Space Summary
The Twitter Space DeFi Foundry: Exploring Governance Aggregators with Equinox hosted by Eclipsefi. DeFi Foundry and Equinox are spearheading a community-centric approach to token launches within the DeFi landscape. By prioritizing governance and empowering users, they aim to counter predatory actors and emphasize transparency and fairness. Their collaborative efforts focus on innovating while maintaining security, reshaping DeFi projects through inclusivity and ethical practices. Through discussions on community involvement, original blockchain principles, and the future vision of DeFi, DeFi Foundry and Equinox inspire a more sustainable and ethical DeFi ecosystem.
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Questions
Q: How does DeFi Foundry differ from traditional token launch platforms?
A: DeFi Foundry focuses on community and governance to counter predatory actors.
Q: What is the core mission behind Equinox's approach to DeFi?
A: Equinox aims to bring back the original principles of crypto and blockchain.
Q: Why are governance aggregators crucial for DeFi projects?
A: Governance aggregators enhance transparency and empower the community.
Q: How does DeFi Foundry promote innovation while ensuring security?
A: By balancing innovation with ethical practices and user empowerment.
Q: What role does community play in the DeFi Foundry and Equinox collaboration?
A: Community participation is fundamental to the ethos and success of the collaboration.
Q: In what way does DeFi Foundry contribute to a more inclusive DeFi ecosystem?
A: DeFi Foundry prioritizes fair opportunities and a community-centric approach.
Q: How does Equinox plan to counter predatory actors in the crypto space?
A: By empowering builders and users through transparency and ethical practices.
Q: What are the key values of DeFi Foundry according to the discussion?
A: The core values revolve around transparency, innovation, and community empowerment.
Q: What distinguishes the approach of Equinox towards DeFi projects?
A: Equinox stands out for its commitment to original blockchain principles and empowerment.
Q: How do DeFi Foundry and Equinox envision the future of DeFi projects?
A: Both entities aim to reshape DeFi by focusing on inclusivity, ethics, and innovation.
Highlights
Time: 00:12:45
Community-Centric Token Launches DeFi Foundry and Equinox emphasize community involvement in token launches.
Time: 00:25:19
Governance Against Predatory Actors Discussion on the role of governance in countering predatory behavior in DeFi.
Time: 00:35:50
Empowering Builders and Users Equinox's strategy to empower builders and users for a more ethical crypto landscape.
Time: 00:45:30
Transparency and Fairness DeFi Foundry's commitment to transparency and providing fair opportunities to participants.
Time: 00:55:15
Innovation in a Secure Environment Balancing innovation with security measures in DeFi projects.
Time: 01:05:10
Building an Inclusive DeFi Ecosystem Efforts to create a more inclusive DeFi space through community-centric approaches.
Time: 01:15:40
Ethical Practices and Community Participation The importance of ethical practices and community engagement in DeFi Foundry's mission.
Time: 01:25:55
Future Vision of DeFi Landscape DeFi Foundry and Equinox's vision for the future emphasizing ethics, inclusivity, and innovation.
Time: 01:35:20
Balancing Innovation and Security Strategies to harmonize cutting-edge innovation with robust security measures in DeFi.
Time: 01:45:30
Original Blockchain Principles Equinox's dedication to preserving the core values of crypto and blockchain technology.
Key Takeaways
- DeFi Foundry and Equinox aim to create a community-driven space for token launches.
- The focus is on reducing the influence of predatory actors within the crypto ecosystem.
- Governance aggregators play a vital role in restoring the true essence of decentralized finance.
- Community-centric approaches can help in strengthening the fundamentals of DeFi projects.
- Transparency and fair opportunities are central to the ethos of DeFi Foundry.
- Equinox strives to bring back the essence of crypto and blockchain to their original principles.
- Empowering builders and users is a core principle of DeFi Foundry and Equinox.
- The goal is to foster an ecosystem where innovation and community participation flourish.
- Committed to reshaping the DeFi landscape by prioritizing inclusive and ethical practices.
- Balancing innovation with security is a key focus of the DeFi Foundry and Equinox collaboration.
Behind the Mic
Greeting and Introduction
Good morning. Good morning. Or afternoon or evening, wherever you might be in the world. Welcome to the space. I can, loud and clear. I never get tired of the australian accent. Just before because I'm just sitting at the computer here and obviously the doors open to the outside world. And in Australia, you wouldn't believe this, but we're heading into a warm Queensland summer and there's all these magpies just straight outside having a full laugh. And I'm like, we can't start a space like I sound like this. We can't start a space like that. This is going to be a disaster. But it's all right, they've gone now so we can get back to some level of professionality. So, welcome to the space, everyone. What a way to kick off.
Discussion on Australian Wildlife and Introductions
It could be lorrakeets. They could be lorikeets. That would be worse, right? Yeah, I was thinking kookaburras. That's very, that's a very unique. Right, that'd be very australian sounding. but let's, before we get off on tangents, because I know that when we have conversations there do tend to be a few tangents. probably because of who we are as people. but. So I'd like to welcome everybody to the space. Obviously this one's a little bit different to the ecosystem. Hours we've been, rocket on before. So this is, I suppose you would call episode one of Defi Foundry. So we're going to be doing a bit of exploring into the governance aggregators with Equinox. We're going to take a bit of a high level overview, find out what exactly any of that even means.
Introduction of Key Participants
And we've got the ultimate professional here to take us through it, the proper degen Simon that he is. And I see we've also got our usual crew of fantastic members that I'm sure will have some questions that they'll throw up in the chat as we go along as well. So I think, I mean, do we need intros? Do we, do we need a quick overview for people that haven't played the game before? So I'm Joe or Jory fish. You'll see me in discord. So I'm our community guy and obviously we've got Simon with us. Simon, do you want to do a quick one liner? Yeah, I'm Simon. I'm also a community guy now. I'm a co founder of Eclipse, but I am also a community guy. That definitely is. I think I'm in the top number of most active participants on Discord, which is interesting.
