About

Spectra is an open interest rate derivatives protocol offering services for traders, risk hedgers, organizations, and liquidity providers. It enables users to lock in fixed interest rates, trade yield, and earn on liquidity. Additionally, Spectra supports the development of decentralized applications and strategies using its derivatives layer.

History

APWine was founded by a group of four computer science graduates hailing from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The idea for the protocol came at a wine party slash brainstorming session, where the quartet deliberated how to break into the DeFi scene. After much pondering, they came up with the idea of future yields tokenization. This formed the basis of APWine. The “wine” part of the name is a wordplay to commemorate the event that led to their innovation.

After observing the trend of extremely high APY in the DeFi ecosystem to attract farmers, particularly during the DeFi summer craze, the team began researching how investors could bet on the speculation of these APY valuations and hedge against the associated risks. APWine is a future yield marketplace where you can sell your future gains (yield) in the present. Investors, who don’t want to sell their tokens, can sell the yields they can earn on that token.

The team started to research and develop the protocol in August 2020, and by December 2020, had closed a $50k pre-seed round. Since the beginning of the project, the team has launched two Alpha versions on testnets and a Beta version on the Ethereum Mainnet. The Beta version was deployed on February 2021. A month later (March 2021), APWine V1 went live on Polygon, and in December 2021, went live on Ethereum mainnet. The protocol airdropped 1.18% (588,430) of its governance token (APW) to its testnet participants in December 2021.

APWine closed a $1M Seed Round in March 2021. The capital raised is allocated for the development of the protocol. The team plans to roll out new products shortly that could help cement its place as a primitive of DeFi. Examples of these products include; tokenizing vested tokens and PoS rewards.