Mercurial Alpha: How to buy and use MER tokens in the Solana DeFi ecosystem

8 min readSep 6, 2021

This is an article written by Mercurial’s community member @AxBen8 to explain how to utilize MER tokens in Solana. If you have more questions, you can ask him and our other knowledgeable members, in our discord!

Introduction: achievements of Mercurial in two months

It has been approximately two months that Mercurial has launched its mainnet to offer a liquidity platform for stable assets to the Solana landscape. In this short period of time, Mercurial has already achieved a lot of milestones. Indeed, it has:

Reached out a TVL of more than 140M stablecoins deposit on its protocol;
Helped on the adoption of the PAI stablecoin of Parrot in the Solana ecosystem;
Brought the Terra ecosystem closer than it has never been before from the Solana blockchain by giving a usage to its native stablecoin, wUST;
Launched Solana’s first on-chain cross-protocol swap integration with Serum giving users the possibility to exchange not only USDC and USDT but also PAI and wUST to any tokens that have a trading pair with USDC on Serum, giving first usage to these two newly introduces stablecoins.
Launched the pSOL liquidity pool with Parrot to consolidate liquidity across all stake pool tokens.

Where to buy MER?

Mercurial Finance’s protocol starts piquing your curiosity? Then, here are several ways to get some MER tokens whether you prefer centralized or decentralized solutions.

Centralized exchanges

If you prefer centralized exchanges to purchase some MER tokens, you will have two options: look for MER on FTX by jumping on the MER/USD pair (https://ftx.com/trade/MER/USD) or on gate.io with the MER/USDT pair (https://www.gate.io/trade/MER_USDT).

Decentralized Solana’s protocols

If you prefer using protocols in the Solana blockchain, let’s review the different solutions available.

Swap on Mercurial Finance
Trade on the DEX of Serum
Swap on Raydium or trade on its DEX

Swap on Mercurial Finance:
Pair available : MER/USDC ; MER/USDT ; MER/PAI ; MER/wUST

Since August 18th, an aggregation between Mercurial and Serum allows users to swap Serum tokens to any major stablecoins on Mercurial with a single, low slippage transaction.

Transparency, clarity, and user-friendliness are the keywords for this new way to buy tokens. As you can see below, Mercurial highlights the different parameters that you need to know when you swap tokens: expected rate, transaction route, minimum received, and Mercurial and Serum LP fees.

Trade on the DEX of Serum
Pair available : MER/USDC ; MER/USDT

If you are used to a trade interface and want it in a decentralized way, Serum is the solution that you need. You will find Trading view charts and tools, order books, and other UI/UX designs that you usually find on other CEX and DEX.

Do not forget to settle your transaction to find back your MER tokens in your wallet!

Swap or trade on Raydium
Pair available: MER/USDC; MER/USDT; MER/PAI

Last but not least, Raydium is THE historical swap protocol on Solana and it also has its own DEX! On both solutions, you will be able to swap or trade thanks to the high amount of liquidity deposited in its pools by Solana users that are incentivized to do so (we will come back to this later).

How to get more MER?

In order to get more MER without purchasing more, you will have different strategies that are more or less risky and thus more or less profitable.

The objective of Mercurial with its MER Token besides its native function described in their lite paper is to incentivize liquidity providers of stablecoins on its protocol and allow them to compound with various DeFi strategies. Let’s dive into the available strategies to get more MER tokens using various Solana protocols.

Disclaimer: Annual percentage yield (APY) that will be mentioned in the following strategies are subject to vary in regards to modifications in liquidity pools and incentives proposed by quoted protocols. Thus, I will invite you to check the APYs yourself if you decide to follow one of the proposed strategies.

Deposit some stablecoins on Mercurial.Finance

First, the safer way to passively earn MER tokens without buying some is to deposit some stablecoins in the Multi-Token Stable Pools of Mercurial Finance (https://mercurial.finance/). For now, you can find the two following pools :

PAI-3Pool (https://mercurial.finance/pools/pai-3pool) — USDC / USDT / PAI — expected APY : 22,63% (12,64% in MER and 9,99 % in PRT)

UST-3Pool (https://mercurial.finance/pools/ust-3pool) — USDC / USDT / wUST — expected APY: 27,99% (24,00% in MER and 3,98 % in renLUNA)

Once your stablecoins are deposited in one of the 3Pool of Mercurial Finance, you will be able to claim your MER tokens every day on the “rewards” section (https://mercurial.finance/rewards).