Understanding Governance Aggregators
Yeah, that's right. It's like, oh, who's been this? Who's been talking with Simon? Everybody has their own individual conversations with Simon as we go around. And then, you know, that's part of the fun. Even the good morning bot is speaking with Simon. So classic stuff. So I think a good place to start this would be even if we go for a high level overview of like we're going to get into the, I don't want to say the weeds, but we're going to get into it a little bit more as well. But what exactly is a governance aggregator? What does that even mean? Yeah, great question, Joe. And I mean, there's multiple words for governance aggregators. It's quite interesting in terms of the different terminologies that we've seen thrown around as there's different ways, I guess, that you can label these.
Terminology and Evolution of Governance Aggregators
You could call them, sometimes they're called yield optimizers. Sometimes they're called governance aggregators. Sometimes they're called governance optimizers. There's a few words for them. The most notable one was originally convex in Ethereum, which was a protocol built on top of curve and that kind of kick started the whole governance aggregation thing. But over time we've seen many different forms of governance aggregators pop up. So across multiple ecosystems, such as vector, I think it's on Avax, we've seen magpie pen PI, all the PIs across the arbitrary ecosystem. And more essentially, these governance aggregators are platforms that sit on top of other platforms and they serve to somehow make voting or governance more efficient or more affordable or help boost yields for its holders. And we'll delve into the meat and potatoes of this in a bit.
Functionality of Governance Aggregators
But they've had quite a wide history of being quite, I guess, quite successful protocols that have had the product market fit in their own rights and they all have the different characteristics depending on the underlying protocol that they sit on top of. But we'll delve into them a little bit more, the history of them, how they work, the history of astroport as well and what happened over there. And then we'll dig into equinox itself if that's how you want to kind of flow. That sounds amazing. And I've already got the one tangent question ready to go. I suppose just as a quick delve into this, because I know that lots of, you know, we talk about governance aggregators and we talk about how does it aggregate it, how does it bring more yield, et cetera. And we'll get into, really into that.
Importance of Governance Models
But why is it important that we have governance models across anything? I suppose, like we've come from a society, I suppose, out in web two or web zero, basically, where there isn't web. And now we've stepped into web three and we've discovered that we can have these, I suppose, daos even, or governance based activities or governance based projects. What's the importance of governance generally and why do we need to have that for sure? And while I'm at it as well, I want to say hi to integrated. If you do want to jump up at any point in time as well, fluffy, you're welcome to come up. It's good to kind of keep this open as well. And I'm sure you've got some kind of thoughts on this, too.
Understanding Different Governance Concepts
When we talk about a governance aggregator, I think it's really important to split a, the concepts of governance because, you know, in crypto and blockchain, you kind of have like daos and governance of daos, which is sort of like democratic vote or like protocol control. But this governance aggregate is a slightly different element of governance. And this governance is essentially governance over emissions or governance over incentives. And so it's not necessarily like, hey, you know, we need to change this fee model. We need to do that sort of stuff. It's typically been a redirecting of incentives on a protocol. And, you know, there's kind of a bit of controversy of what the best models are to kind of allocate bootstrapping emissions.
Allocation of Incentives
Like if you have a Dex, a decentralized exchange, you know, how do you actually allocate these incentives to pools? People have had, like volume based kind of redirection. There's been a couple models, but the kind of, and we'll get into this in SEC with the vote escrow model was a model that's kind of been adopted over the last couple of years, was one where governance controlled a portion of the voting of where these emissions went. And it would allow protocols to essentially create demand for their token through kind of competitiveness of protocols. They wanted to get emissions, and if you just emit out Dex tokens sometimes they would definitely have issues with cell pressure. And so they created kind of like a demand competition between protocols to control where these emissions went.
Governance and Protocol Dynamics
And so that's the governance that we're talking about here. I know I kind of took a long winded response, but yeah, no, and. That'S like I said, it's good to just understand the picture itself of what exactly we're talking about because I think otherwise, you know, we get the confusion of well how does this plug in or how's that? So that's perfect. I think next step is yeah, let's start with the history and just get the, you know, where to from here as in how did this start? How do we, how is this plugging in? Obviously then we can start heading towards more so equinox itself from eclipse point of view. But obviously there has to be a starting point and we want to talk about history, astro port and all that sort of stuff as well.
Starting the Journey
So let's kick off that journey. Yeah, so it starts with, it actually starts by looking at the underlying protocol mechanisms. So rather than looking at the aggregation itself let's look at, you know, the foundations of what created this kind of behavior or on top of it let's also look at what aggregation means. Right. So aggregation in the sense is I don't know how to explain it in simple terminology, but it's how do you give someone, how do you kind of collect all the pieces and give someone the best value possible? That's sort of like if you get a trading aggregator you might have ten different protocols and the aggregator sits on top and it finds the best routes across these ten protocols or splits and routes and other sorts of stuff.
Understanding Governance Aggregator Mechanics
If you're looking at a yield aggregator sits on top of multiple things and it looks to redirect and give you the best value. Whereas a governance aggregator is a little bit different because it's not so much sitting across multiple protocols and giving you the best governance. It's typically sitting one protocol and it's basically optimizing the benefits that you would get from interacting with the underlying protocol but through that protocol itself to better understand it we need to go back to curve, which is a big Dex on Ethereum, pretty OG in the Defi summer days, very well known for stablecoin liquidity. They had a lot of stable swap pools and there was a lot of competitions from stablecoin issuers who wanted to get liquidity to their pool.
The Role of Curve in Governance Aggregation
Now they're just not just stable coins. But we notoriously saw kind of the big games happening around fracs, around UsT terror, terra Luna's UsT and other stable coins in an underlying way. A lot of big institutions or protocols would use curve to swap between different stable coins. And the deeper the liquidity that people had for their own stablecoin, the better it was because it would allow these whales to move a lot of money in and out. So if you're trying to create adoption for a stablecoin, you really wanted to really have some deep liquidity pools and make it really easy for people to kind of swap in and out.
Competitive Ecosystem in DeFi
We saw sorts of, like, interesting pools, like three pools, which allowed to have, like, three tokens in a pool. But really, it was like, it was kind of like this power game of people wanting the emissions. They're wanting deep liquidity on their pools on curve. Now, curve had a very interesting model developed, a very interesting model called vote escrow. And the idea was, okay, curve is giving out emissions to these pools. And sure, it has fees coming in for buybacks and all sorts of stuff, but typically, at least in the short term bootstrapping phases, you end up with more sell pressure. And if the token is worth less, then the emissions are worth less.
