A new decentralized finance (DeFi) asset is capturing the attention of crypto traders after exploding more than 1,800% in only two days.
Pickle Finance (PICKLE) is the latest food-themed token to surge, jumping from a low of $4.41 on September 12th to a high of $85.24 on September 14th, according to CoinGecko.
The coin is gaining traction due to a unique use case and a voting mechanic that earned praise from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. According to its website, Pickle Finance is designed to use farming to help eliminate volatility in the four largest stablecoins in the DeFi space.
It offers more rewards for stablecoin pools trading below their peg and fewer rewards for pools trading above their peg. The system incentivizes users to sell above-peg stablecoins and flock into below-peg stablecoins. Currently, Pickle Finance covers four stablecoins pools: DAI/ETH, USDC/ETH, USDT/ETH, and suSD/ETH.
In addition, Pickle token holders can participate in an unusual governance process.
“We use quadratic voting to prevent whales from having too much influence. Instead of counting votes nominally, we take the square root of it for each account.
For example, the following two situations have the same amount of voting power:
1. A whale casting 100 votes.
2. 10 regular people, each casting 1 vote.
This gives more power to ideas that can garner a large number of people’s attention.”
The price of the DeFi asset began to rise after its original voting system caught the attention of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
Nice! How do you determine individual identities to prevent individuals from splitting their funds into many accounts to avoid being square-rooted?
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 13, 2020
In response, Pickle Finance admits that they are still in the early stages of developing a system.
“We can’t, at least not now. We don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This will hopefully slow down the whales who want to game the system…
Maybe later on we can devise a system to better identify users. But we are quite stretched for bandwidth right now. The project has been live for a little more than 2 days.”