ALEXGO: Bringing DeFi Expertise To Stacks

The Stacks defi space is relatively small compared to Ethereum. Still, builders on the Stacks protocol are changing the game and creating something that has the potential to serve as a primary hub for liquidity on Stacks. Let’s dive in!

So what does ALEXGO even mean? I thought it was an interesting name for a protocol, so I had to do a quick YouTube search to find out. ALEXGO means Automated Liquidity Exchange. Alexgo bills itself as the first full-service defi service on the Stacks protocol. It wants to be your one-stop shop for everything defi on Stacks. Instead of hopping around to different dApps to do things like lend, borrow, stake, or pool, you can do this all in one place.

The ability to do this all in one place is a compelling use case that I believe can have mass appeal to many end users, especially people new to stacks Defi who want to test it out with little fuss.

So what can you do with Alexgo? You know me, I had to test it out for myself so I could talk about it from a place of honesty and integrity. My first impression of ALEXGO is that using and understanding your actions is effortless. Let me walk you through some of the things that you can do on ALEXGO.

Swap

Just like with the Arkadiko protocol, you will need a wallet to interface with the dApp. I highly recommend using Hiro Wallet if you use a desktop or Xverse if you are on iOS or Android. Both wallets provide a smooth and seamless experience. Once logged into your wallet, you are ready to start using ALEXGO!

Your screen should look like this after you log into your wallet and hit Connect Wallet on their application.

As you can see here, the UI is super clean and easy to understand. So far, so good, right? From here, you can swap your STX tokens into different types of assets. The primary tokens supported by ALEXGO are their governance token ALEX, atALEX, sUSDT, xUSD, xBTC, USDA, and the city coins MIA and NYC. As you can see, there is a wide variety of tokens that you can swap into.

After you decide to swap your stacks for another token, what can you do with it? You can pool, stake, or farm your tokens on ALEX to earn a return.

Pool and Farm Your Tokens

When you pool your tokens, you provide liquidity that can facilitate trading on the protocol. The cool thing about this is that you get a percentage of the trading fee whenever someone initiates a trade. So, for example, if someone wants to exchange STX for xBTC, you earn fees from providing this liquidity. As you will see below, each trading pair offers different levels of return. As a rule of thumb, it is best to stick with bigger pools because you can earn more because of more activity. All the liquidity data is provided to you so you can make an educated decision about where to place your tokens.

Staking Alex Token

If you don’t feel like pooling or farming different tokens, you can also stake the ALEX governance token to help secure the protocol and have a vote on significant changes to the protocol. If you are unfamiliar with staking, the basic premise is to lock your tokens on the protocol for a certain amount of time to earn a reward. Since ALEXGO uses the Stacks blockchain, you must lock them for at least two weeks.

Interestingly, the ALEX token also has autoALEX, a synthetic ALEX token that auto compounds on its own without doing anything. As long as you keep the autoAlex staked, it will keep rolling over the rewards into the next cycle.

Einstein once said, “ Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. Those who understand it earn it. He who doesn’t pays it.” I love this quote, and it seems the creators of autoAlex are fond of it, too. It is super simple to use; follow the prompts, and you will be staking ALEX in no time.

Lottery

If you are feeling lucky, you can even try your hand at playing the lottery. I think this is somewhat gimmicky but fun if you want to see if you can win some extra ALEX tokens. You must buy “tickets” using the Alex token to participate.

It cost 10 Alex per ticket to participate. After you have your ticket, all you have to do is wait for the drawing to see if you win. The pool size changes after every round, but the proportion of the prize pool you can win does not. 1st place gets 50 percent of the pool, 2nd place gets 30 percent of the prize pool, and 3rd place gets 20 percent.

I’ve personally tried this feature a few times but never won anything. :( Still kinda of fun if you want to give it a try.

Bridge Ethereum Into Stacks

I thought this was an exciting feature. As Stackers, we want to bring more liquidity into the Stacks ecosystem. What better way to do this than getting it from the second most popular chain by value? Ethereum, at the time of this writing, has a market cap of $200 billion, give or take. Some of this liquidity tied up in Ethereum is people using Bitcoin to get loans on Ethereum. There is clearly a demand for lending and borrowing using Bitcoin, so we should want these people to return to the Bitcoin ecosystem from Ethereum and start using the Stacks protocol.

The ALEXGO protocol makes this possible with a bridge deployed a few months ago. It allows users to convert their ERC-20 USDT token into a sUSDT token. Once converted to sUSDT, users can interact with the ALEXGO dapp and do what they need to do.

I think this bridge has the potential to be a game changer in the future and serve as a gateway to bring more liquidity from stacks in a trustless and self-custodial way that is so central to the mission of Bitcoin, Stacks, and the true decentralization of finance. Keep an eye on this feature.

Launch A New Idea

Last but not least is their Launchpad service, which you might be interested in. The basic premise of the launchpad is to help businesses get their idea off the ground or look for additional funding through this new mechanism. For users to participate, they need to acquire the APower token by staking ALEX or yield farming. After they acquire these tokens, they can join in the project launch. I haven’t personally used this service, but it is an interesting service to keep an eye on. There has been a recent launch of an Ordinals project and a BRC-20 project, so there is activity on the launchpad. Look for this to increase as we emerge from this bear market.

Final Thoughts

My final overall impression of ALEXGO is a positive one. As more liquidity comes into the Stacks ecosystem, ALEXGO will benefit tremendously and could become an essential hub in the Stacks Defi space. The only thing missing now is the ability to borrow and lend trustlessly on the protocol, but I am sure that feature will be deployed in the future.

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