Emissions and Sell Pressure
And so you've got to emit more tokens to keep up with this spiral, right? And obviously, the more your token is worth, a more the emissions are worth, and it becomes a more positive reinforcing cycle. You attract more liquidity. More liquidity attracts more volume. More volume typically means more fees, which means more buybacks. So you're trying to create this flywheel effect, and if it's going against you have a problem. And so a lot of dexs, at least in these initial bootstrapping phases, really struggled with this downward pressure and sell pressure on their token. So convex was like, how do we break this cycle?
Concept of Vote Escrow
How do we actually come up with a mechanism that creates, I guess, like a demand or lockup for their token, in the sense that they can distribute incentives and kind of kick start, like a good flywheel for their protocol. So this is where the vote escrow model came up and the voters grow model was essentially, let's basically give people the vote, voting power on where the emissions go. But to get these, obviously emissions, you need to stake the token for a long period of time. And in Curve's case, it was four years as a maximum. And the longer that people stake, obviously, the bigger multiplier they got from voting power.
Voting Power in Emissions Distribution
And this voting power would allow them to vote in epochs, which would, during each epoch, would actually redirect liquidity to pools, emissions, and incentives to pools. So there was a big incentive for people to lock up for four years. On top of this, they pioneered boosters, which would mean that liquidity providers that had a large amount of staked convex could get boosted emissions on their pools. So it was up to two and a half times on curve, I believe. So anyone holding large staking of curve or staking about a curve would get boosters.
Staking Dynamics and Challenges
So it became very attractive to obviously stake the curve token for four years for a long period of time. But it can get quite challenging when you're competing against whales for staking of curve, that maybe you're okay staking it for four years. And you also have to put up that capital risk where you are actually going and staking an asset for four years. Curve has a model in which that deprecates over time. So you have to keep relocking it pretty much indefinitely. So if you're kind of a player, you need to kind of go and acquire a bison curve, and you need to stake it, and then, you know, you need to compete with everybody else that's doing the same, and your efficiency is not there.
Benefits Accessibility in Governance
You don't have, like, this sort of, you know, ability to vote on emissions or get the boosters. And everyday people want the boosters, too, but they can't. Obviously, for them, it doesn't make sense to go buy a whole bunch of curves, stake it, and then get the boosters for this reason. This is where the convex model came along and sat on top of curve. And the convex model, the goal was, hey, we are going to essentially pull a huge amount of this curve, maximum state curve, and we're going to allow people to access the benefits of this without them having to go out and stake curve for four years.
Flywheel Effect and User Access
So how do we, like, create this kind of flywheel effect on top of the protocol that allows for the accumulation of large amounts of this voting power and giving the benefits to end users without having to then themselves go into stake curve to get the benefits of this. So, yeah, I know that's a long ramble. I can delve into more of the mechanisms of how this worked, Joe, and just stop me if I'm going off track, because I know I can ramble for a long time. But that's sort of how it started in terms of, like, this protocol that would sit on top, and it would allow people to access, I guess, like, aggregation of this voting power, aggregation of the benefits on top of curve.
Comparison with Traditional Models
So just so I think that's perfect. I think that explains it really well. And just to. Just for my own mind as well, in putting it into, I suppose, terms from a bitcoin point of view, for example, like, once upon a time, anybody could mine and you would just be able to mine, and there is a chance that you would mind the block and you would get the bitcoin. Then it obviously became very whale dominated where, you know, if you were a single user, the chance of you actually mind that block is so low that people started making pools where they were together as a group to create that same effect.
Pooling Resources for Efficiency
And then it was shared amongst the group, as opposed to being shared amongst the individuals using that sort of group power. And I suppose that is that sort of how the second layer would sit over the top of the curve. Kind of like the way that I think about it is a bit like a timeshare, actually. That might be the best. The best example. Maybe. Maybe it's a bad example, but kind of is a bit like a timeshare for those that maybe have, like, some exposure to it.
The Gym Membership Analogy
Let's say, you know, there was a gym that meant that you needed to you to join this gym. You really want to join this gym, but to join this gym, you had to buy a membership for two years, right? And that wasn't necessarily like, you know, you didn't necessarily want or need to join this gym for two years, because you only use it maybe from time to time, or maybe you want some of the benefits, but not all of them, and maybe not a great example, but, like, let me see if I could kind of follow this along. And so instead, this gym, someone kind of comes along and makes a deal with this gym, buys a whole bunch of, like, two year memberships and allows people to get, like, temporary access, I guess, to some of the benefits or things like that, into returns without needing to buy this whole membership two years in advance. Something along those lines. I don't know if that's a perfect example, but maybe something closer.
Understanding the Complexity of Crypto
Yeah, no, I sort of follow that. I love a good explain. Like, I'm five moment, the Eli five, because I think, you know, we have so many processes, so many things were built up over time, especially with our, let's call it localized knowledge, especially in crypto. Crypto becomes something that's so niche, it's almost like trying to talk to a teenager these days with the YEET misgivity. I don't understand half of it, and I'm sure that's how people feel about crypto if they're not inside of it. So trying to bring that back to where it's like, what? Can I make this the comparison so that it's understandable? But, no, I think that's good. I think we're. We're on top of that as a. As a general journey. So I guess the next question is then how. How does Astraport then plug into that?
The Dynamics of Governance in Crypto
Yeah, so the next would be. I mean, I'm not going to delve too much into the mechanisms of how it works, I think, because that's going to be quite technical. But, yeah, I mean, if we look at history, let's say follow history, and then bring this to terror, what was created by this happening? I mean, convex was sort of the leader of a lot of this, and so it kind of created dominance. There was some other players, but convex did create some dominance. Typically, then you end up with other multiple governance aggregators, fighting with each other for who the biggest is. So I just drank some coke. So, yeah, so you end up with a few protocols, like fighting for who the leader is. And they have ways of capturing revenue and value by people interacting with their own protocols, sitting on top of things. You end up with many kind of meta layers of governance, these protocols competing. But convex was a very successful model.
