Monthly Update: August 2022
Dear Fringe community,
Another month of working to make Fringe the go-to place for permissionless altcoin-backed loans has just finished. We have listed new assets at an accelerated pace, reaching 15 accepted collateral types. We’re also testing new strategies to develop our community reach, all the while the development of our product continues.
Now, let’s get into the details!
Product Development
The Staking Platform contracts have been audited
The smart contract audit for the Staking Platform is now complete. We’ve reworked issues from the initial audit and have re-submitted the codebase for a re-check, with the auditors confirming that all issues were addressed as required.
We’re now in the process of deploying to Mainnet, with a first pass via Testnet in an abundance of caution to ensure no regressions were introduced by the audit items’ re-work.
Once we’ve checked and then deployed our staking contracts to Mainnet, we will have our auditors confirm the codebase on Mainnet is the codebase they successfully audited. Then, both parties will publicly release the audit results.
The launch of the Staking Platform will be joined by a multi-faceted strategy including aspects such as the incentivization of trading pair liquidity providers, lenders, incentive programs offered by our partners, and more. As these programs are implemented, they will be monitored and adjusted to achieve their maximum effectiveness and best use of the Fringe Treasury.
More details to follow.
Primary Lending Platform interface update
We have some minor UI updates for the PLP pending release. These include the more compact display of some large numbers, social media interactivity, and additional anonymous user behavior statistics to allow the team to deliver a better product.
Our bug bounty program continues
Our Immunefi bug bounty program was released last month and continues. In the past month, Fringe Finance has paid out several well-considered bug reports from white hat hackers. We have also received additional bug reports, and the team continues to work through these.
We are very pleased to advise that none of the current bug reports are related to any direct risk to funds locked in the platform.
This bug bounty program is an ongoing key aspect of our approach to security. With the future release of new Fringe Finance roadmap items, we will extend our bug bounty program accordingly. As Fringe Finance’s TVL increases over time, we will scale bug bounty rewards to continue attracting the valued attention of the white hat hacker community.
USB Platform development
We continue the development of the USB platform, and it continues to cycle through testing and re-work. We will provide further updates as we progress toward a smart contract audit.
Interest rate model update
Fringe Finance has designed and developed a new interest rate model to better serve the needs of our lenders and borrowers. The interest rate model is a core component of the PLP and, given that interest underpins why any lending platform is useful, its importance cannot be overstated.
The impetus for updating Fringe’s interest rate model is that the existing model results in very poor capital efficiency. This poor capital efficiency manifests as low utilization rates, meaning that only a small % of lenders’ funds are actually used by borrowers, while the majority are sitting idle.
Fringe’s new interest rate model, soon to be deployed to Mainnet, addresses this by automatically adjusting the interest rate upwards or downwards to target a much higher utilization rate of 80%.
A utilization rate below 80% indicates insufficient demand for borrowing and is now automatically responded to by a decrease in the interest rate. Conversely, a utilization rate above 80% indicates insufficient lender demand, and so is now automatically responded to by increasing the interest rate to attract more lenders.
As a result, Fringe will have much higher capital efficiency than incumbent lending platforms, and hence will be able to offer both lenders and borrowers superior interest rates.
Multi-chain
We continue testing our initial multi-chain roadmap, having deployed the PLP’s Testnet to Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Also, we’ve commenced testing with ZKSync 2.0. We anticipate this will give us a market advantage of being possibly the first lending platform available on ZKSync2.0.
As we progress, we will make further announcements.
DeFi ecosystem situation
In the past month, there have been actions taken by authorities in some jurisdictions in relation to DeFi, some of which have surprised the market.
Fringe Finance is assessing the implications of this and is determining any action we may need to take to maintain the integrity of the project and platform. Fringe Finance recognizes that DeFi’s core value proposition is its uncensorability, so we will be devising our response and action plan accordingly. As many will already be aware, Fringe’s roadmap and philosophy are to continue to deliver an increasingly decentralized solution to better assure its uncensorability.
We will make further statements in due course in relation to this evolving situation.
Fixed interest rates
We are progressing in the design of our fixed-interest solution. The recent market ecosystem machinations have caused us to add further assessment criteria in our due diligence to select the fixed-interest rate primitives with which we will integrate.
Our aim is to ensure our fixed-interest rate partner remains open-access for us to compose our fixed-rate lending solution.
New additions to our collateral list
In August, we upped last month’s efforts and managed to integrate double the amount of new collateral types into the Primary Lending Platform. In chronological order, the six newcomers are:
We have already started seeing borrowers take out loans against some of the above assets. Integrating new collaterals is a vital part of our strategy to increase platform usage and bring Fringe Finance into the big leagues in DeFi lending, so expect more listings throughout September!
Community & Marketing
Interacting with DAOs
In continuation of last month’s efforts to connect with DAOs and their communities and spread the word about the opportunity of using loans in Fringe to fund DAO operations, we approached several communities in August.
Fringe took part in ShapeShift’s Tokenomics Discord Call on August 2nd, presenting the ShapeShift Community with an opportunity to optimize their capital with permissionless loans. This also led to us hosting a Spaces on our own Twitter. We look forward to continuing to collaborate and interact with the ShapeShift DAO and community, as our visions seem to complement each other.
In Lido’s Governance Forum, we petitioned the Lido DAO to consider partially funding Lido operations through loans on Fringe’s PLP. The proposal resulted in a Twitter Spaces session to discuss the $LDO integration, permissionless lending opportunities, and bringing the two communities together.
These efforts will continue in the coming months as we consider them essential to growing a reputation for Fringe in the Ethereum DAO landscape.
More calls and AMAs
For the first time ever, Fringe hosted a Discord Community Call in an effort to uphold our commitment to transparency and increase our synergy in cooperating with token holders for the project’s success.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the call and invite those who couldn’t join us to the following one Join our Discord server and participate in all discussions about Fringe.
On September 1st, we will also have a session with prominent members of the $APE community discussing NFTs, and $APE, so makes sure to tune into that one!
Fringe Whitepaper v1.2
This month we finished a major revision of our Whitepaper. This update reflects everything that transpired after the release of our Platform and its first interaction with the market, which introduced new ideas, changed the scope of specific aspects of Fringe’s vision, and required a few adjustments to reflect the project’s current state and foreseeable future.
Whitepaper v1.2 brings better explanations of collateral asset parameter modeling, wording tweaks, updated diagrams on the Fringe Finance ecosystem’s workings, and more. It’s the most comprehensive look at Fringe’s vision, condensed into 45 information-rich pages.
Check it out on our website.
Media Features
Bankless Times wrote a piece on the current mass withdrawal of funds from exchanges. This piece features Brian Pasfield, Fringe’s CTO, as a consulted expert. Similarly, in CoinTelegraph’s piece on decentralized money markets, Fringe served as a prime example of how these protocols work. The article touches on the decentralization aspect, how an altcoin money market assures stability, and collateralization mechanics.
Fringe and its integration of $LDO as an accepted collateral type were also the subjects of an article on Crypto Daily. This very same article was reproduced in Binance’s Flash News segment!
About Fringe Finance
Fringe Finance is a decentralized money market designed to unlock the capital spread in crypto assets regardless of their capitalization and supported network. With a next-generation DeFi lending & borrowing ecosystem, Fringe aims to unlock the dormant capital from traditional financial markets and all-tier cryptocurrencies.
For more information on Fringe Finance, visit our website.
