Maiar Review – Is This Exchange A Top Choice?

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By Austin DeNoce

Last Updated

Maiar Review

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Maiar Review

  • Swapping
  • Liquidity
  • Farming
  • Fees
  • Customer Support
4.2

Summary

Maiar is a decentralized protocol and exchange built on the Elrond blockchain. This exchange allows users to trade, swap, farm, and provide liquidity for digital assets and cryptocurrencies. Maiar supports nine assets, including their own native token (MEX), and also includes an analytics section for additional information including price charts, volume charts, and more. Find out if this exchange is worth using by reading our complete Maiar review.

Pros

  • Extremely user friendly
  • Excellent support resources
  • Token lock APR bonus

Cons

  • Very limited number of supported assets
  • Everything revolves around EGLD

About Maiar

Maiar is a Romanian-based decentralized protocol built on the Elrond blockchain that allows users to trade, farm, and provide liquidity for certain digital assets. Maiar is a non-custodial platform and will require a web-supported digital wallet such as the Maiar DeFi wallet to use their services. For those who need it, there is a bridge built into the Maiar platform to transfer ERC-20 USDC to the Elrond equivalent. Maiar also has their own native token (MEX) of which highly incentives staking, is used to issue rewards, and is used for governance on the platform.

Maiar Homepage

Maiar Swapping

Maiar swapping/trading is similar to most other DeFi platforms, with an aesthetic strongly reminiscent of Uniswap. Like most DeFi exchanges, there aren’t any charts accessible in the swapping section, but the order panel is extremely user-friendly. Within the order panel, you’ll be able to see the slippage, fee, and price impact, but there is, unfortunately, no option to adjust any of these to your liking. Another drawback to Maiar’s swapping is it only supports nine assets: EGLD, MEX, USDC, RIDE, CRU, ZPAY, ISET AERO, and EFFORT, and all those assets can only be swapped with EGLD. This is a major difference to nearly all other DeFi protocols that support seemingly countless assets and pairs.

Maiar Swapping

Liquidity

Users on Maiar can provide liquidity for eight different pools—one for each asset other than EGLD (as every pool is an asset paired with EGLD). Though you are quite limited, given every pool requires EGLD, many of the fee rewards stretch high into the double digits.

Maiar Liquidity

That said, about half of the fee rewards are less than 2%, which is a little underwhelming compared to most, if not all, other pooling platforms whether that’s 1inch, Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve Finance, or the like. Nevertheless, if you are an EGLD holder, the liquidity pools will be a great resource for you.

Maiar Add Liquidity

Mariar Farms

Farms on Maiar generate yield for liquidity providers that stake the LP tokens and are meant to incentivize long-term liquidity by awarding an additional revenue stream for providers. The rewards for farms are usually provided in MEX tokens, but special farms with dual token rewards can exist. An interesting feature Maiar offers within their farming is the option to lock your rewards for one year for 2x APR to further incentivize long-term liquidity. At the moment, there is one staking farm and three LP farms with APRs ranging from 18% to 44% or 109% to 121% if you choose to lock your tokens. Maiar’s farming is very underdeveloped compared to most other farming platforms like PancakeSwap or SushiSwap, and their regular APRs are pretty average, but their locked APRs are quite enticing and give many other platforms a run for their money.

Maiar Farming

Analytics

Maiar’s analytics section provides additional information about the exchange and its token pairs, such as price charts, volume charts, and other pieces of useful information for traders. The charts are line charts and only have day and week timeframes, but the whole section is beautifully laid out and has helpful buttons that will take you directly to the swapping or liquidity-providing sections.

Maiar Analytics

The information provided is a tad basic compared to a platform like Curve Finance and their statistics sections, and it would be nice to see more data or lower-timeframe information added, but it’s exceptionally designed and still a great resource for anyone looking to monitor volume, liquidity, and price.

Maiar Exchange Analytics

Maiar Fees

Maiar charges a flat 0.3% fee for swapping tokens, and a part of that fee (0.25%) is split by liquidity providers proportional to their contribution to liquidity reserves. As for the remaining 0.05%, the smart contract running fees will buy MEX from the EGLD/MEX pool and burn it. This fee structure is fairly standard and nearly identical to that of SushiSwap, who charges a 0.30% fee, awards liquidity providers 0.25%, and allocates the remaining 0.5% to SUSHI holders. It’s also quite similar to Uniswap, though Uniswap awards the entire 0.3% of its fees to liquidity providers.

Another fee to consider is related  to the bridging capabilities alluded to in the overview. Though you can bridge USDC from Ethereum to Elrond, it will cost you 50 USDC per swap and requires a minimum transfer of 2,500 USDC.

Customer Support

If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you’ll see a ‘Community Support’ section, but if you click on it, it will say ‘Coming Soon,’ so Maiar doesn’t have everything rolled out quite yet. That said, they have an excellent FAQ page and what might as well be a help center within that same section.

Maiar User Support (Faq)

They have an overview of the platform, its services, technology, architecture, and even how-to guides, all full with pictures and beautifully organized walkthroughs/explanations that go into considerable detail for everything related to the protocol. They really did an amazing and job with the whole section, and it’s worth sifting through if you plan to seriously use the platform.

Maiar User Support (How-To Guides)

Conclusion: Maiar Review 

Maiar is a smooth-looking and well-designed platform, but it’s significantly limited in what assets users can swap, pool, or farm. These considerations in mind, the Maiar platform is best left to those well-versed or interested in the Elrond blockchain. Anyone not interested in Elrond or EGLD will find little to no use from the protocol and certainly won’t find most (or really any) crypto assets popular among traders. However, if you’re a big fan of Elrond, there probably isn’t a better platform out there for you. The interface is as aesthetic as it is intuitive, and their fees are right on par with other popular DeFi protocols. And while they have a limited number of pools and farms, you’d be hard pressed to find any competition around the EGLD-specific pools and farms. Bearing all this in mind, Maiar is clearly a niche protocol specifically catered to the Elrond blockchain and, thus, terrible for people not involved in the ecosystem and perfect for those who are. If the platform had more supported assets, I would easily put it in the same camp as some of the most popular protocols like Uniswap, but it’s just far too niche to recommend to anyone not part of the Elrond community or holding EGLD. Nevertheless, it truly is an amazing platform that any and every EGLD holder should join.

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Austin DeNoce

Austin DeNoce is a writer, personal investor, and entrepreneur who is focused on trading and investing education for macro, crypto, equities, derivatives, and foreign exchange traders. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s in philosophy and carries a deep passion for a first-principles approach to investing and education therein. Austin specializes in topics related to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

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