Strategic Roadmap Update for Alien Base
September is upon us, and we aliens have managed to secure a solid base on Earth. Now it’s time to grow it and start beaming down all the alien technology we brought 🛸
We’ve also thought of an adapted plan to take over the Base chain (and Earth). It includes many of the same things we announced in our previous roadmap, but with some changes. Let’s go through each thing one by one.
New Area 51 Launches and ALB Airdrops
The Area 51 Sub-DEX has launched its Pilot successfully, with both BlackRock Inu and VeyronPepe acquiring a sizable number of holders and volume (about 200 holders combined and $100k volume in two days)
As a Pilot project, we were carefully monitoring the launches of both tokens. In both cases, some sniper activity was detected — more on VeyronPepe due to a lack of protection against it in the token.
In this first batch, we started out with the idea of limiting our intervention into the design of the token and overall launch procedure as much as possible. Area 51 ensures that the developers are legitimate and will not create instant rugs, but it doesn’t cover for overall success.
MEV bots sniping new token launches are unavoidable, and as Area 51 grows, more bots will come with even more money to snipe with. In the case of BlackRock Inu, the token creators added anti-sniping limits, but a few bots were still able to grab a good chunk of supply. This tells us that any kind of measure is little more than a small speed bump for determined bot operators, and that a whole new approach must be adopted.
Because of this, from now on we will focus on alternative distribution methods for tokens on Area 51: airdrops and farms. From now on, tokens who want to list on Area 51 must use better distribution methods than simply pre-minting all tokens.
One of the requirements is to airdrop some tokens to ALB stakers and LPs. Projects will be able to choose the ALB thresholds required to be eligible, as well as how much of their supply to airdrop. This is a win-win for everyone, as an airdrop helps attract legitimate ALB community interest and effectively distribute tokens to real people.
Another, strongly encouraged requirement will be to distribute tokens through our integrated farms (without ALB rewards). The projects have full freedom to choose their own distribution schedules, and the tokens will be farmable on the Area 51 platform directly.
Combined, these two approaches will help make Area 51 launches fairer and less advantageous to MEV bots.
ALB Staking and Tokenomics
As we promised, we will be launching rewards in ETH from Area 51 fees for ALB stakers next week, as we need to work with our partners at Beefy to enable the double rewards and respect the 7 day time lock for adding extra rewards. Each week, the farm will be loaded with rewards from the previous week (currently collected manually).
Area 51 receives 80% of the 1% trading fee for its tokens, which would go to ALB stakers. This can be a very significant sum: if Area 51 generates just $200,000 daily volume, real yield ALB APR (added to existing rewards) would be well over 100%.
Area 51 Roadmap and Evolution
The vision for Area 51 is to be the fun part of Alien Base. Humans like to take risks, but only as long as the game is fair. This is what Area 51 will be: a curated but still higher risk environment than the main platform.
The current “launchpad” for meme coins is an initial version of it, but we aim to also support other types of projects that may need an initial boost in community and liquidity. Here, the airdrop and farming launch becomes key for a successful start.
We heard some humans also like lotteries and predictions, so these will be added to Area 51 by the end of September.
But right now, we will focus on attracting the best and most promising projects that could become the next big thing on Base.
Alien Base Farms
We have a live StableSwap integration on Alien Base, which so far is hosting a DAI/USDC pool. We also have a regular V2 DAI/USDC farm, which is nowhere near as efficient as StableSwap.
Over the next few weeks we will be gradually reducing rewards to V2 stable pairs in favor of StableSwap pairs of the same tokens, as well as adding new pairs.
StableSwap pools are extremely cheap to incentivize, as they don’t need much liquidity to support enormous swaps, making them a very efficient allocation of rewards.
It’s time to optimize our ALB allocations. The next few weeks we will be iterating to increase the efficiency of farms to maximize volume and TVL per ALB expended in rewards.
ALB Liquidity Improvement
With both Base and Alien Base maturing, it is time to work on improving the ability to swap in and out of ALB for our users. Liquidity on the platform is significant, but we are limited by the Uniswap V2 algorithm, which is extremely sensitive to large orders.
Over the next few weeks we will be working on multiple ways to use the ecosystem around us to improve liquidity.
An interesting way to boost ALB is by launching bribes on Aerodrome. Bribes are almost always economically worthwhile for the incentivizing projects, and have the added benefit of exposure and marketing. As a “public good platform” on Base and “central liquidity marketplace,” Aerodrome is the perfect place to test this assumption.
We aim to deploy between 300–400k ALB from the protocol treasury wallet for a one week run of rewards. This is little more than 10% of weekly rewards, which according to our projections can double the liquidity of ALB. If successful, we can continue the program while fine-tuning the amounts to achieve maximum efficiency.
Other potential ways include deploying ALB on a V3-like platform, or listing on high quality centralized exchanges. But we haven’t formulated specific plans for it yet.
At the same time, we’re at a key milestone where we need to start setting up for Nebula development and other features, which will require significant resources to ensure security. To guarantee these resources and supplement the fee revenue, we aim to devote 600k ALB from the ALB rewards we obtain each month for our growing team’s salaries (currently, 8 people working full time and more part time).
Perpetuals, Nebula and more
The rest of our roadmap is currently unchanged, although we expect that Perpetuals will come at some point in October.
As before, with Perpetuals we aim to implement a full-scale esALB system where platform fees will be given to token holders and lockers.
As for Nebula, the journey from the mothership is still long, but when it’s on Earth, it’ll be worth it. Everything we’re doing is to prepare for its development and deployment, which would likely occur in 2024. We’ll give you more updates as we get closer to finishing the Earthly part of our roadmap, which helps us fully secure the Nebula project.