Astroport's Launch and Its Impact
And what would happen is people would then go and accumulate convex instead of curve. Well, curve convex, because it was a lot more efficient to acquire voting power through convex than it was to curve and created all sorts of interesting dynamics. So, fast forward to 2022. The start of 2022. End of 2021 starts 2022, which was prominent boom days for the terra ecosystem. Start of 2022, Terra Astro port launches on Terra. And Terra was a booming ecosystem. Had its flaws, obviously, but there was a large increase in demand from anchor protocol. There was a Dex on Terra that wasn't incentivized, but it was seeded by the TfL team called Terraswap. People didn't really like Terraswap. The team on top of it weren't really managing it well. So there was, like, opportunity for, like, a big powerhouse Dex, built by team on top of Terra.
Challenges and Successes in the Ecosystem
There was a couple other protocols, like loop and stuff, but they weren't really kind of executing that well. And it wasn't, you know, wasn't really capturing and solving the needs of what people had. So Delphi Labs got together and collaborated with TfL. Well, not really, but there was support there. And they got together and they launched this big Dex on terra called Astroport. And when they launched it, they did a lock drop in an LBA launch mechanism, and they attracted, I think it was one point two to one point five billion dollars in TVL from launch. They had a vampire attack on Terraswap. They executed this beautiful launch. And one of the big things that Astra was bringing in is they were going to be the core, fundamental pillar of the terra ecosystem.
Importance of Emissions in Ecosystem Competition
And that meant that every single protocol, if they had a token and they wanted liquidity or trading or all this stuff on their token, it was going to happen through astroport. Now, this created some pretty interesting dynamics where pretty much everyone in the ecosystem is, like, fighting with each other or competing to try and get emissions onto their pools. And having emissions from such a powerful Dex on your pools is really important and powerful, because if you're emitting your own token out to these pools as a project that just launched, for example, if your token goes down, that token is worth less, and then it creates this downward spike spiral, and you might not have enough liquidity from the emissions of your own token for people to see it as a valuable source of yield. So you need to, like, emit really high aprs in your own token for it to be attractive, because people would rather accumulate terra Luna or they'd rather accumulate astro rather than your own token.
Strategies and Market Manipulations
So it becomes very detrimental if you're your own protocol, sometimes emitting your own token, because it's not really seen as super attractive unless there's high demand for that token. So as a token of a project wanting to attract these emissions of a very high demand Dex, such astro, which had a very attractive asset. I think a peak astro token was worth $3.5 billion in FTV. So very high, you're going to want that voting power. Astroport had plans to deploy their very own convex model called Vxastro. Had some slight differences to your classic curve model, but it was a pretty cool model, followed a very similar flow to what the curve model had followed. And they started to build it up due to the demand and the high volume and the amount of trading fees that Astra was accumulating and the amount of mine share around it really built a huge amount of hype.
The Astro Wars Phenomenon
These asteroid wars became sort of like a huge talking point on the whole terra ecosystem, with everybody wanting a piece of this. We saw the fees before ex Astro launch. We saw the huge amount of millions and millions of dollars worth of fees stacking up in this treasury that were going to be used for buybacks of Astro. And it was exciting. People were writing content about it, and suddenly there was a kind of a scope for the launch of VX Astro, which was going to kick off what we called the Astro wars. And the Astro wars became a whole battle to see who would accumulate the most astro in the ecosystem. Because every protocol that was planning to deploy on terra was going to want to get access to these Astro missions. They were really fighting to see like, okay, we want these astro missions on our pools.
Competition and Economic Power
So whoever captured the most Astro would have really strong economical power in terms of. In terms of influencing or getting financial revenue or bonuses from these projects. And that's typically done through bribing and we'll talk about this later. But we saw a dynamic landscape of multiple protocols setting up and preparing for the launch of VX Astro. So we had retrograde, we had reactor that were pure governance aggregators, and then we had the likes of Apollo and Orion that had their own mechanisms and ways in which they were planning to lock large amounts of this astro in their protocol. And this kicked off like a frenzy over, I think, a couple months where, you know, everyone was like, who's going to win? Let's fight. I think there was a, there was even maybe a couple other protocols fighting for this kind of astro, this Astro accumulation.
The Aftermath of Terra's Collapse
They would offer like, incentives and all sorts of things to kind of accumulate astro. We had retrograde, launched a lock drop themselves and locked a huge amount of astro and it looked like they were in the lead, whereas reactors one didn't go so well. We saw this massive chain wide battle for the Astro wars, which were becoming hot. And this drove value and demand for the astro token and was exciting and everybody was happy for it. And then Terra collapsed before the X astro could launch. And so we never got to see the results of the astro wars. We never got to see the dynamics of these astro wars. So, yeah, that story time, maybe that's the next step.
Resilience Following the Collapse
But yeah, I love a bit of story time and I think everybody that's listening to my ecosystem shows for the last several weeks knows that. Like, it's one of the questions I usually ask of the projects that are still here is, you know, what, coming back from that moment of like, terror collapse, for example, it really shows chops for the projects that are still here building. And I think seeing the resurrection of what Astro ports, Astro wars could be coming up in the future is very exciting. Knowing that we're going to have that dynamic again and perfect time of market, perfect time of everything. It feels like we're coming back to the budding ball. I think we're in a perfect situation and at timeframe to see the resurrection of that moment as well.
Navigating the Recovery Phase
So let's not call it totally, I suppose, aborted from where it was, but more so, it was just very delayed over the course of several years. Right. So I guess moving on to the next bit is then, are we at that stage now where, how do we plug into that? Would that be the next bit of this story? I think there's a bridge in here which is, like, the recovery, I guess, of astro into that part. I think, like, I'm trying to break it up, so I'm not rambling for, like, too long in a row, but I think, like, the question is, like, what is astroport focusing on? Like, where's Astro port now? What was the recovery from that terror collapse into?
