Creating an Ecosystem Farm

Intro on Ecosystem Farms

Ecosystem farms allow project teams to bootstrap liquidity in a pool by incentivizing liquidity providers with token emissions. Similar to creating a liquidity pool, any project team or user can create a yield farm on Raydium. By creating a farm, project teams can crowdsource liquidity from the community in a decentralized manner, which results in better prices for users when swapping on Raydium and deeper liquidity on any Serum DEX GUI.

It is highly suggested to carefully read and understand this entire guide before creating a farm.

IMPORTANT - points to keep in mind before creating a farm:

• AMM ID: Every farm must be linked to a liquidity pool AMM ID. The same AMM ID can be used for more than one farm on Raydium. Read how to create a pool for your target pair if one does not currently exist.

• Liquidity: It's highly recommended to add sufficient initial liquidity to the target liquidity pool for the farm in order to support basic trading before creating a farm. Very low liquidity means that even very small swaps in the pool will result in highly volatile prices. Users adding liquidity to join the farm when the price has been drastically changed may then suffer significant impermanent loss.

• Rewards and APR: Determining suitable rewards emissions and APR can be a difficult task as APR is a function of rewards, token price and liquidity in the pool, however below are key points to consider when calculating rewards:

  1) Target TVL: How much liquidity do you want in the pool and what level of price impact is acceptable? You can compare with existing pools to get an idea.

  2) Price of reward token: The reward token price has a direct effect on APR % for the farm. You may want to estimate a price range over the farming period to estimate APR.

  3) APR calculation: APR is equal to the $value of rewards for a period divided by the $value of liquidity in the pool, then annualized.

  • Example for APR based on daily rewards: ($500 rewards per day/$100,000 in liquidity)*365 days = 183% APR

  • Referencing existing farms can give an idea about the level of rewards and APR needed to achieve a target TVL, however, every project is different and results will vary.

  • Keep in mind any change to liquidity in the pool or price of reward tokens will affect APR.

• Rewards allocated to farms are final and cannot be withdrawn once the farm is created. Extending or adjusting the rewards rate can only be done near the end of the current farming period, make sure to read part 4 of the guide below for specifics!

Creating a Farm

1: Connect wallet and choose target liquidity pool

First, navigate to the farms' page and click “Create Farm.” Make sure your wallet is connected.

Search for the liquidity pool you want to create a farm for in the drop-down menu or by pasting the AMM ID. Every new farm must be linked to an AMM ID. The same AMM ID can be used for more than one farm on Raydium. Read how to create a pool for your target pair if one does not currently exist.

2: Set up rewards and duration

Rewards: Choose the reward token and amount to be emitted from the farm. Farms support a minimum of 1 reward token and a maximum of 5 reward tokens.

Duration and Start Time: Choose a duration for farming period. The period must be a minimum of 7 days and a maximum of 90 days. Then select the date and time for the farming to start. The farming end time will be calculated accordingly.

• Pay close attention to the chosen start time as this can NOT be adjusted after the farm has been created.

• Newly created farms generally appear on the Raydium UI approx 5 minutes after creation, depending on Solana’s network status. Farms on the UI will display an 'Upcoming' tag prior to the start time of rewards.

• Once created, reward emissions will start when the time set in the creation phase reaches Solana’s cluster time. Cluster time is the current on-chain time, meaning there could be a slight delay depending on Solana’s network status.

IMPORTANT:

• Rewards allocated to farms are final and cannot be withdrawn once the farm is created. Additional rewards can be added to the farm, more details on adding rewards are below.

• After the start time, rewards are only emitted if there are LP tokens staked in the farm. Meaning APR may remain at 0% if there are no users staking LP tokens at the start. In this case, you may want to consider staking a small amount of LP tokens to ensure APR displays properly.

3: Review and confirm

After all settings for the farm are confirmed, click “Review Farm”.

Make sure to confirm that rewards, duration and start time are correct. These can not be changed once the farm is created. Click "Create Farm".

That's it, your farm should be live on the UI in approx 5 minutes. You can click the 'Show Created' tab on the Ecosystem farms tab to view your farms.

4: Extend or adjust rewards

You can view created farms by checking the “Show Created” toggle on the Ecosystem Farms page.

If you want to extend farm emissions or adjust rewards for a specific farm, click the ‘Edit Farm’ button in the farm drop-down.

Rewards allocated to farms are final and cannot be withdrawn once the farm is created. Rewards can be extended or adjusted, however, changes must be in line with the below requirements.

Extending rewards period (same emissions rate): You can add additional rewards to a farm 72 hours prior to the end of the farming period. Adding rewards means that the emissions rate (rewards per day) will remain the same but the period will be extended. You can not adjust the emissions rate once a farming period has been confirmed.

Adjusting rewards (changing emissions rate): If you want to increase or decrease the emissions rate, you must wait until the current rewards period ends before starting a new period and then adjusting the rewards amount and emissions rate.

Additional reward token: An additional reward token can be added at any time, up to a maximum of 5 reward tokens. The reward period can be different for different tokens.

That's it! You're now bootstrapping decentralized liquidity on Raydium!

If you have questions, feel free to drop by the Raydium Discord server!