DEV Community: Hritwik Tripathi

Unveiling Pickle finance (Part 1)

Hritwik Tripathi — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:39:35 +0000

This is a new series called Unveiling where I would tend to discuss a certain protocol split up in multiple blogs to cover from a general point of view about the protocol as well as try to make a project on top of it for a development perspective.

Another Project that popped up in defi summer, back in the day the motivation for the project was as stated by their team ->

Stablecoins have often gone off peg due to varying market conditions and limitations in monetary policy. The recent boom in yield farming has only exacerbated this problem as farmers buy and sell large amounts of stablecoins in order to chase the best yield.

For the DeFi ecosystem to flourish, a much more stable stablecoin ecosystem is required

*What is Pickle Finance?
*

The development of on-chain asset management protocols is one of the hottest new types of applications in the DeFi space. As more and more applications join the DeFi space everyday the number of good investment opportunities rises exponentially. With all the fly-by-night “exit scams”, “rug pulls”, and straight-up hacks, they knew it was hard for newcomers to figure out which platforms they could trust.However, the premise of Pickle Finance was that Pickle Finance’s founders noticed that farming yield hasn’t gotten any easier.With that in mind, Pickle Finance wanted to create a yield-generating DeFi protocol that earned top yields for its users, but also one that was simple to use.

Pickle’s mission is to be your one-stop shop for maximizing your returns in crypto with the lowest amount of effort. User funds are pooled in smart contracts which have automated strategies to put those funds to productive use and get higher returns than one would by simply putting money into a lending protocol like Compound or Aave. When a strategy becomes outdated a new strategy is developed by the Pickle community. As of the time of this writing, people have entrusted more than $7 million dollars with Pickle.

As a means to provide equitable access to blockchain data, Pickle Finance developed the Etherscan Developer APIs to empower developers with direct access to Etherscan’s block explorer data and services via GET/POST requests. Etherscan’s APIs are provided as a community service and without warranty, so please use what you need and no more. They’ve helped you take the first steps by writing some thorough tutorials on how to query and derive popular blockchain metrics. For power users, also added guides such as how you can programmatically verify contracts through API calls and more advanced use cases of endpoints.

*How does it work?
*

What is Dill?

Users who are willing to deposit and lock up their PICKLE tokens for a period of up to four years will be rewarded with DILL. DILL (sometimes known as vePICKLE or vote-escrow Pickle) provides holders with several benefits. These benefits are:
Participate in governance (1 vote = 1 DILL), including Snapshot voting and on-chain governance
Farm Weight Voting Rights, DILL holders get to set which farms get PICKLE emissions
Boosted Farm Rewards of up to 2.5x, DILL holders get additional weighting in the farms
Weekly Revenue Share: 45% of weekly revenue via PICKLE tokens

*Some of their products are as follows ->
*

_Pickle Jars
_

Pickle Jars allow users to deposit tokens from liquidity pools such as Uniswap/Sushiswap/Yearn, and then execute sophisticated strategies that benefit the depositor. For example, the series 0.69 Jars auto-harvest the Uniswap UNI token, sell those tokens, and purchase more Uniswap liquidity tokens on behalf of the user.

The Pickle project retains 27.5% of the profits it earns its Jar customers, currently the lowest among its peers. Of these profits, 20% is directed to the Pickle Treasury (which often benefits Pickle stakers), and 7.5% to the Development Fund.

_This diagram explains it better ->
_

_Pickle Farms
_

Pickle Farms are an additional option for yield farmers looking to maximize their yield with PICKLE token rewards from our farms. To be eligible to gain these PICKLE rewards, a user can deposit a pJar token, which they received in return for depositing into a Pickle Jar, into a matching farm. The one exception to this is the Pickle Power pool, which requires staking Uniswap PICKLE/ETH LP tokens instead of pJar tokens.

_
Pickle Staking
_

People who stake their PICKLE tokens at Pickle Finance receive profits earned by the project. Currently, that is all Treasury funds in excess of $500,000.