Lessons Learned from the Collapse
I guess, like, now's Astros models like the VX Astro, and the upcoming Astro wars, which, you know, so obviously what happened? Terra collapsed, and everyone got hit really hard. I mean, we got hit pretty hard, and, you know, had to kind of figure out how to move ahead from that. A lot of protocols didn't make it. Many pivoted. But Astra port survived, and it was challenging. We saw it go from $1.8 billion in TvL and 600 mill, 250 to 600 mil a day in trading spot trading volume to $1 million in TVL. And everything got kind of blown up very quickly. And, you know, they could have given up. They could have thrown in the towel and just kind of stopped.
Delphi Labs and Resilience
But I guess the Delphi labs guys and the contributors to Astro and Mars and all these other protocols had different plans. And so there was a bit of a lull in terms of figuring out what was going to happen. At the time. Terra was working on Luna two. Terra two. There was some incentives going to protocols to stay, and it was kind of interesting to see what was going to be the resurgence of the ecosystem. But it never really was able to recover from the collapse of reputationally or just in general. Everybody's pretty burned. And so Astraport found itself kind of housed on terra with a bit of trouble staying there.
Transition to Multi-Chain Strategies
So started to expand multi chain, and the idea was to set outposts on multiple chains across the cosmos ecosystem, starting with injective, followed by, say, and then followed by neutron ecosystems. And so started creating this outpost model, proposed a few ideas for shared cross chain liquidity and ways it would kind of recover. It was challenging because obviously funding got blown up, and the team got blown up and lost some contributors. But Astro was figuring out, okay, what's next? How do we come back from this, and what are the advantages and the things that we focus on?
Astroport's Future Directions
So what they did is they chose to move their home base to neutron ecosystem. They worked on a framework for pools called PCL pools, which was a very efficient pull mechanism as opposed to concentrated liquidity. And yeah, they just got back to building. Right. And they really rebuilt those foundations. They became at one point the top decks on every single outpost that they were on and moved their hub home base to Neutron and serves as the core liquidity amm for the neutron ecosystem. They did the lock drop for Neutron, which was housed on Neutron. And then a lot of like the liquidity across, I guess like neutron ecosystem is housed on astro port, including drop and having the LP tokens of astro interacting with Mars.
Astro Wars as a Future Event
And it's kind of creating a full composability across the ecosystem. Now there was still this talk of astrowars and weren't sure when it was going to come because it was kind of talked about like the start of the year. But there was a lot of other priorities that seem to have come tech debt and priorities that seem to have come up for astro before the astro wars. Plus, trying to get the timing terror did change its model for convex, its kind of convex model quite so, its curve model quite dramatically. It moved away from your traditional four year lock and boost version of vote escrow towards a much more, I guess, fairer model. And I can talk on that in the future.
Anticipation for Astro Wars
But essentially the curve model did have its own issues around creating monopolies and creating extractive behavior, but they went for a bit more of a docile kind of approach. And so, yeah, and so that was kind of this buildup. And for kind of a lot of this year, there was talk of when this VX Astro, when the Astro wars would kick in, and now we're really on that home stretch and finally everything's kind of come together and you'll start to see a lot coming out for the launch of that. So that's where we are with Astraport. So Astraport had this whole roundabout story into now, coming finally back into the launch of the Astro boarse.
Astroport's Decision for Future
So, yeah, I guess a question as well. And obviously, I don't know if you're the right person to answer this, but in terms of being the hub on neutron, why was it that they ended up on neutron specifically, what is it about neutron as a blockchain that allows them to do anything better than anywhere else, for example? Great question. So when you look at the way that Delphi labs operates or you look at the way that these protocols like Astro and Mars tend to operate, they're pretty hard, they play pretty hard.
Evaluating Partnership Choices
They put a lot of resources into the work that they do, but they typically want to have really close relationships with the chains that they're building on and the ability to corner the market in those ecosystems. If you're a big Dex like Astroport and you're putting a lot of energy and resources and focus into a chain, you want to be really careful that firstly, you believe that chain is still going to be around, but also that, like, you know, you're going to be able to capture a lot of the share of that chain in a healthy way that helps you to kind of create prime positioning as Dex of the ecosystem. And you want to ensure that, you know, this chain isn't going to go against you.
Maintaining Strong Relationships
Like, they're not going to firstly not support you or they're not going to go and build their own competitor you and displace you when there's better terms or better kind of deal for them. And we've seen this happen in many ecosystems, so that's one. It's like very, you need to ensure that whoever you're kind of working with are competent, they're going to place well for the future, and you have a good working relationship with them. Now, on Terra B, Luna was built by Lido, right, the PDP, and they built the whole liquid staking for the terra ecosystem, which was the founders of Neutron.
Astroport's Strategic Decisions
So they were very involved in the terra ecosystem in different capacity. And they have a very close ranking relationship with Delphi Labs. They are very competent team, like the P two P guys. From a technical perspective, a relationship perspective and a go to market perspective, they're very switched on guys. And they had this vision for this permissionless cosmosm chain in the Cosmos ecosystem that was missing. Obviously, it has a lot of cool technical components to it as well, but also from who's behind this chain and the competence of the team behind. There was a lot to be said about the neutron team for Delphi Labs to astropor wasn't going to go rebuild from scratch in EVM.
Investment in the Cosmos Ecosystem
It just doesn't make sense from a code perspective. It's like we believe in the cosmos, we believe there's potential here. Where is the best bet for us to go? It could have gone on osmosis, which. Osmosis is its own Dex, and it has interesting dynamics of how they interact with applications in the ecosystem. Typically, osmosis is an app chain first, ecosystem second. In terms, they always prioritize a value to their own token or value to their own app chain before the rest.
Choosing Neutron
So it's not always a great chain for, I guess, apps to build on because there's always upgrades and various things and so really the only option that made sense was neutron. I mean, they deployed on injective, they deployed on say and stuff, but those teams have their own plans and their own kind of ways of operating and it didn't necessarily make sense to have a hub there. So, yeah, as report chose neutron as the ecosystem and Mars also moved its hub over to neutron. So I don't know if that answers the question, but, yeah, maybe gives you a bit of color of where that happened.
