Team blog #3. State of Locus and upcoming releases
1. Product positioning and future of indexes
Locus is the protocol that launches and maintains yield bearing indexes, providing diversified portfolio of DeFi yield strategies within a thesis of index.
The transition from “vaults” to “indexes” is a must to put ourselves in the specific market category both for crypto retail and DeFi users.
Indexes have variables around: framework, live service of strategies, decompositions formulas and more. This perspective give us a lot of space to improve our products over time and update our positioning from “non-custodial asset management with vaults” to “indexes”.
2. Indexes updates and go-to-market strategies.
Today we updated the xUSD index with the new UPPS technology (Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard), which makes it possible to withdraw assets *immediately* from omnichain index. Really soon we will add two more strategies, which will give you a diversified L1 and L2 cheap exposure to generating yield on stables.
Based on the product interviews that I had over the last two weeks, the core constraints of new deposits to our product became clear. Those are:
- high fees to test out vaults on Ethereum chain;
- low diversification of strategies within index;
- unclear risk of DeFi, Indexes and strategies within index creates uncertainty;
- complexity of depositing into vaults through the partners.
On the index side we plan to:
- make existing indexes more diversified and competitive in terms of yield;
- launch the yield index for Mantle ecosystem with vast diversification and exposure to multiple trends (RWA, Restaking of ETH, Liquidity hooks, Eigen Layer and other protocols Points and Revenue share) within one index on one of the cheapest L1 chains;
- update the index pages providing detailed data about the used technologies and strategies, making the full dive on technology.
Therefore, after tuning the existing indexes we will focus our resources into one integrated product that will give crypto retail the full exposure to the vast ecosystem of Mantle.
If that product will be succesful, our goal will be to create such indexes for each L1 and L2 chains of ETH, including Frax blockchain, Blast, Berachain, etc. This basket of products will give anyone a one-click exposure to the whole ecosystem both in yields and products.
It puts us in a unique position. By the end of the year our goal is to have at least four integrated indexes for L1s and L2s and omnichain ETH and USD indexes. Those products give anyone an exposure to the spectre of DeFi. Also indexes will be the place for protocols to pitch their strategies for inclusion into indexes.
3. Update on the security
In January our team implemented two types of multi-signatures for developers and strategists, which makes any private key violation impossible to hurt the protocol.
From the technology side our dev team reviewed all the technologies and provided additional updates and securities from the best practices of industry (e.g. UPPS that was released today for xUSD).
We plan to make a full breakdown of every technology we use with their audits to decompose our protocol into the idea of safety of our indexes.
Also, we plan to arrange an additional audit with the release of the new index.
4. UI features
We just recently released the analytics of your positions, which decomposes the yield sources. We are tweaking numbers to make sure that everything is correct, but you can already check what generates yield in your index.
We are also working on the onboarding and new landing pages around the new positioning.
5. Marketing
We are preparing for the marketing campaign with the launch of Locus rewards for vault tokens. We start in March. More updates on this soon.
6. Community
Make sure to invest a $100 in any index and claim the role of power user to get into the conversation in the closed Discord channel and book a call with a team.
