than that on BSC. And now TVL on both chains is only $22,000,000, 99% drop from its peak.
IRON is a stable coin collateralized by 75% USDC and 25% Titan (the governance token). At first thought I was curious of its origin and impressed of its performance at the same time:
The curiosity was how a stable coin could be stable when it was not backed by stable collateral (today it was answered).
However the impression was the mechanism of keeping IRON’s value pegged to USD somehow worked well as we could see from the super fall of crypto price in May. All stable coins struggled to bring back its value to one USD as some had been down to almost 10% before recovering in a week later. While IRON allowed arbitrage by minting your own IRON when there’s a price gap over one USD and buying low when it’s below one USD, the fluctuation was still within 0.5% change which was remarkably impressive.
I think IRON polygon platform offered the highest yield for farming stable coins at that time. I was so confident that I was about to invest more and recommend it before it was rotten. TITAN now values “0”, and IRON, with 25% TITAN collateralized, values lower at about the same proportion. It was a deeply depressed moment when you had to redeemed a stable coin at 75% of one USD when you initially farmed stable coins with hope to protect your capital value.
It’s now over 24 hours, but there’s still no any further explanation from the development team.
MATIC is still a good chain though
I have an advice for those who want to try Matic Polygon farming. Because if you have your coin on Binance Smart Chain, you’ll have to move it on Matic Chain. There are 2 ways:
1. Move it through the exchange platform
2. Use the BSC-Polygon bridge
I used EvoDefi bridge USDC from BSC to Polygon. The charge for bridging is 0.5%, but good thing about EvoDefi is they also give you free 0.001 MATIC for gas which allow you to make up to 50 transactions since gas on Matic Chain is extremely low. There are some other sites that also give free MATIC for gas such as Macncheese.finance and Matic.supply. Just on claim is enough for you to move on Matic Chain. Believe me you won’t get rich by claiming several times.
Final Thought
I’m still fascinated by those Defi farms out there, especially on Polygon. They are so creative I just hope there will be a way to prevent the same case from happening again as I don’t want to see good ideas being rotten. Bank run, rug pull or hacking…there should be a way to control it, so we can see good farms shaping themselves in brighter future.