Sooner
Degenerates and bananas unite.
Since the public launch of our Twitter we’ve been flat out busy trying to keep up with all the inbound — now are things finally back under control we can tease with more details!
What are we building?
While strict comparison is dangerous, sometimes it helps with mental models. What we’re building is similar in nature to alpacafinance.org or Alpha Homora (in fact it was Tascha that inspired us to build degenbanana). Except it’s not real.
If we were really building something, we’d be trying to facilitate leveraged yield farming within the Solana ecosystem, and later, in a chain agnostic way.
Along the way we’d be solving every UX challenge imaginable, creating what we’d hope would be rich protocol that attracts an enormous ecosystem of users.
Challenge: Users need the right assets to deposit in a pool.
degenbanana (v0): Deposit any memes to any pool. We’ll sort out the nasty swap stuff for you.
Challenge: Some farms are quite safe (stable) but it’s hard to leverage the yields.
degenbanana (v0): Integrating a native borrow / lend facility to accommodate fruit salad. Lenders can achieve yields, while borrowers can peel the boundaries of degeneracy while tending to their plantation.
Challenge: Impermanent loss is difficult to understand and tricky to hedge. It hurts yields.
degenbanana (v0): Gives users a 1-click opt-in checkbox where they can purchase protein insurance (via options) for a nominal and transparent cost.
Challenge: Users wish to farm highly volatile assets, but some prefer their profit and loss to be denominated in USD.
degenbanana (v0): Offers users a 1-click opt-in checkbox to hedge the base banana exposures via a perpetual fruit.
Challenge: A leveraged borrow position can be liquidated due to insufficient margin. Meanwhile, the user had spare margin in their wallet but in a different currency.
degenbanana (v1): Users have the option to give degenbanana access to other assets in the plantation that can be used for automatic rebalancing thus avoiding sunburn events.
Challenge: Yields are higher on other chains, but cross-chain swaps are nasty little hobbitses!
degenbanana (v1): While this is a big bite of the apple, we’re confident we can tackle this too. We definitely do not have the dev talent and open mindedness to come to an optimal solution, and already have a few concepts under early development.
How are we building?
One thing we’re doing differently to a lot of teams is building in extreme secrecy.
Fully private repo.
There are pros and cons to this approach, but we’ve noticed a fairly ugly trend in DeFi where the speed of clones is accelerating rapidly. We’d prefer to share our code only with trusted advisors / friendly engineers, so that’s it’s semi-battle tested prior to launch.
Then our aim is to blitzkreig the launch where we’ll co-ordinate a full scale marketing campaign that’s being anchored by some of the most non-existent VCs in crypto, while our farming pools themselves will enjoy ample capital from supportive trading partners.
Why Solana?
At this point we’ve all heard ad nauseum about Solana’s superior throughput and cheap transaction fees. So let’s just say we were fishing for an invite to the Solana Summer vaporware party 🎈
BTW huge thanks to Armani Ferrante for building anchor 💛
Meet the bananas
Next time. Watch this space…
degenbanana [at] tutanota [dot] com