Understanding the Context
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's good to have context around how do we get to here? I feel like we've had a really good story time up until this point. It's sort of like, okay, here's history and now three to where we're up to right now. So I suppose that's the next question. Is this where we find ourselves with eclipse plugging into that? How do other projects plug into that? Are we at the Astro wars phase yet where it's like, okay, what does that mean?
Back to December
Yeah, great question. So let's go back to December. We, you know, we decided to build our home base on Neutron. We did have some experiences with other chains such as, say, and Juno and a few others, and were sort of struggling to find our own home. As far as chains went in the past, it was always a bit of a nightmarish situation for different reasons. And, you know, after everything that happened with, say, you know, were having a lot of chats with asteroid team and we're having a lot of chats with Mars and these other protocols and, you know, they're like, come to neutron and we're like, okay. But we're not sure. You know, it's small. There isn't a lot going on.
Forming Relationships
Got to, like, got to know the neutron team pretty well. And I'm like, okay, I know that this chain isn't going to be a hype chain that's going to go out and say they've got 200 apps and do this sort of stuff. But I believe that long term, these guys are in it for the long haul. I was pretty disheartened with some of these bigger, new l ones that kind of were playing these hype games where, you know, they would say one thing and then the team was selling OTC bags on the retail in the background and doing all sorts of dodgy stuff. And I'm like, you know, are these guys really in it for the long term? Are they going to have the right intentions for an ecosystem? Are we going to get the right support? So we chose to go to Neutron.
Astroport Collaboration
And then were talking quite a length of astroport and the contributors to Astra. We really want to work with a launchpad in the ecosystem. We want to create the synergistic relationship between a launchpad and the DeX. We believe that launchpads are really important to ecosystems or important to the DeX, but we're not going to build our own Dex. We're not going to build our own launchpad on top of Astro port. So we'd love for you guys to fill in that we worked on a proposal called Arc 75, which was a fee sharing proposal on Astro, so you could basically share in the fees that were listed on the protocol. And then we took it a step further and we started looking at differentiators.
Creating a Moat
And as a launchpad, how do you create a moat? So how do you create an unfair advantage where you have something that projects want or that people want, that give you kind of an irreplaceable advantage in the marketplace? And that's very powerful for startups. Right? Tech can be copied, processes can be copied, but if you can create, like a strategic positioning or advantage that is hard to copy or that gives people a reason to want to go with you or go to you, then that puts you in a really good place, especially if you're on Launchpad, where a lot of launchpad are commoditized, where it's like, why would should we go with your launchpad? And typically it comes down to, like, fees, or it comes down to the number of users or a whole range of different things.
Solidifying Position
These differences, obviously, sometimes you've got mechanisms that change things, but for the most part, it's a commoditized game. So we're like now within cosmos. How do we really solidify our position as the launchpad for the ecosystem? How do we attract some of these bigger projects that are maybe a little bit hard for a regular launchpad to reach chains and all sorts of things. And there's a team that had built a kind of convex, a governance aggregator on Juno just to play around with wind and a few other things at a small scale. And we decided to acquire them. So we acquired AJ from that, and we essentially then had to rebuild a lot of it.
Combining Governance and Launchpad
And we had to look at the new model that AShRAe was proposing for Equinox. And we said, why don't we try and combine a governance aggregator with a launchpad? Because they both kind of, they have different intentions, but they both tie into each other very well. Both are really vying for the new launches in the ecosystem. Both are trying to create liquidity for projects and deepen liquidity for projects. And they're both playing in the same space but with different uses.
Merging Mechanisms
One is trying to deepen liquidity for projects and helping to boost pools on a Dex and the other one is listing tokens and actually helping them to get liquidity. So we're like okay, what if we merge the two? And we created a bond between a governance aggregator and a launchpad and helped to create a model which would attract projects to come to it because there's a chance of getting liquidity and voting power for their pools. That also helped to funnel liquidity towards the pools of the projects that we launched because that would help with sustainability. And how do we create like a flywheel effect around this?
Launching Mechanisms
Because if this was done well and you create a demand for the token, you could create a really cool relationship where astroport becomes much more attractive as a listing venue even from outside of neutron. Because if a chain wants to get incentives, their token, they can go list on osmosis, but they're not guaranteed to get Osmo incentives, they're not guaranteed to get liquidity incentives. But if they can come to neutron, they can tap into this governance aggregator and they can get incentives to their pool. Suddenly it makes astroport a more attractive place to list your token.
Creating Demand
And if it's an attractive place to list your token, then volume typically goes up, which can obviously mean more fees, there's more demand for the token to control liquidity. And then you create these really powerful flyer effects. And then if you got a launchpad and this listing venue is more attractive, then where you're going to go list your token if you have to choose between multiple options. So it's kind of like how do we create this crazy effect? And that's sort of what birthed the combination of equinox and eclipse as a launchpad.
Adjusting Governance Models
And how do we synergize the dynamics. So then we had to really dig into the mechanisms and figure out how to adjust a governance model so it fits a launchpad, how to actually adjust the model to the new format that Astra was creating their VX Astro around and how we could make that work in an efficient way that would still be attractive to projects and users and still make economic sense. And we spent like a good amount of time on that and we got to like some pretty good conclusions where we got to a model that actually works, you know, from that perspective.
Summary of Developments
And we just spent the time to refine it until we got to a good conclusion, which is a big part of what aligns it all. It's an ongoing investment of time and effort into making Equinox a featured platform and protocol. We have streamlined our process to be coding and testing quicker than previous to that moment where it took a while to get the application built. Now it's much smoother thanks to our brilliant development team. Our guys have come a long hard way and they're just starting to motor along with new projects. So yeah, that's sort of how it all came about.
Equinox in Context
I know it's a long story time, but it hopefully gives you some context on how that all came about. Yeah, I mean, it's a, like, I know this is meant to be a multiple part show, so that's okay. So basically it's a who's who in the zoo, I think. And then obviously we take a much deeper dive as we go further into the show subsequently. But I suppose it brings us to our next thing is equinox itself.
Explaining Equinox
Do we want to dive a little bit into that and give more information and then also. Then strip it back to the. The Eli five version if I'm a user, for example, because I think there's two main things here, right? And it's as a protocol, how do I plug into astrowars, astro port, et cetera. And as a user, how does it affect me to plug into that as well?
