What’s in store for Narwhale.finance
Recap of what has happened in the past 24h
Narwhale.finance has been announced 4 days ago, as per initial medium post. The deposits have been open since then and effective farming has started 24h ago.
At the time of writing, there is roughly 16m USD deposited value into the distribution contract and receiving NAWA at a rate of 3 to 4 digits APR, from 25% to 7000%.
The pools supported are sUSD, sEUR, EURS, FRAX, DSD, ESD, AMPL, MIC, BAC, BASED, Sushi-MIC-USDT, Uniswap-FRAX-USDC, Uniswap-BAC-DAI, Uniswap-AMPL-ETH, Moonbased, Curve, EURS-sEUR, Uniswap-NAWA-USDC, USDx, Uniswap-USDx-USDC
Clearly, that yield is not sustainable unless proper demand and value are being created. Read below how we plan to do that.
Who are we
Narwhale.finance is a 3 persons project, all of us having different technical
skills and background: systems architect, full stack developer, junior frontend developer.
We are all friends & family.
This is our first try at developing a product on Ethereum after watching on the sideline the rise of first-hand developers like banteg, samczsun, andre, and many others (please don’t feel left out, we appreciate you all).
We prefer anonymity as it provides the shelter some of us, coffee drinking code monkeys, need in order not to feel the pressure and investor’s gaze.
The initial plan
Our initial plan was to fill the asset management and yield farming gap between USD and non USD stablecoins.
After extensive research, we have concluded that the current supply of EUR, SGD, GBP, and other currencies is very low, but it does not mean that at some point it won’t lift off.
The regulatory sandbox is being put in place for a possible digital euro, for instance. Other entities like Statis EURO or Syntetix’ foreign currencies are already on top of their game and can easily expand once the demand picks up.
When they do, we plan to offer them a home.
We are already handling EURS, sEUR and one of the first vaults would surely be Curve EURS-sEUR pool.
The pivot to algo stablecoins
Until then, we have pivoted to the current craze which is algorithmic stablecoins. Each of them has something to offer but has yet to prove itself.
Not all of them will survive, but Narwhale.finance aims to be the go-to place for those that provide value and utility.
The future plan
What do I mean by “a go-to place”? A platform that can manage users’ funds deposited into vaults acting as proxies for different yield farming strategies available for a given stablecoin, as long as there’s an opportunity out there.
I have mentioned above the EURS-sEUR vault. That is an obvious one. We can see an opportunity in handling FRAX’s internal affairs, for instance. A strategy cand and will be built on top of that.
What’s in it for narwhale.finance? A % of the strategy’s performance will go to the treasury. The treasury will be distributed to NAWA holders staking their tokens.
What about the user? Hassle-free asset management.
You know the drill, you have seen it on yearn.finance and other decentralized asset management. We just plan to tackle the algo stablecoin niche, as BADGER did to wBTC.
We would like to change the current UI, which is mostly used for farming and NAWA distribution, to a proper dashboard.
At the same time, we are working on developing our first vaults and strategies and will not be released without a proper audit. Both the development and the audit itself take time and would not see the light of day until at least a couple of weeks.
The next step would be to add lending/borrowing option for EUR stablecoin and proven algo/seigniorage stablecoins.
Our value proposition is to offer this range of tools for stablecoins holders.
Addressing some of the concerns
- Why not develop first, token later? DeFi is innovating and launching products at a rapid pace and sometimes keeping a product hidden for too long would mean a lost opportunity.
We have basically distributed NAWA to stablecoin related investors that might keep interest in narwhale’s future plan. The future plan is to reward NAWA stakers with protocol-generated fees.
- Governance is also on the roadmap, but we would like to put in place an anti-gaming mechanism and voting based on voter’s capabilities, but to be perfectly honest we do not currently have details about how it would work. Worst case scenario, we implement the ordinary governance flow.
- The emission rate seems too steep for the demand that is currently expressing. Because of this, we have decided to END the current
pool rewards at block 11742897 which is in roughly 50h: https://etherscan.io/block/countdown/11742897 - The NAWA-USDC pool will still receive rewards at a rate of 10 NAWA/block
- This 10NAWA/block emission will last until the first vaults release at which point we will reassess the emission and incentivize the vaults usage.
- The current circulation supply has no hard cap, but the plan is to migrate to governance before it actually reaches the appointed tail emission (70M in 5 years). Until then, at no point in time, the block reward will be higher than what has been described in the second post.
- At this point, the minting can be accessed only through the distribution contract and it mints NAWA only on attached pools whenever someone is depositing/withdrawing based on weights. As stated above, the plan is to eventually migrate to governance, but before that, on vaults release, we will be transferring the ownership to multisig wallet. Until then, if needed, we can implement timelock.
- There was no audit before launching the distribution because the contract has been battle-tested on Sushi’s launch and the code is based on it with small changes. We also run a series of automated tests that provided an additional confirmation that the contract is safe to use and the user’s funds are not in danger.
- The future releases will be made after proper audits.
- The 10% dev fee should be self-explanatory. We did not farm the initial distribution, we are self-funded and we would also like to be incentivized to keep on running. No vesting has been considered at launch
because at some point in time we would need to reward ourselves for the time, effort, and operation costs.
Social media and useful links
Website: https://narwhale.finance
Discord: https://discord.gg/umhM4MvtKf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FinanceNarwhale
Github: https://github.com/narwhale-finance
Buy NAWA: https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0x687085fa2b8bd4757f2858fb403e6329b31615ab