_Pickle Jar Swap
_

Imagine you’re earning APY in a BTC-related Jar, and due to a surge in BTC price, you’d like to switch into USD. You can do that directly at Pickle by swapping from one Jar to another, free of charge!

References =>

What's a Decentralized autonomous organisation(DAO)?

Hritwik Tripathi — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 05:19:58 +0000

Disclaimer: I have tried to do a lot of research on this topic but I am not 100% sure if everything aligns right. I can say that I am 92% sure. Also this is my personal view and we can have different opinions on a specific topic so feel free to jam pack the comments section if you feel different. Also DAO and blockchain are banned in some countries so please refer to your federal laws before making a DAO.

The world that we live in today has the Internet that we call home. We tend to do most of our work on the Internet nowadays. People shop, relax, watch, sing, stream and sometimes even marry online. This world has been starting to adopt code, computers to do a lot of work for them and now we have a new kind of AI which might even do jobs that normal humans were doing in the past. So if the world is adopting computers so much then why don't we have organizations or companies that are not headed by a single person or board but are head by code and people decide what the company needs to work upon.

Let me tell you some key aspects where we have differences between centralized/legacy organization and decentralized autonomous organization.

Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) are self governing organizations which are not affected by things that happen around the world. They are operational software with the by-laws that are immutably written on the blockchain and are not in the hands of its creator. These organizations are created by like minded people with an agenda/goal on a specific project. Its Identity is made through consensus and its authority is made by voluntary endorsements and network effects.

A DAO is only a software and can not sweep streets, make games, manufacture steel from iron ore. So we need real world people that work. They are called Contractors.

DAO can have an apt amount of Contractors. It all depends on the task. Contractors would submit a proposal for development of products and services. These are smart contracts which have English descriptions. For security reasons we have a group of signatories that validate the proposal and only after that, Contractor is entitled to receive ether(ETH) from DAO. This group of signatories are collectively known as Curator and for decentralization the Curator can be dismissed at any time by DAO and for any reason. These decisions might look rash but these are taken by voting of all the participants of the DAO.

People wishing to be a part of DAO can purchase DAO tokens in exchange of ETH and other crypto currencies which then gives them the power to vote(vote power is proportional to the amount of DAO tokens purchased) on proposals as well as receive the benefit of output of the work done by Contractor's proposals.

Debates on proposals can take place on/off chain through a service chosen by the DAO community(for example - slack, gitter, discord and telegram etc),It is also possible for the community to select a replacement Contractor for any proposal, so the work can begin from where it stopped and not left altogether due to a specific Contractor.

Powers of DAO

DAO can take actions on the Contractor and the Curator. DAO can be commanded to use its power for these actions-

Signing off proposals

This is done after a rigorous debate. This might take some time but a good decision always takes time. The amount of minimum participation rate needed for signing off a proposal is proportional to its intensity of operation for DAO or the value it has to offer to DAO.

Proposals can have a variety of complexity.From being really simple to being super complex. For example - a DAO can realize a trust factor issue and can only give money (ETH) to the Contractor on a monthly basis instead of providing the whole sum at a time. Another example is that it can send money to one or many accounts simultaneously where these many accounts represent a trusted individual who contributes to some part of the proposal or the project.

Proposals can also have operational parameters for example - they can have charges imposed when a non-token participant is using a service or product made by DAO. The charge is fixed by DAO in the initial stage of the product's proposal.

These features allow code representing DAO(smart contracts) to stay immutable, be secure and flexible at the very same time. Also with the option to change business model or dismiss Contractor leads to a smooth pivot which is not seen in a legacy organization.

The above image shows how we have a hierarchy in a legacy organization and how an open community can be more beneficial for an organization to take decisions.Just like we have transitioned from a monarchy system to a democratic model of state governance, we should also try to adopt a democratic governance inside our big corporations and companies too.