Astro Wars Dynamics
Yep, makes sense. So first, I'll just finish off the last question I think you talked about before about like, who's coming up for the Astro wars. I think it's like the game's being played slightly different this time around and it's being played differently because Astro is now multi chain. And so this is going to be controlling all of this across multiple chains, not just a singular chain. Secondly, we've seen different players really come into the mix than they were back on Terra.
Emerging Participants
So the three different players that are really coming up, firstly, we're getting chains. So we had like a situation where the TFL accumulated a couple million in Astro and we're playing the game. Neutron has a large holdings of Astro as well. So chains were starting to kind of play this game around. Like how do we redirect liquidity incentives to our apps? Secondly, you got LSD protocols.
LSD Protocols
So Cosmos had a lot of these LSD's and these LSD's really need to have liquidity for the derivative tokens and their pools. So you got like stride drop, milky Way, multiple different LSD providers persistence, different liquidity providers that really need to kind of get incentives onto their pools on a Dex. And so that's one component of it. And a third one that's really new and exciting is DAOs integrated dyno here from Nucleus council has built some pretty cool mechanisms for accumulation of Astro.
The Role of DAOs
And so yeah, we're seeing a lot of DAOs sort of aggregate act as kind of mini aggregators in their own right for communities that help to kind of pull the power to kind of influence incentives, which is going to be really interesting. When we have a few of these communities playing in the astrowars and acting as kind of like power brokers across the ecosystem and aligning with projects and doing all sorts of cool things, I think it's going to be quite interesting, and I'm excited to see that.
Benefits for Users
So we're sort of seeing that we will see projects participating in this as well. But, yeah, we're sort of. Yeah, we're sort of seeing the game played in a different way. Now, the last question you asked ties into what are the USP's, maybe what are the benefits to the users and all the different parties involved in Equinox. How do, I dunno, how do eclipse stakers benefit? How do astro stakers benefit from this?
User Engagement and Emissions
So in the model that we created, we managed to put together a pretty interesting model that essentially allowed for users to lock their astro in Equinox and receive both boosted astro emissions and eclip tokens on top of it. So even if you took out the kind of extra eclipse emissions, we've managed to put together a model that actually means that users both participating in both types of pools are able to get increased astro emissions. I'm not going to dive too deep into the mechanism because it's fairly bit complex, but we played around with internal governance and a few things in a way that we could redirect a portion of the yield from the LP people towards the single sided vault, and then managed to use a portion of that voting power to actually send astro emissions to the LP pool.
Sacrificing and Gaining
So we managed to create kind of a effect that boosts astro emissions on top of both pools. And then on top of it, there will be clip emissions on top, which that's where it gets interesting. So essentially, as a user, the USP is you, essentially, I guess, like sacrifice, locking your Astro, and in return you're actually sacrificing your voting power and getting like much increased emissions in return. The voting power is then controlled by eclipse stakers.
Voting Mechanisms
We've got a pretty cool mechanism that kind of comes into play for that. Not going to go too deep into details, but we've got a couple of announcements coming as well on how we've made that, like, a lot more accessible to users. But essentially, like, Eclipse stakers will now, through cosmic essence, will control both access to launches like they do on the regular launchpad. But they'll also be able to basically vote on where the Astro emissions go that equinox holds, and they'll be able to also get bribes so people could, like, protocols can come along and they can, you know, provide tributes or bribes and users can earn extra fees by essentially either voting on specific pools or they'll be able to delegate their voting power to a voting DAOs, which will kind of vote on their behalf.
Incentives for Projects
So that's like from the, I guess the astro holders can get extra emissions and incentives. The eclipse stakers can control voting power or they can delegate and get bribes and rewards. So if they don't want to vote themselves actively, they can delegate that to a DAO, which goes and puts it into different kind of pools and gets bribes. And then for projects, the interesting one is the projects can do a couple of things.
Efficiency of Eclipse
So firstly, they can accumulate eclipse and get better bang for buck by accumulating eclipse over Astro. So we're putting the calculations together at the moment, based on the current model, we've actually just built a calculator using cursor. For what kind of efficiency do you get? I think it's, at this current point, I think it's looking like eclipse staking is four times more efficient, four times better value than astro in terms of voting power.
Potential Changes in Voting Power
Now this will change and the calculator is meant to be dynamic, but there's also a scenario where it might be up to eight times and that will be released soon. If you could get eight times more voting power by accumulating one eclipse as opposed to an astro, that's kind of powerful. That was kind of like, and it does depend on how much gets locked and all this sort of stuff. But that's sort of like what we've been playing with the calculators.
Redirecting Votes
So for a project, it could be make much more economical sense to actually accumulate voting power if they want to redirect that to their pools. So yeah, that's a couple of the dynamics, but we'll tie into also using a portion of the voting power to redirect towards projects that are launching too. So there's a couple dynamics at play, but projects that come and launch will be in a better position to kind of get liquidity for their pools.
Attractiveness for Launching
So it will become like an attractive venue and kind of kick off the flywheel. So yeah, hopefully that answers the question. But yeah, I think that's excellent. And it helps to tap in not to just like Equinox itself, but how projects, as an example, launching through eclipse and how important it is obviously liquidity and everything like that.
Launch Success Factors
Because as a project that's launching, there's a few things you've got to tick the box along the way. Right? Like you have to have active liquidity. You've got to have a variety of other things in order for your launch to be smooth, successful, etc. So to have extra mechanisms that are being built out. And I know we've got a lot of stuff.
Development Pipeline
I suppose it's in the pipeline. I don't know if there's any cheeky alpha that you want to share because there's. I mean, there's always cheeky Alpha. But yeah, we can't obviously, say too much about some of the things we're building, but is there anything in there that you want to let any of the cheeky information out? Yeah, Joe's trying to tap into the loose lip.
Development Team's Efficiency
Simon. Yeah, I'm not. Add some coke, you know, so I'm not going to. Coke. Coca Cola. Yes. This guy. So let me try and not release too much alpha. Let's say we've got a couple of things that we are building right now that are not related to launches, but they will be related to launches where we're essentially, we've got a cracked dev team now. They're able to ship at Lightspeed.
