How it all started

An answer to the yieldfarming problem.

Clam Island - how it looked initially.

How it all started

The three founders of Clam Island are all veterans in the DeFi and NFT space. We have been farming since the early days and have seen that there have been a lot of forks, which started to die out sooner and sooner. Lacking of innovation, no product backing the native reward token, low effort approaches were one of the reasons why we started this. We wanted to create something new, interesting, fun and first and foremost: sustainable.

This is how the Clam Island idea started. Over time we honed this idea. Especially in our participation during the Filecoin Launchpad Accelerator Program we refined our idea, which became a Vision for the long run.

The “yield” farming problem

With the rise of BSC came extremely low barriers to starting your own yield farming project. This has been both a blessing and a curse for the space in general. Even after navigating through the minefield of rugs and exploits, we found ourselves asking, but what “yield” are we really farming? And since new clones sprout daily like weeds, what really prevents a user from just chasing the next clone for higher APR?

There is a reason why people compare Degen yield farming forks to Ponzi schemes. PancakeSwap printed CAKE tokens to incentivize liquidity pools because it was an exchange, and an exchange needs TVL in liquidity pools to earn money and establish itself as a legitimate project. The Degen yield farming forks, on the other hand, are NOT exchanges, despite forking part of an exchange’s code. There is, in fact, nothing of value supporting the native token’s price, other than the hopes of other people buying the token with the same hopes of earning yield, which itself is distributed in the same (worthless?) native token.

Don’t get us wrong, we are big fans of the Degen farming experience. Earning 100,000%+ APR in the beginning of a project? And if you’re successful, maintaining 1000%+ APR for weeks and 100%+ APR for months over the longer term? Sign us up! In fact, some of our team members are seasoned yield farmers from before BSC yield farming became popular. But how do we ensure that we can maintain these kinds of yield sustainably?

The solution is obvious. Create an actual product that backs the value of the native token. And there is no better choice for this than NFTs.

But, we don’t mean more of the same pointless, static and boring NFTs, which some yield farming projects have attempted to “integrate”. We want to be clear about this. NFTs may be enjoying the current hype very much as yield farming has been, but if we paid an artist on Fiverr $100 for a piece of artwork, minted 100 copies of it as an NFT and called it “limited edition”, that does not mean these copies are now worth $1,000 each even if we managed to sell them for that much. Viewing NFTs in this light is like viewing the potential of blockchain through the lens of SafeMoon.