Kuiper — a decentralized financial protocol for index tracking
Kuiper is a new public protocol for indices and baskets, aiming to make the benefits of portfolio diversification available to all.
The protocol is a set of rules governing how 4 key participants interact:
1) Index Publishers — Any index you can design, you can propose to the protocol.
2) Asset Issuers — Any index proposed by a publisher can be launched as a basket with one public function call an asset issuer.
3) Basket Rebalancers — When indexes are updated, the protocol determines which basket rebalancer will be responsible for ensuring the basket tracks the index.
4) Holders — Baskets are tokenized and can be held by holders in mainnet wallets or bridged to other execution layers by market makers.
But what makes Kuiper unique?
Permissionless
The protocol allows anyone to participate in any role without restriction of future risk of censorship:
No Upgradeable Contracts — After deployment, the Kuiper contract will be immutable and un-upgradeable. While this will limit options if assets get frozen in the protocol, potentially increasing risk of loss in a catastrophe, it will give participants confidence that the protocol will operate according to the rules established in the code.
Minimum Viable Governance — Governance can tune 3 auction parameters and can raise its split of streaming fees up to a maximum of 20%.
Ethereum Mainnet as Settlement Layer — Ethereum is the most decentralized blockchain in the world, and we chose to use ethereum as the layer where all Kuiper baskets will settle.
Credible Neutrality
The protocol does not allow governance to discriminate against individual indices or baskets. All governance-controlled parameters are global (applying to all baskets), so special treatment is impossible.
For participants, credible neutrality makes Kuiper safe to build on. No matter how successful a Kuiper basket becomes, it is *impossible* for Kuiper governance to extract more rent than is allowable by the protocol.
Simplicity
Kuiper is designed with a mandate to push complexity out of protocol wherever possible. The protocol does not depend on oracles or other defi primitives to operate safely.
But does that make Kuiper “safe?” Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to understand the safety level of a protocol until it has handled real money and been tested by participants, some whitehat, some blackhat, who may be looking to break it.
Note: If you discover an economic or smart contract vulnerability, please let us know privately. ty.
The Soft Launch
We are calling this launch the soft launch. The contracts have not been exposed to adversarial participants. Please evaluate the risks of being a participant before participating. The contracts have been subjected to 3 rounds of auditing from Code4rena and a private review of final mitigations, as well as regular peer review throughout the development process.
There is not currently a token. Any token you see on a dex is a scam. The bootstrappers have made absolutely no decision on retroactive airdrops. We have explicitly made a decision to not discuss this topic to avoid the possibility of information leakage, because information that does not exist can not be leaked. Any rumors you hear can not be based on any actual conversation. If a token is launched in a month, the question will be evaluated at that point for the first time.
Want to join us?
The Kuiper bootstrapping crew has a vision for what decentralized finance should be, and the kuiper protocol is our expression of that vision. We intend to participate in an open organization which will also be committed to pursuing that vision. We are looking to add individuals for all positions you find in an elite open organization committed to making a protocol successful.
We are looking for people to join us.
Want to get involved?
Follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/KuiperFinance
Join our discord: https://discord.gg/cMU3kVcabr
Read the documentation: https://kuiper.gitbook.io/kuiper-docs/
Note: Our contracts are public and verified, but are not currently licensed to allow forking.
