Introducing Maximus
Maximus DAO is a smart contract that facilitates trustless pooling of a max length HEX stake. To fully understand Maximus, you must first have a basic understanding of smart contracts and HEX. If you’re already familiar, feel free to skip the Introduction.
Table of Contents
(Links to other parts of the same story, only work on desktop!)
- What is a smart contract?
- What are gas fees?
- What is HEX?
- HEX Bonuses
- Share Price
- Emergency End Stake
- Max Length HEX Stake
- How It Works
- Benefits of Maximus
- Instant Liquidity
- Maximum Yield
- Gas Fee Savings
- Market Utility
- Tokenomics
- Progress to Launch
- Join the Community
Introduction
What is a smart contract?
Smart contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. They typically are used to automate the execution of an agreement so that all participants can be immediately certain of the outcome, without any intermediary’s involvement or time loss. They can also automate a workflow, triggering the next action when conditions are met. Smart contracts are trustless, meaning you don’t have to trust a third party: a bank, a person, or any intermediary to operate a function or transaction.
What are gas fees?
A gas fee is something all users must pay in order to perform any function on the blockchain. In regards to HEX, you must pay a gas fee to start and end a stake. Due to demand, gas prices have gone way up, and a recent security upgrade to the Ethereum network suddenly made HEX and many other smart contracts 160% more gas expensive to execute.
What is HEX?
HEX is the first high-interest Certificate of Deposit, which rewards investors who lock up or Stake their holdings for a period of time. When you start a new Stake you burn your HEX and receive Shares (called “T-Shares”) in return. Each day at midnight UTC, every single Share accrues interest in HEX. The more Shares you have the more interest you receive. When a stake ends, you are able to claim your principle investment + the interest earned.
HEX Bonuses
Built into HEX are 2 bonus structures to incentivize investors. The Bigger Pays Better bonus incentivizes investors to invest more HEX into one stake by providing a bonus of up to 10% for staking 150M HEX. The Longer Pays Better bonus incentivizes investors to stake longer by offering a bonus up to 20% per year for 10 years.
Share Price
In order to ensure that longer and larger stakes pay better over time, there is a pricing mechanism built into the contract. Every time a stake is ended, the gains for that stake are calculated in the form of a share price which all future stakers will pay to convert their HEX into shares. An important note here is that HEX’s base unit is the Heart. Hearts are to HEX as Satoshis are to Bitcoin. There are 100,000,000 Hearts per HEX.
The share price at launch was 1 share per Heart. The way the share price moves is related to return on investment for a stake. For example, if on day 5 someone ends their stake and has a 20% gain, it translates into a share price of ~1.2 Hearts per share. If that user wishes to stake again, their Hearts will be divided by 1.2 to determine their number of shares.
Emergency End Stake
A HEX user can terminate their stake before the committed time, but has to pay a penalty for this. The contract calculates the payout for ½ (rounded up) the days committed, e.g. 182 for a 52 week commitment, and subtracts that from the funds returned to the user. It will always apply at least a 90 day penalty. For example, I stake for 52 weeks (about 1 year) and emergency unstake after 266 days (38 weeks). The contract calculates my payout for days 1–182 and flags that as the penalty. The funds returned to me are then my Principal + (Days 183 to 266) payouts.
If the user emergency unstakes before ½ their days are served or if their stake is fewer than 179 days due to the 90 penalty day minimum, the penalty can cut into Principal.
Max Length HEX Stake
The maximum amount of time you can Stake HEX is 5555 days, or 15.2 years. The benefit to staking this long is to maximize the amount of T-Shares you get due to the Longer Pays Better Bonus, and to maximize the amount of time you earn yield. The tradeoff is that you’re locking your funds up for a very long time with no access to your gains until the Stake ends.
Maximus DAO
Now that you have a better understanding of smart contracts, HEX, and gas fees, the first sentence of this post might make more sense.