As for now, you will also be able to claim your renLUNA rewards, but the PRT will be retroactive. To track your amount of PRT retroactive rewards, you will have to connect on the website of Parrot (https://parrot.fi/rewards/).

Fyi :

renLUNA is the wrapped version of the LUNA token through Ren Protocol. You can farm some SBR tokens with wLUNA-renLUNA LP tokens on Saber (https://app.saber.so/#/farms/luna/stake).
PRT is the native token of Parrot Protocol (https://parrot.fi/mint/)

Provide liquidity on the Raydium pool & Farm

Let’s say now that you have already bought or earned some MER tokens and you want to get more from your current bag. Head up to Raydium (https://raydium.io/) to provide liquidity in the MER-USDC Liquidity Pool. This pool will be used by users looking to swap or trade between MER and USDC tokens.

For that, you will have to deposit in the “liquidity” section (https://raydium.io/liquidity/) an equivalent value of MER and USDC in exchange for what Raydium will give you back MER-USDC LP tokens. To reward you for providing liquidity in its protocol, you will benefit from a portion of Raydium fees that are taken on every swap and trades between MER and USDC. These rewards can be visualized in the “1-year fees/liquidity” column of the “Pool” section (https://raydium.io/pools/) and are equivalent to an APY of 2,22%.

Once your MER-USDC LP tokens are in your wallet, you can also go to the “Farms” section (https://raydium.io/farms/) to stack these and earn MER tokens at a 16,92 % APY (19,14% -2,22%)

Another option to simply farms with an auto-compounding function with your MER-USDC LP tokens is to go on the vaults of Solfarm (https://solfarm.io/vaults) and stack it for an 18,40% APY (20,62% — 2,22%) in MER tokens and an extra 12,23% APY of TULIP rewards.

Lend MER tokens to boost your APY on stablecoins

Another opportunity is to use lending/borrowing platforms. For now, only Port Finance (https://mainnet.port.finance/#/) and Acumen (https://app.acumen.network/#/) list the MER token but soon we should see new protocols launching their mainnet and proposing lend/borrow on MER.

Let’s use Port Finance as an example.

Same as before, you already have MER tokens and want to earn more from it. To this end, you can go on the “supply” section of Port Finance (https://mainnet.port.finance/#/supply) and lend your MER for a 4,63% APY.

But that is not it! As you just lend some value to Port Finance, you can use it as collateral to borrow one of the proposed stablecoins (USDC, USDT, or PAI) on the “borrow” section (https://mainnet.port.finance/#/borrow).

Fyi: One thing to have in mind is the meaning of the APY on the borrowing assets: it will be the annualized yield that Port will ask you to repay after one year to withdraw your collateral ( heads up to the article of @tiddernips for more explanations: Mercurial x Port Explained: What is Port Finance? (https://blog.mercurial.finance/mercurial-x-port-explained-what-is-port-finance-81c4fb53a1a) .

Thus, when you borrow one of the proposed stablecoins, look for the one with the smaller APY.

Accumulate MER tokens

Once these stablecoins are in your wallet, you can go back on Mercurial and deposit one of the Multi-Token Stable Pools to earn APY on your MER tokens.

At this point you can see all the beauty of Decentralized Finance:

Deposit stablecoins => earn MER => lend MER => Borrow stablecoins => deposit stablecoins => earn MER … it can be an endless loop!

Diversify your portfolio by earning SBR tokens

A second option is to use your borrowed stablecoins in one of the pools of Saber. For that you have to go on the “Pools” section (https://app.saber.so/#/pools), deposit in one of the pools you are interested in, and deposit the corresponding LP tokens in the “Farms” section (https://app.saber.so/#/farms). For now, you can expect APY from 17% to 26 % of APY in SBR tokens.

Next up for MER and Mercurial?

For Q4, Mercurial will aim to offer the best price and best yield for stables as well as focus on value creation for MER holders. They will be achieving this by launching new innovative liquidity systems that build on top of their current platform, including a more powerful swap aggregator, dynamic vaults (as listed in the whitepaper), and MER staking to channel gains from dynamic vaults and fees from swap volume to MER stakers.

If you’d like to hear more, join the community discussions on Mercurial’s Discord.