2020 in Review: a year full of yield
Money should never sit still. And in 2020, money hasn’t definitely sat still for DeFi and Idle.
We are approaching the end of the year and this article provides a recap of what the core team and community, the Idle governance, achieved so far in these amazing (yet tough, globally) 12 months.
One year ago we were brainstorming with early LPs and users about ways to improve capital efficiency in DeFi, trying to aggregate and optimize across as many primitives as possible.
The mission to provide an effective capital allocation was clearly defined in our first post of the year.
The aggregated and automated supply-side rebalancing protocol took shape when we announced Idle Finance v2, a major update that introduced the Dynamic Funds Allocation mechanism and a new smart contract architecture. The community provided over 200'000 DAI in less than two weeks, a satisfying result for that period.
In February the team graduated from Tachyon Accelerator III, started in November 2019 and powered by ConsenSys.
As a result, Idle Finance V3 went live two months after, bringing a restyled user dashboard and the Risk-Adjusted strategy, developed in collaboration with DeFiScore. Fiat-on ramp solutions, insurance, and more strategies were on our radar as the next integrations.
Then, during the last exciting DeFi summer, our fourth major update incorporated a multi-protocol yield farming system into Idle, which brought TVL to over $3M.
In October, Idle Labs secured $ 1.2M seed funding from gumi Cryptos Capital with participation from industry leaders like Richard Ma from Quantstamp, TheLAO, Dialectic, BlockRock Capital, Greenfield One, LongHash Ventures, and other DeFi-angels.
But the apex of this year of building, planning, and DeFi growth, came in November 2020: the team introduced a governance system that upgraded the Idle protocol’s administration with community governance, powered by $IDLE.
Things then escalated quite quickly.
Liquidity Bootstrap program clearly drove an exponential level of liquidity and allowed us to analyze its current behavior.
$10M TVL reached in just 3 days, $50M after one week, $100M exceeded in two weeks and peaked at $ 230M. Now the protocol is sitting back at $ 17M TVL, on behalf of hundreds of users. We now have enough information to set up the next programs, and we are hearing what our community is asking for.
Let’s prepare this 2021 for development and partnerships, and the governance forum will be the centerpiece of it:
Idle community is vibrant and participative, allowing us to bootstrap a perfect boilerplate to then keep cooperating on the protocol. Idle has now:
- 5k+ people are following Idle in Twitter;
- more than 1k members chat in Discord, almost 2k in Telegram
The DAO already executed IIP-1, assigned a Grant for the development of the Smart Treasury and many other topics have been analyzed — coverage protection, reorganization of the fee structure, staking, and so on.
This bootstrapping month allowed us to also observe Idle protocol’s integrations, and we now have and will build the right tools to ease the job for third-party implementations.
What’s next? We plan to write down some possible initiatives that might be made in the next months, defining a sort of community-driven to-do list, participate and continue to support the activity of the governance, and work on new products on top of the Idle Protocol.
Our team is proud to be part of the DeFi ecosystem, and we’re amped to start this new exciting path with our community. DeFi is having its own road that has had many exciting ups and heartbreaking downs, but one thing I know is that our journey is not over and the best is yet to come.
Stay in the loop
We’re building Idle for the Ethereum ecosystem and its great community. We’d love for you to be part of our development process.
Here you can find our documentation: developers.idle.finance
To follow our updates, new releases, and monthly reports, subscribe to our newsletter. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us on Twitter, Discord, or Telegram.