Maximus DAO is a smart contract that facilitates trustless pooling of a max length HEX stake.
How It Works
100% of the MAXI token supply is generated during a one time 14 day Mint Phase where anyone may choose to mint 1 MAXI per HEX pledged to the Maximus Contract. Once the Mint Phase ends, the smart contract will execute a single 5555 day stake with all the HEX used to mint MAXI. Once the stake has ended, users may redeem their portion of the HEX stake principal and earned interest.
Benefits of Maximus
- Instant Liquidity
- Maximum Yield
- Gas Fee Savings
- Market Utility
Instant Liquidity
As mentioned previously, when you stake your HEX, you can’t access those funds until the stake ends without paying a penalty. But what if you absolutely need to? Or maybe you would like to cash in on some or all of your earned interest to buy something you want.
Maximus gives you optionality.
Let’s say you minted MAXI, and it’s year 5 of the Maximus 15.2 year max length stake. If you had staked on your own, due to the early end stake penalty, you would be able to withdrawn $0 of your funds. But with Maximus, you’re able to sell MAXI, now worth 5 years more of interest, on decentralized exchanges.
Maximum Yield
If everyone who understood T-Shares had the ability, they would choose to stake their HEX for 5555 days to maximize the amount of T-Shares they get and to maximize the amount of time their T-Shares earn interest. Many choose not to because they can’t or don’t want to lock up their funds for that long.
Maximus provides the maximum yield of a 5555 day stake without the tradeoff of locking up your funds for 15.2 years.
Gas Fee Savings
While a 5555 day stake earns the most interest per HEX staked, it also costs the most gas to end. The contract must loop over each day to calculate the interest to mint, costing about 2310 gas units per day staked. In 5555 days when ending the stake, at current gas prices, that is roughly 1 ETH of gas fees per person ending a max length stake. This drastically hinders new users with balances under ~$1000 to utilize HEX as a high growth savings product because gas fees are charged per transaction and are not based on value of the transaction.
By combining many small stakes into one large max length stake, Maximus reduces many end stakes to just one, saving gas for all members.
Although solutions such as PulseChain exist to reduce gas fees, the linear scaling of faster larger blocks is only a temporary solution. If you envision $PLS running 10,000x, you’re also envisioning a situation where PulseChain gas fees increase 10,000x. The benefits of reducing the gas fee impact on max length stakes will be fruitful on both Ethereum and PulseChain.
Market Utility
MAXI will be an ERC-20 (and PRC-20 token when copied to PulseChain) so you will be able to use it like any other token on the market. Meaning, while your MAXI is earning HEX interest from the max length stake, you can also put your MAXI to work with other opportunities like yield farming or as a liquidity provider on decentralized exchanges. Being backed by staked HEX, MAXI is also very strong collateral to extend credit upon.
Tokenomics
Due to its fixed supply and maximum yield earning treasury backing, the MAXI intrinsic value measured in HEX will always go up — by how much will be determined by the daily T-Share Payout from HEX.
MAXI has two values:
Treasury Value (or Redemption Value) = the amount of HEX redeemable per MAXI when the max length stake ends
Market Value = the price of MAXI on decentralized exchanges
The market value, set on exchanges, may vary widely from the treasury value, cycling between trading at a discount and premium to the underlying HEX. Below is a chart showing what the relationship between those values could look like over the period of the max length stake.
Progress Towards Launch
As of April 8, 2022
We just received our security audit on 4/5/22 and passed. We are currently finishing our second public test phase on PulseChain Testnet v2b. Once that is completed, we will announce the official launch date of Maximus.
To get ready for the Maximus launch, buy HEX! We will announce the official launch date on our Twitter and in our Telegram.
Join the Community
Please join the discussion in the Maximus DAO Telegram and follow Maximus DAO on Twitter.
Official Telegram: t.me/MaximusDAO
Official Twitter: twitter.com/maximus_dao