Protecting DAO

We have seen that the biggest threat to any distributed system like this is the 51% attack. Usually this attack emerges from the idea that a person with 51% of all the token can give any power of DAO to him/herself.This might even lead to transfer of 100% ETH to him/herself, So it is more like becoming a dictator inside a distributed platform like DAO which should not be possible. In such cases DAO is dissatisfied with the Curator, they might even change the Curator. Changing the Curator with voting takes place with a special flag and its voting is done in two rounds. The first round of voting is done as an informal round for changing the Curator. Then a second round of voting is done to seal the decision on changing the Curator by the DAO token holders. They have two choices, either to change the Curator or to split the DAO into two, so that they do not lose their money that they had initially invested in DAO token with ETH.

If a split occurs then the DAO token holder initially would receive the benefits of the proposals that are in work before the split and they would retain their ETH which will be transferred to the new DAO as new DAO tokens. After the split both the DAO would continue to be operational with their own Curator and Contractor. This is somewhat equivalent to a big corporation splitting into two companies.

Conclusion

We learned that DAO is more or less an organization which is designed to sustainably develop diversified crypto-assets and products/services backed by some crypto assets(ETH). These accrue value for DAO members who invest in DAO for the initiative they want to pursue. It is like a clean capital pool with the agenda to make everything autonomous with code and try to make an organization which is not influenced by the mishappenings or politics of the outer world but at the very same time is global.

GitHub vs GitLab

Hritwik Tripathi — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 08:06:41 +0000

Before exploring GitHub and GitLab, let's clarify what Git is. During a Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC), the source code undergoes multiple changes. New versions of it are created by the development team every day. Just like with video games, in programming, every decision you make can be consequential.

If you make a bad decision, the entire course of the game may go in the wrong direction. How to avoid that? Instead of playing the game all over again, players usually revert to a saved checkpoint and start again from there.

Git is the tool that ensures those checkpoints are in place. During the development process, developers can roll back to the previous version of source code and make changes if needed. Additionally, Git makes it possible for developers to find code added by them or other developers at any point of SDLC.

Git

Thus, Git is a version-control system for tracking changes in the source code during an SDLC. It was initially designed by the Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, in 2005. Version control systems weren't a new concept. But since then Git took a major leap, becoming the preferred solution for many projects, both commercial and open-source. Today, it's an open-source, free tool.

Git can be initialized in a project to create a Git repository. After you install Git, you will see that a Git repository is a folder inside a project that contains a history of changes made to files in a project over time.

GitHub

Let's start with the basics. GitHub is a Git-based repository hosting platform with 50 million users (July 2020). Originally, GitHub launched in 2008 and was founded by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett.

GitLab

Similar to GitHub, GitLab is a repository manager which lets teams collaborate on code. Written in Ruby and Go, GitLab offers some similar features for issue tracking and project management as GitHub.
Founded by Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov in 2011, According to their website, GitLab is used by more than 1,00,000 organisations today which include enterprises such as IBM, Sony,EA,Goldman Sachs and NASA.

GitLab vs GitHub-

Private Repositories

GitLab used to provide free private repositories for unlimited users to collaborate and now GitHub has joined the party by doing the same but the difference lies in the amount of storage provided by both platforms. GitHub provides 500 Mb whereas GitLab provides 10Gb for the repository space,So this round goes to GitLab by a small margin.

CI/CD framework

The great feature of GitLab was its inbuilt CI/CD system,which now is getting a run for its money as GitHub recently announced GitHub Actions which is GitHub's own CI/CD system.
Yet, because GitLab has been offering its own CI/CD tool for so many years, we can confidently say that GitLab CI/CD is way ahead of GitHub. As a matter of fact, the Continuous Integration framework inside GitLab is ranked as one of the best tools out there, if not the best.
But what's cool about GitHub's new CI/CD tool is its new features called "matrix builds." It allows you to run multiple versions of your applications in parallel.Pretty cool right?
So we have a tie in this round.

