Greetings and happy Easter, Cadets.
Here’s a long awaited update from the StarkDeFi team.
In this text we’ll go through:
Products and platform updates
- Intermission,
- New UI & Intermission UI,
- Upcoming products & thoughts going forward.
Incentives and roles
- $STRK distribution,
- ReGenesis Early Participant bonus,
- @pre-liquid role benefits.
Operations and TGE
- Communication and media
- TGE and future sales
- DeFi Spring, Starknet & ZK chains
Products and platform updates
Intermission
Intermission is the period between ReGenesis phases. It allows us to trial incentives and utilities for our community to work out a continuous model to be employed throughout the growth phase of Starknet, onboarding new users and founders.
Intermission started at the close of ReGenesis (7th of March). The structure was an incentive program with rewards allocated based on daily volume, to allocate incentives in proportion to the traction the program received.
However, the UI planned for Intermission met with some issues on the development side and had to be postponed. The consequence being that the active UI on our site didn’t communicate the ongoing programme clearly for users as the ReGenesis UI was still present. This, it follows to reason, has mitigated traction. A new UI is imminent that should increase clarity considerably. Upgrades will be made to it as it progresses to make the experience smoother.
Intermission incentives
The initial incentives were only allocated to trading activity and only activated if we had $500,000 or more in average daily volume. This has now been amended. LP’s now receive incentives matched with DeFi Spring rewards and there is no required volume.
Swap incentives — 60,000 $SDC for the top 300, based on volume.
LP incentives — 60% of DeFi Spring rewards in $SDC, available in the incentivised pools. This will be adjusted as DeFi Spring rewards taper off.
New UI and Intermission leaderboard
We have revamped the Intermission leaderboard and will start off with a fresh leaderboard going forward.
Originally we intended to continue using the ReGenesis leaderboard with the reasoning that it’s the same user base, so the tradeoff should be small.
However, this has not functioned as intended and needs to be changed.
Upcoming products
During Q2 and Q3 we will be expanding our product stack.
Closest in the pipeline are price prediction and, which we’re quite excited for, a Liquidity Book protocol. Both are currently being built together with Blaize.
We’ll be the first on Starknet with a liquidity book, and we think it will complement the existing products on our home chain very nicely.
We’re quite excited about this and will talk more about this in an upcoming article.
Incentives and roles
$STRK Distribution
The 25,000 $STRK we have allocated to the community through the STRK is part of StarkDeFi’s protocol allocation from Starknet, subject to Starknet’s unlock design. The unlock happens in June, and we will distribute the $STRK at that point, prioritising STRK role holders.
ReGenesis Early Participant bonus
A 5% bonus will be given to early participants in ReGenesis, as captured by the snapshot on the 22nd of February.
Pre-liquid role benefits
Originally we had planned for Pre-liquid role holders to receive the lower fees utility of our token design. This was quite impactful at the time as fees were higher, but after Dencun fees have dropped considerably and the impact of such a utility would not represent that effort required to get the role. We are therefore rethinking this and will come up with a new reward for the role holders.
Operations and TGE
There’s a lot to be said here. But the gist of it is that our traction has faltered. DeFi Spring certainly didn’t work in our favour (we receive ~1/4 of the incentives of other protocols, decreasing our competitive capacity), but the main reason for decreased engagement most likely lies in our communication. It’s been incomplete and infrequent, which is not a good combination. The decrease in TVL from DeFi Spring specifically is one thing, but communication is entirely on us and something we are actively working on improving.
So far our communication has been scattered and more of a “Here’s what’s up! GLHF!”. It works in some cases (ReGenesis, for example), but not as a general modus operandi. We want to engage more with our community, and to be more present.
Communication and media
Following on the above, this is easily our most pressing concern at the moment. Development is progressing nicely, capped only by our available dev power. Communication on the other hand has been one of weak sides and we’ve been working on this to find a better structure. We believe we have found that and are working to implement it. Naturally, this will be noticed as we’ become more active across different channels.
It can generally be summarised as:
- Fireside chats, AMA’s etc,
- More articles,
- More active in Discord and on X.
TGE and future sales
WEN?!
We had planned a public sale with one of the largest launchpads in early April, allocating 4.8% of our token supply to it. However, throughout the negotiations it became clear that the ‘recommendations for a successful launch’ was little more than a pump and dump scheme. Funding is nice but it shouldn’t come at the cost of the protocol, so we decided against this. TGE was planned to happen a few days after the IDO, and the negotiations there is why we’ve held off about TGE dates.
Sticking to the plan however, we are talking with Fjord Foundry for an LBP through their platform. We believe the model to be better in line with how we would want to conduct a sale as it allows us to tailor it ourselves. Also, it would give easier access to our own community instead of some launchpad’s token stakers.
We are currently going through their curation process.
On the IDO side of things, we do have a small sale (1.5% of token supply) planned with another launchpad, scheduled for mid to late April. We would love to hear the community’s thought here.
DeFi Spring, Starknet & ZK chains
DeFi Spring started on February 22nd and has brought Starknet from $50,000,000 TVL to over $300,000,000 in less than two months — Quite the achievement! However, the Starknet ecosystem remains small with considerable centralisation, and as an AMM (although there’s more to come) this affects the amount of organic traction we can expect. A lot of the building we’re doing at the moment is aimed at a time when the current plans of Starknet have come to fruition, with more natural (i.e less incentive-driven) activity happening.
For us in particular, DeFi Spring has had a distinctly negative effect as the incentives were skewed towards market depth instead of general TVL — something we as an V2 base can’t adjust for. As this tapers off however, we should see our traction improve as we build out our product stack and Starknet comes to enjoy greater organic traction as the ecosystem expands.
With that said, it is our intention to expand to other ZK chains such as ZK Sync and other more nascent, up-and-coming ones. We already have a product in mind, but it needs to be either multichain or on a large chain with a lot of activity and projects.
This is something we want to discuss with you as well.
Which ZK chains are you hyped about?
How can we connect the tokens of our future ZK products to our current user base?
That’s it for this transmission. Let us know your thoughts and feedback.
Over and out!