Restructuring Efforts
A lot of the first half of this year, we spent restructuring the dev team, getting through tech debt. I think the devs had to rebuild pretty much everything from scratch in the first half of the year. The front ends and everything. Then the team got really efficient and close, and now they're able to push out code on an insanely fast perspective. We have a Gantt chart with literally seven different product lines being built at once of insane.
Progress and Development
And we see them, like, progressing through it. It's like, I'm gonna be like, okay, we got to redo the website of the navigation.
Design and Integration Process
And then, like, three days later, the front end guy's finished. So just try to juggle. Like, we've got, like, the design. Like, I'm working with the designer. We got this design process coming through product and prds, and then we're moving into, like, you know, we've got architectural phase and then smart contract guys working while the design is getting finished, and then it's passed on to the front end team for integration and then testing in and out. So over the next couple of months, you're going to see a lot of stuff getting shipped out pretty quickly. We wanted to really focus on being a powerful hub for Neutron. And even though token launches are still our primary focus, we wanted to really be like, how can we be that front end? How can we be that onboarding for the ecosystem? How can we have products that synergize into the launches and help to increase that experience.
Token Launch Strategy
So you'll see a couple of things coming up pretty soon that we're playing with and exploring and that will tie in and it will eventually plug back into token launches. That's the goal, but yeah, so we're building these products in parallel. The one thing that I will say is Equinox will be able to, I think there's a couple of these avenues that Equinox will beneficial for as well. So if we can control liquidity lp like voting power, there's some cool things we can do with that if we have some of that power. So that's the goal. The one piece of alpha that I will drop on this call. Are you ready for it, Joe? I'm ready. Give it to me. So we have officially penciled the date for the lock drop of Equinox.
Upcoming Lock Drop Announcement
Are you going to give us the date or. Yes, I am going to give you the date. Go on. So the lock drop for Equinox will begin on the 21 October. You have no idea how much of me in my ADHD brain wanted to mute you just for that moment. It begins on just silence. And that would have been the best. And I'll just end the space. No, no. One more time. So the lock drop for Equinox will begin on the 21 October. So we're going to release this kind of twitter after this spaces. But we will be doing a seven day lock drop. So it will be five days deposit phase and a two day withdrawal phase.
Details of the Lock Drop
We've done the testnet for this already publicly, but we're going to be dropping some more details on how it works and how it's all going to operate. Essentially we'll get through the lock drop and then essentially the launch of Equinox will happen shortly afterwards. That's obviously based on the launch of the ex Astro, of course, but yeah. So this is finally, after all this time, building Equinox and everything going on, audits and everything going on, we're finally going to go into the lock drop for Equinox and we've got a pretty big month ahead of content and go to market happening for the build up of this. So that's going to be a perfect opportunity for people to earn extra rewards.
Participation in the Lock Drop
So essentially the lockdrop is going to be a limited time event which is going to allow people to deposit their Astro in the lockdrop. And obviously they'll get the benefit, the ongoing benefits of normally depositing into Equinox, but there will also be a pool of tokens to be captured from that for the lockdrop phase. So that's going to be really exciting, especially for those that, you know, really interested in kind of getting all these benefits for their Astro. We should see some pretty heavy participation. We have some pretty big astro whale relationships and a lot of the key movers. So I've got pretty high expectations for the success of the lockdrop being a key player.
Anticipation for Ecosystem Participation
And obviously, the more voting power that the lockdrop accumulates, the more powerful equinox becomes. So, yeah, that's the news. That's the alpha is the final launch of the date. It's finally happening. We've squeezed it out of you. So I guess the question is, if I'm a community member, what are some of the things that I can do now to get myself prepared for that moment for lockdrop coming up? Like, do I need to stack bags? Like, what do I need to do to make sure that I'm ready to rock and roll on day go? Yeah, so, I mean, you're going to see a lot of content coming up in different forms, spaces, collaborations and all this sort of stuff.
Accumulating Astro Tokens
I think accumulating Astro is probably a pretty decent idea. The only thing is we should see, once Astro finally releases VX Astro, you should see some pretty high demand kicking into the market. So you should see some. I think you'll see some moves happening. I think we're already seeing it with Astro over the last few days. It's gone up 30 or 40%, so we're seeing some moves on Astro. Definitely a good idea to be accumulating Astro on that front as. Yeah, that's going to be kind of potentially your opportunity to get some. I think that's really, it just kind of really staying in the loop is going to be important.
Community Engagement and Content Creation
If you want to create content as well, feel free to reach out to the team. There's going to be a lot of cool content opportunities and a lot of stuff coming out around the astro. We can have a lot of spaces, but, yeah, just get that Astro ready and get ready for the lock drop and get ready for some excitement and some fireworks. Yeah. And I can say as well, obviously leading up to that and during that phase, we are going to have a lot of communication guides, all that sort of stuff that come out from the community side, but we're also going to have a lot of spaces happening.
Final Thoughts and Wrap Up
I swear, we've had this conversation. It's not just me off on a tangent. He's probably like, I'm very surprised by this. Yeah. So, you know, we do have a lot of stuff that will be coming up to make it really easy for you to plug in as well if you haven't just been listening to this space, for example. So I suppose that's a like, that is an absolute fire hose of information for everybody for this last hour. We've had a full history lesson. We've had a full wraparound. We've had a squeezed out bit of alpha, I suppose, to give us a wrap up because otherwise, like I said, if you allow me and you to go off on tangents, it's going to be like when I had deployed Don on here as well, where the second half of the show gets real crazy.
Community Feedback and Wrap Up
So let's start to look for a wrap up. Is there anything we need to add in? Is there anything stage needs to know? Yeah. The one thing I would say is if you've been involved in the terror in the previous days, in the past, I know that sort of had this chat with integrated, it's probably a good opportunity to talk to old Tarot holders or contributors, those that are kind of aligned to Astro. It's going to be really about like, this is going to be a win game for everybody that's playing in the Astrowars is that, you know, the more attention this gets, the more excitement happens around the astrowars, the kind of the better the effects that happen.