DevOps Cycle

The above mentioned image will give you an overview of the features that both the platforms give in DevOps cycle.
GitLab is ahead of GitHub in many aspects here,it has been the same for many years in the DevOps arena.In the past people moved from GitHub to GitLab due to this feature alone.So this round clearly goes to GitLab.

Import/Export

When it comes to importing data we have a weird sense of tie.On GitLab we have an extensive amount of documentation which makes the work a lot easier but on the other hand GitHub compensates the lack of documentation with an awesome tool to import our work.
The only area where GitLab shines here is exporting as Git hub has lack of documentation ,So you might have a hard time exporting your files whereas GitLab has good documentation for importing and exporting.
So this round goes to GitLab.

Community

This is a great area for GitHub to shine as GitHub is the home for 50 million people on our planet whereas GitLab is nowhere near to this number.With great events and a better developer interaction GitHub takes the spot for #1 for community engagement.So, this round goes to GitHub.

User Interface

A great distinguishing factor for a user is the user interface. GitHub crushes GitLab in this area with its stunning user interface which comprises of a better and more intuitive workspace.This makes a new user to come at ease while working on GitHub.
So this round goes to GitHub.

Hosting on your own server

When i talk about hosting repositories on my own server i can surely say that GitHub does not offer any such feature whereas GitLab does provide us with an option to choose the hosting service.This gives GitLab another point over GitHub.

GitHub Pricing vs GitLab Pricing

Well pricing is something that i cannot comment on as the pricing is a decision which will be dependent on the situation and the organisation/team.But i will provide the difference by images shown below.We do not have a specific winner for this round.

GitLab :-

GitHub :-

Web IDE

GitLab provides us with a web IDE to support the coding directly from the browser and not getting dependant on an external software.This might not be deal breaker for people but it is good to have various features for free. GitHub does not provide any IDE for coding inbuilt inside the platform.With GitHub desktop they might be going towards this feature but time will only tell if we ever get to see an IDE inside GitHub.So this round is won by GitLab.

New Features and Updates

With new features rolling every 22nd day of a month we can surely say that GitLab promises for new updates and innovation really fast.Whereas this is all great but there is a dark side to all of this glitter as many a times the new coming feature is not in 100 percent working condition, so you have to take this point with a grain of salt.So this point is a personal preference.

Authentication levels

GitLab provides with different authentication levels to users working on a repositories ,so we have distinction of people which are working on a project. GitLab tries to make the work a little more decentralised with different permissions for different group of users .I like the sound of that but personally i like the GitHub's normal ownership feature by person making the repository.Again this point is also dependant to personal opinion but if i have to mark a platform for features i will surely give GitLab another point.

SLIGHT FEATURES ->

This section is specially designated to throw some light on some minute features which we have exclusively on GitLab. These features are not necessarily a deal breaker but a good feature should be appreciated in any small way possible.We would not mark both platforms on these features.So let us begin the countdown-

Milestones and due dates

GitLab provides us with a feature to have due dates or deadlines on a specific issue.This makes the workflow punctual and time bound.Milestones is another way to tell users what all things are to be expected in future of the development cycle.

Weight on issues

We can have different weights added to issues which helps us identify the severity of a specific issue.This is somewhat equal to adding labels with severity of issues on GitHub.

Monitoring Performance

A great tool for teams and owner of teams is monitoring data that is provided by GitLab. This helps to work on specific aspects of teamwork.This small feature comes handy when we have a large organisation working on a repository,where small problems result in massive workflow losses.

Oh! now is the time for our winner

With all these features both of our platforms are a true beauty to behold in software development industry.These two platform help a great number of developers and tech enthusiast write and store beautiful code on their repositories around the globe.With the score that we are keeping we have our winner as GitLab!(with 7 points) whereas GitHub had(3 points).But these markings are not an ultimatum.Obviously at the end of the day people have their own preferences which would lead for them to use any of the given software platform mentioned.