April: Monthly Update
Before we close out and recap April, let us take a quick look ahead: First off, the Stacking Rewards Programme will realize its’ debut contribution starting mid to late May. We will provide a seperate ANN around the 15th regarding the new program. In the meantime another 1,000,000 BOND tokens have been allocated to the LP rewards program. We believe with certitude that the Multi-asset Stacking program will constitute a pleasant surprise and boon for Bond holders.
Secondarily, as we incorporate our new public relations firm, we are going to be gaining exposure for Bond in more traditional markets. While such content may not be groundbreaking to the crypto cognoscenti, sharing our product offering and helping to educate the masses on the potency of DeFi bodes well for us and the space on the whole. Our new PR partners shall be making a formal announcement within the week.
To commence with our first community-inspired monthly update, let us begin by addressing some questions gathered by our telegram incumbents.
- “You’ve stated that the strategy involves having little communication until things are almost ready…”
Our strategy does not “involve having little communication.” This was never stated or even implied but we’ll reluctantly say “we get what you mean.” From a truly neutral place, we can say that we publish 4–5 posts per month all of which demonstrate meaningful progress. There are almost no projects outside the top 100 that match this. To the community’s point, our overall communication is neither prolific nor reticent. To acknowledge the community’s point, we have now officially engaged with a PR firm and we are underway. As stated in the Telegram, we do prefer to put out more meaningful content via our Medium although our PR strategy will involve more general, educational material which may not fit our personal definition of meaningful.
- We always talk about the audit, as the event that will start all the things (roadmap, product deployment etc), can you give more details about the audit process, what are the more recents error you found? What are the solutions you are implementing?
As stated previously in this “When Audit” post, the primary issue was how gas intensive the transactions would be. Our ambition to catalogue risk, volatility and data points of hundreds of altcoins in a lending protocol while insuring quick settlement of contracts, prompt liquidations and security of capital without impacting costs carries a high degree of difficulty—that is not an excuse. Nonetheless, the audit exposed the algorithmic process would not have been able to scale effectively. Resultant to this and other less weighty concerns, we decided on what essentially constituted a rebuild. We immediately went out and found additional resources, put them on the case and focused on the build. This is the solution we are implementing.
- What is the order of the products you are going to reveal? Any plans on having more products on the platform?
Yes, Bonded has continued to iterate to the chagrin of many at times but we are committed to capitalizing on opportunity. The first and also a new product is The Stacking Rewards Program which was not listed among our original suite but something we believe can deliver value in the short-term and beyond. Next up will be our hybrid stable dollar known as USB. From there, we will continually roll out our product line contingent upon development and commercial opportunity.
- What is the role of David D with the team and therefore, whats the implications of Avalaunch in the project? Are you looking towards other ecosystems?
David continues to be a vital resource and advises with Paul every day. While we are always looking to build our network of partners, it is too early to discuss anything in regards to Avalaunch.
- What’s your relationship with Glitch Finance, is it the solution you are planning to solve gas costs?
Glitch is one of our newest network partners and a project we believe we will have an ongoing relationship with. Solving our gas costs concern was a matter of how technically intensive the operations we were performing; firstly, the processes needed to be simplified. This had to be done on our end but we’re open to additional solutions and would not hesitate to look to Glitch.
- Is L2 (matic) deployment a solution you may take to address the gas fee problem?
As many know, Polygon (formerly Matic) is one of our first partners. We anticipated gas costs being a potential hurdle early on and it is a great source of frustration that it became the single biggest contributor to our delay. If you read on, you will see some of the outcome of that frustration. Yes, low friction integrations are appealing but the most important thing is to code methodologies and processes that are as simple and therefore, as low fee as possible. This streamlining is one of the reasons while real DeFi projects require genuinely world class developers.
Roadmap
The updated roadmap is something we’d like to address. It is being revised although we would not have been able to put things like the Stacking Rewards Programme in—which came together rather expeditiously. We will publicly publish an updated roadmap in June.
Testnet
The V0.1 iteration of the Bonded testnet is now live and can be found at bonded.finance. As has been stated on numerous occasions, we aggressively began a rebuild. What is now live, is a depiction of an older version and we are well aware of the quirks and small errors that may be evident to those that have a look around. While the updated versions will be more reflective of our final version, this testbed beta is for users to familiarize themselves with Bonded products.
Nonetheless, this represents a milestone of sorts and something we are quite happy to have behind us. On a much more positive note, we are supremely confident in our existing, pooled development resources. Our consultants, Cyber Unit, are able to handily supplement our development resources and are assisting with our product build.
With tech now both in-house and some outsourced, there is much lying ahead. Again, it is worth noting that what one currently sees is not reflective of the actual UI we will be deploying. Without question, we have significant changes coming and we will begin sharing it publicly as we gain comfort with our foothold in the market. Though the live test-net is not our final interface, in the name of transparency we thought it prudent to release some of the code. The intentional limits portend some interesting developments in terms of new ways to combine and extract value from what will surely be a volatile collection of assets. We will work siloed in order to capitalize on our head start in creating what we believe to be a novel innovation in DeFi. Development contends that our forthcoming demonstration of what’s possible will be something that other projects may wish to build upon. Despite our past obstacles, we are now well underway.
2.3% Of the Total Supply Burned
Bonded stated that the initial product delay was the result of severe dissatisfaction with developers and that resultant to this, personnel changes were made. While statements like this are commonplace, we were sincere in our convictions. Yes, our business development has outpaced our technical development and this is something of a luxury problem. Making the platform more dynamic and accommodating a greater number of partners is by all accounts, a good thing although the market does not always commensurately reflect progress. Nonetheless, mistakes were made which we owned.
To demonstrate our convictions, the keys for the wallet with the tokens slated for the accountable individuals are officially burned. This is essentially a dead wallet where they will live in perpetuity. We are not here to name and shame but to move forward and consider these earmarked tokens to be reflective of a stagnancy we hoped to avoid. We did not seek to reclaim them as we are well positioned to stay on course and to be appropriately rewarded when successful. Below is a link to the dead wallet with 23m tokens i.e. 2.3% of the total supply. These tokens are now essentially burned—may it rest in peace.
The road has been long and fraught with obstacles along with a perfunctory amount of peril. We have drawn the ire of our community as well as their support. We have made numerous strides and had our share of setbacks. Finally, we are getting to the rollout stage of the business. To that end, expect to see more activity on socials, a strengthening public relations presence and added media exposure. Additionally, from May onwards, we are going to finally reveal some of the technical aspects of our product so our spirited but patient community can glean a sense of what we’ve been working on.
Onward and upward.
-Bonded
About Bonded
The Bonded platform was created to incubate and deploy experimental, high-yield, smart-contract driven, financial instruments that push the bounds of open finance. Bonding is an algorithmic model that aims to unlock, aggregate and de-risk ~50 billion in dormant value distributed amongst untapped digital assets by allowing supporters of qualifying altcoin projects the opportunity to borrow against these assets or pool them and start earning.
