March RevCast

https://rss.com/podcasts/revcast/

In our very first RevCast, Chadly, Xam, Entropy and Shien110 sit down to talk through what’s been achieved in the past month (March, 2022) and then to delve into detail concerning a range of topics, including Singularity, veCREDIT, the Revenant Labs Community, and more. Let’s dive in.

Progress in March

Bribing the Stable Credit Sonata

Revenant Labs is now actively taking part in the Beets Bribing Wars. We will continue this battle, looking to incentivise the Stable Credit Sonata, which drives more liquidity to the pool. You can read more about that here. So far there has been 20,489 CREDIT paid out in bribes and we intend to continue incentivising this pool (in part to be more involved with the community, but also because it creates more potential rewards for CREDIT holders). Bribing the pool has also brought more attention to Creditum and Revenant Labs, which is a notable benefit in itself.

veCREDIT Going Live

Prior to veCREDIT, xCREDIT was the staking model used. The recent migration to ve-locking has now been completed. So, what was the rationality behind this?

Well, a few reasons.

Initially, xCREDIT was a good model to incentivise people to stake, but not intimidate them with locking periods. Now that the protocol is evolving, the intention is to build better, long term commitments with users — as those are the ones we would like to have governance control.

The length of lock times ranges from 1 week to 4 years, so for maximum returns on locked tokens, users will need to commit for the maximum amount of time — with veCREDIT, that’s 4 years.

With governance in mind, our long term goal is to decentralise as much as possible. As of now, the protocol retains quite a lot of governance power. However this is because, initially, new protocol’s need a little more power to make sure the foundation of the project is sturdy and built the way it was envisioned.

In the next few weeks, we will be implementing on-chain governance in the form of interest-rate control. While interest rate increase/decrease is determined by how balanced the pool is, veCREDIT will allow users to vote which collateral this interest rate change will affect.

So far, there has been $113,657 in fees distributed to veCREDIT holders. Fees are just one benefit for veCREDIT holders — there is intention over time for veCREDIT holders to have governance power over new collaterals and interest rates — effectively making them the “Fed” of the Creditum protocol.

New UI

A great deal of credit needs to be given to youngseebi. The new UI is still a work in progress and we are always listening closely to feedback from the community. We do believe that it looks significantly cleaner and more professional than the old one, and that we’re travelling in the right direction. There has also been some confusion about URL changes and, moving forward, we will remove revenant.finance completely. Everything will be combined into revenantlabs.io, which will hopefully simplify things across the board.

Current and Future Projects

Singularity

Singularity is on track, but has undergone an entire overhaul which has required a new set of audits, and another round of detailed testing. We want to offer the best possible product we can, so we rethought our whole approach. Ultimately this lead us to producing a useful, top class product for our users. As quality is of utmost importance, we are taking all the time we need to make sure it is ready and done right.

Singularity takes a novel approach to bonding curves, allowing very low slippage between pairs. It still needs more thorough testing as it is an innovative, new idea, but it will offer end users the best possible rate on their swaps.

Documentation for Singularity will be coming out in the next few days along with a release date for the beta.

Why does cUSD exist?

Increasingly, we perceive cUSD as taking an internal route, as opposed to an external route (like MIM or MAI, for example). For us, cUSD does not primarily exist to have external use cases beyond the Revenant Labs ecosystem. Instead, cUSD is a massive bootstrap for future protocols such as Singularity.

There is huge utility in having control over our own stablecoin when we do introduce new features or new protocols.

Community

Why does community matter?

We believe that community matters enormously. In juxtaposition with traditional finance (tradfi), decentralised finance(defi) champions the idea of community. The community provides a safety net in a decentralised world where in the centralised world, there are no authorities who exist specifically to provide that safety net. An active community helps to keep the users of a protocol safer, as a result from their own curiosity and shared exploration.

The best protocols tend to evolve symbiotically with their user-base. Not only do protocols adapt and change as a result of user input, but users become empowered by the additional knowledge that they absorb as part of their journey.

Commitment and Engagement

Protocols can create digital commitment, as a result of veTOKEN models, like veCREDIT, but they cannot necessarily cultivate digital engagement in such a simple manner. Instead, engagement needs to be incentivised in a unique way. This can be done through events, ongoing flow of educational resources, in-person engagement from community leaders, and when and where possible and pertinent, through the developers themselves.

Keeping things fun and making conversation natural are overall good routes to encourage more engagement. Previously we’ve trialled Kahoot, a trivia style game, which allows users to challenge each other on their knowledge of the protocol and compete to see who can score the highest. Moving forward, we are potentially interested in gamifying engagement again.

Benefits of Engagement

It is important that people can see that their engagement brings them tangible benefits. That might be in the form of escalation to a place on a team, or it may be as simple as being able to distribute more accurate knowledge about the protocol to a wider audience. Decentralised finance has really brought down the barriers that would traditionally prevent people from having engaging conversations with thought leaders and developers in the space. With a bit of confidence, perseverance, and a willingness to muck in, users can have fascinating, enlightening conversations surprisingly easily.

Developers and the Community

For developers, there can be a chasm between them and the community. This can be alleviated to some degree by empowering users via educational material. Iif developers can trust that their users have a mutual knowledge set, it makes discussions substantially easier.

Having access to developers is important, but balancing this is also really important for the time management of developers who are often extraordinarily busy. This is an ongoing learning experience, for both users and developers — patience is key!