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Farm Ranking

MotoSwap runs dozens of farms at once. The Farms page ranks every one of them by what it would actually pay your deposit, and shows the reasoning beside every number, not just a verdict.

This page explains how that ranking works. It is the same judgment Catpound uses to decide which farms get a vault.

Why not just sort by APR?​

A farm's headline APR is its yearly emission divided by what is staked in it today. The less anyone uses a farm, the bigger that number gets. Sorting by it mostly finds the thinnest, least-used pools, which are exactly the ones where:

  • your own deposit is a large share of the farm, so the rate drops the moment you join;
  • the pool is too shallow to enter without losing money to slippage.

So the ranking uses three criteria instead, applied in order.

1. Exclusions​

A few farms are left out whatever they pay, because their token breaks compounding outright:

FarmWhy
MOTO/FLOKI, FLOKI/WETHFLOKI takes a fee on every transfer, so a compound can never complete.

2. Pool depth: a safety gate sized to your deposit​

Entering a pair pool swaps about half of your deposit into the other token. In a Uniswap-style pool, that swap moves the price by roughly:

entry impact ≈ deposit / (pool depth + deposit)

where pool depth is the value of both sides of the pool. If that impact is above 1%, the farm is gated: it is shown, with the impact, but not ranked and not offered as an action.

Because the gate scales with the deposit, the same farm can pass for $100 and fail for $1,000. At $100, a pool needs about $9,900 of depth; at $1,000, about $99,000.

This is the lesson of a pool that looked like the best farm on the list and turned out to be too thin to enter: the headline rate was real, but the deposit lost more to slippage than it could earn back.

The single-sided MOTO farm has no pool to swap through, so it is never gated.

3. APR after your deposit: the ranking itself​

Every farm splits its emission pro rata across everything staked in it, including you. So the ranking uses the rate after your deposit joins:

APR after your deposit = yearly emission in USD / (farm TVL + your deposit)

A farm with $500 staked paying $5,000 a year is 1,000% for the first dollar, but 833% after a $100 deposit. The page also shows you'd be X% of it. When one deposit would be more than a quarter of a farm, the page says so, because that farm's rate falls fast as anyone else joins.

Farm TVL sits beside the rate as the adoption signal: what MotoSwap's own users have actually staked in that farm.

What the numbers are, and what they are not​

  • Live. Everything is read from the chain when you open the page, and refreshed every minute: the farm's emission rate, how it is split across pools, each pool's reserves, and what is staked. MOTO is priced from the MOTO/WETH pool, and ETH from Chainlink.
  • Today's rate, not a promise. An APR is today's emission at today's MOTO price, annualised. MotoSwap's emission runs in campaigns with a set end date; the page shows when the current one ends, and every rate holds only until then.
  • Simple, not compounded. A Catpound vault or Catscrow position compounds the immediate half of the reward, so what you actually earn can be higher. Half of every reward is also escrowed for 180 days, which the APR does not discount.
  • Not advice. The ranking is a method, applied the same way to every farm. It says nothing about the tokens themselves.

What you can do with a ranked farm​

Each ranked farm offers one action:

  • Deposit: Catpound has a vault for this farm; the button opens it.
  • Open position: there is no vault, so the button opens a Catscrow position in that farm, a contract of your own that compounds and can be sold later.

See also​