Guide to Sowing on Beanstalk 🌱
Welcome bean farmer! 🚜
Beanstalk 🌱 is a credit-based stablecoin pegged to $1.
Beanstalk exists to disrupt DeFi and the rent-seeking collateralized stablecoin market by creating a decentralized protocol that can trustlessly issue billions of dollars of stablecoins. This is only possible using a non-collateralized model and a decentralized credit facility.
This guide will show you exactly how to sow Beans in the Beanstalk Protocol. Let’s get started 🚜
To Sow Beans, navigate to the Field module on https://bean.money. You should see this:
Let’s first understand what all of these numbers mean.
Each number here represents a key statistic on the “decentralized credit facility” that Beanstalk calls the Field. The reason Beanstalk has a Field is so that it can issue debt and repay the debt in order to keep the Bean price at peg.
Because Beanstalk is still such a new protocol, it’s currently offering high interest rates. Over time, those rates would be expected to fall significantly over time as people perceive Beanstalk as “less risky”. You can see that the weather rate has already begun to trend downward recently in the Weather graph under analytics.
Okay, so what do all of these numbers mean?
Available Soil is the Available Debt in Beanstalk. This is how much debt in total Beanstalk is willing to issue. You can only buy debt when there is Soil available. Each season (1 hour), Beanstalk can potentially add more Soil so if you don’t see any, you can always check back later.
Weather is the interest rate that Beanstalk is willing to offer on the Soil.
Pod Line is the amount debt that the Beanstalk protocol already holds. When you sow Beans, they are burned and Beanstalk gives you pods in exchange for Beans Sowed * Interest Rate. So for example, if you sow 1,000 Beans at a 2,000% interest rate you’ll receive 20,000 pods. Those pods will convert 1:1 into Beans at $1 once they harvest.
Pods Harvested is the amount of debt that Beanstalk has paid off thus far. Each season, Pods can potentially harvest into Beans and the Pods Harvested metric will update.
Seasons to Pod Clearance is an estimate of how long it will take Beanstalk to pay off all of the pods in the Pod Line based on the pod harvesting rate of the last 7 days.
So that’s the basic terminology. You’re buying debt (soil) at an interest rate (weather) and when Beanstalk pays you back your debt will turn into Bean stablecoins.
To sow, it’s pretty easy. Just navigate to the Sow module in the Field:
And you can play around with how much Ether you’d want to deposit.
Expand the “transaction details” to see exactly how many Beans you are buying and how many Pods you will receive. When you Sow, Beanstalk will burn the Beans that you buy and give you Pods in exchange along with a position at the end of the Pod Line.
Press “Sow”, approve the transaction in MetaMask, and then you’ll see your total Pods in the bottom left of your My Analytics module. 👇
Congratulations, you’re now in line for the harvest 🚜
This is meant to be a basic overview but there are a lot of great resources for learning more about Beanstalk. Check out the:
Beanstalk How To Guide: https://bean.money/docs/How-To.html
Beanstalk Whitepaper: https://bean.money/docs/beanstalk.pdf
Beanstalk Discord: http://discord.gg/y4cJNv5DTM