QiChing!: A Deep Dive into QI Dao

Qi Dao has adopted the philosophy: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”and has started their own journey on the Polygon Network. Many of us that have started this long and winding path with crypto can relate to Laozi teachings. Let’s take a deep dive in to Qi Dao and everything that it has to offer.

Qi Dao is a project I stumbled across a few months back while doing my daily scroll through dappradar.com. At the time it was ranked in the high 90’s out of the top projects. After spending a few seconds on their home page I knew that this project was massively undervalued (and still is in my opinion). Qi Dao is a lending protocol where users can deposit Matic (The native currency of Polygon) and borrow MAI (The stable coin of the ecosystem) against it with 0% interest. This is done by opening up a vault. Users will have the option to create a vault for their collateral type and will receive an NFT to represent their vault position. Now lets look at the stable coin of the platform; MAI.

 Since it’s inception, MAI has some of the highest volume traded of all stable coins. This is massive because in order for a stable coin to hold it’s peg, the underlying assets must remain great stores of value. Even in turbulent times, MAI has held it’s peg unlike other stable coins introduced to Polygon. They have recently added multiple other currencies (WETH, AAVE, Link, CRV), and now users can add their already staked AAVE Market tokens as collateral.

QI is the native token of the protocol. However, QI isn’t just a governance token but it also gives users a chance to earn income passively. There are 2 ways currently to earn yield on your QI: farming and staking. Users can deposit their QI and MAI into a pool on Quickswap. Once this is done the tokens that represent your share of the pool can be staked on app.mai.finance and earn yield of upwards to 200%+ APY. Users can also choose to stake their QI. By staking your QI a user must “lock up” their tokens for a predetermined date. A boost to the APY is applied for any amount of time your QI is locked up. In addtion to this, users are gifted QiPowah. QiPowah is a boost to your voting power. This is a fair system because users that have locked up their tokens for any amount of time believe in the protocol and have chose to take them off the market(the voting page can be found here: snapshot.org/#/qidao.eth). Rewards of QI are distributed weekly to stakers. Early on users are receiving  around 900 % APY for locking up their Qi!

          Since I’ve come across this protocol I’ve come across great strategies to maximize my earning potential. I recommend utilizing smart contract insurance. Smart contract insurance insures against any exploits of a smart contract while your crypto is staked within it. At the moment there is no smart contract insurance for QI Dao but there is for AAVE. AAVE is another lending protocol that is doing very well but it is not native to Polygon. By heading over to https://armor.fi/, we can begin our strategy. Here we want to purchase insurance for the AAVE protocol. Once done we can bridge our crypto over to the polygon network from Ethereum if anything isn’t on the network currently. Once we have our assets bridged, we can deposit our assets in AAVE. In this example let’s say I have some DAI deposited for my AAVE postion. I will receive AAVE Market tokens amDAI to represent my postion. I can take those tokens and deposit them directly in to QI Dao. This was give me camDAI (collateralized aave market Dai) tokens that are currently earning 5% APY. To leverage your position even more, you can open up a camDAI vault and borrow against your position interest free. Once you have your MAI tokens you can head over to quickswap.exchange/#/swap and split them evenly between MAI and USDC (which is currently earning almost 30% APY). For the degens out there you can follow this process and either take your MAI and swap for QI to stake and earn 900% APY (which eventually will probably earn you your principle back) or pool to earn QI!

          With all this great technology of the platform it is easy to see why this project is undervalued. The team does a weekly fireside chat with some of the best teams and devs DEFI has to offer. QI Dao has had guest from: Index Coop, Sushi, Polygon, AAVE, Balancer, and many more. QI will also be apart of Index Coop upcoming P10 asset index. All and all I think the teachings of Laozi has had a profound impact on this team! Stay tuned for more articles and strategies related to this project!