Stella

Stella is the rebranded continuation of Alpha Finance Lab and Alpha Venture DAO, whose flagship product Alpha Homora was DeFi's first leveraged yield farming protocol, launched in October 2020 (Cointelegraph, May 2021). The rebrand to Stella was announced in May 2023, repositioning the project from a DeFi lab into a single product: leveraged strategies with 0% cost to borrow (Stella rebrand announcement, 23 May 2023). Instead of charging interest, Stella uses a Pay As You Earn model: borrowers, called leveragoors, pay nothing while a position is open, and Stella takes a cut of the net profit only when a profitable position is closed (Stella strategy docs). Of that yield cut, 20% is collected as protocol fees accruing to ALPHA stakers (Stella FAQ). The lineage carries a heavy credit history: a February 2021 exploit of roughly $37.5m drawn from Cream's Iron Bank, and a bad debt dispute that ran into 2023 (Cream Finance post mortem, DL News, 2023).