Monthly Update: September

Fringe community,

As September ends, we invite you to wake up and have a peek at what we’ve been up to this month. Enhancing usability and disseminating Fringe’s platform is a continuous effort, which we sure are always proud of.

Let’s look at how we’ve fared on each front, shall we?

Product Development

Support for more lending assets is under development

Fringe Finance has commenced working towards allowing support for additional lending assets. These will be top-tier tokens, including ETH and stablecoins other than $USDC — the only asset currently supported for lending.

Support for multiple lending assets has been on our roadmap from the very start. However, the events of August in DeFi — namely sanctions on Tornado Cash and Circle blacklisting many addresses for $USDC — have prompted Fringe to focus on this feature to reduce the impacts of any further censorship attempts.

DeFi’s main value proposition is its censorship resistance. Let us never forget that.

Staking Platform

The Staking Platform has been transitioning into the Mainnet, and we’re ironing out lesser items to ensure its launch goes smoothly.

We’re also shaping the staking and rewards programs that will be offered, a matter of equal importance to the platform’s deployment. These programs are vital in promoting the adoption of the Fringe platform and will reflect the necessities of the platform to incentivize participation at any moment.

One of the first staking programs will focus on promoting lender and borrower adoption. We will achieve this by offering rewards to lenders, which also indirectly incentivizes borrowers.

The Staking Platform will reward lenders for staking their fTokens (Fringe’s yield-bearing tokens given to lenders when they deposit lending assets), boosting the effective interest rate enjoyed by them. Ultimately, this results in lower (more attractive) interest rates for borrowers.

Staking programs require careful design to achieve their objectives and utilize capital effectively. The Staking Platform and its programs are critical parts of Fringe’s strategy to promote sustainable adoption. We expect to make more announcements about this very soon.

Improvements to the interest rate model

Fringe currently uses Compound’s interest rate model, which has a few peculiarities that can be optimized to deliver better capital efficiency. As a result, we’ve developed an improved interest rate model, which we will be deploying after more testing.

The current interest rate model targets an interest rate, whereas our upcoming interest rate model has a utilization rate target. The improved model will reduce interest rates while the utilization rate is lower than the target. Conversely, interest rates will increase when the utilization rate exceeds the target.

This results in better capital efficiency and will better reflect the market’s needs. We believe it is paramount to deliver this improvement. It is a foundational part of a lending platform that we wish to ensure is optimized as we move forward with the rest of our roadmap.

Other technical developments

Simultaneously, we’re working on a number of upgrades and enhancements.

Fringe continues testing multi-chain support, is finalizing its fixed-interest solution’s approach, refining the USB Stablecoin Platform, and will release a Time Delay Governance Monitoring UI.

The Time Delay Governance Monitoring UI is an open-source tool that will allow anyone to host it. With it, interested parties can easily have trustless visibility of upcoming time-delayed governance changes. This is part of our strategy of trust minimization as another step towards the Fringe project ultimately transitioning into a DAO governance model.

All-in-all, our development efforts have kept us very busy during September. As we progress with all of these initiatives, expect more announcements.

New additions to our collateral list

Six new collateral types have been integrated throughout September, raising the total to 22 accepted tokens! The recent arrivals are, in chronological order:

• Kyber Network’s $KNC
• Frax Protocol’s $FXS
• Ocean Protocol’s $OCEAN
• Tokenlon’s $LON
• 0x’s $ZRX
• Paxos’ gold-pegged stablecoin $PAXG

This continued unfolding of our strategy is significant because one of our key value propositions is supporting many collateral asset types. The more collateral assets Fringe can list, the greater the platform’s utility will be to the broader DeFi ecosystem, while Fringe further differentiates itself from other lending platforms. We have also been happy to see some of these projects embracing and promoting their integrations, understanding the added utility Fringe has created for their tokens.

Community & Marketing

Partnerships

After integrating the KNC token, we secured a partnership with Kyber Network, with mutually beneficial arrangements such as:

• $FRIN became whitelisted on the KyberSwap DEX aggregator platform;
• Exploring the addition of functionalities to the PLP that utilize KyberSwap’s liquidity features;
• Exploring the deployment of $FRIN liquidity on KyberSwap’s concentrated liquidity pools;
• The KyberDAO is considering taking out loans collateralized with $KNC to fund some of their expenses;
• Exploring implementing liquidation optimization measures through B.Protocol, a project by one of Kyber’s Co-Founders.

The full partnership announcement was published on Fringe’s Medium blog on September 27th.

Fringe Finance has also made proposals on the Frax, Uniswap, and DODO DAOs for awareness of token utility and to make protocols aware of the possibility of accessing funding through Treasury-backed loans.

Community calls

On September 1st, we held a Twitter Spaces section with @CryptoVonDoom, @StephanVonGogh, @3orovik, and @itstylersays, prominent members of the $APE community, on which we explored the intersection of NFTs and ApeCoin with DeFi.

It was a fun, laid-back conversation that brought together the $APE and $FRIN communities. If you didn’t have a chance to catch it, you could listen to the recording on Fringe’s YouTube channel. Expect more of it in the coming months!

We also participated in one of the Polygon DAO community calls on Twitter along with two other projects. We had a chance to explain Fringe Finance to their communities, as well as answer their questions.

Finally, on October 6, we will be hosting our second-ever community call on our Discord server at 8 PM ET. Tune in to ask your questions, introduce yourself to the entire community and Fringe Finance team, and present ideas!

Set your reminders!

New landing pages

We have deployed two gorgeous new landing pages on the website to highlight the mechanisms and benefits of permissionless lending and borrowing through Fringe. They facilitate the assimilation of the concepts involved and highlight the platform’s security measures, user-friendliness, and usefulness for capital optimization.

Slick.

Fresh.

Media Features

Our CTO Brian Pasfield was featured in three articles in different media outlets in September.

On September 13th, Brian was interviewed by Finance Magnates to discuss censorship in DeFi and the causes and impacts of the Ethereum Merge. Brian’s stance on censorship resistance is fully aligned with Fringe’s own, as you can assess by his quote:

“Any reference to licenses and DeFi in the same sentence indicates a misunderstanding of what makes DeFi useful. The core value proposition of DeFi is censorship resistance. A truly censorship-resistant DeFi protocol can not be regulated, as it is not susceptible to state coercion.”

On the 14th, BeInCrypto did a piece on replay attacks, a type of attack made possible by the Ethereum PoW fork on which a transaction signed on one network can be replayed on the other network by an attacker. Brian commented on the impact of the move to PoS on L2s, which introduces additional attack surfaces for authorities to attempt censorship.

Our CTO was again featured in a September 16th article by Cointelegraph, shining light on how stablecoins are helping protect savings in the face of rising global inflation. Brian noted that stablecoins will likely become commonplace unless governments censor existing options while heavily favoring their own solutions, such as CBDCs.

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.