youves, a short introduction — Minting, Saving & Staking
In our last post, we explained our vision, mission and values and gave a glimpse of youves’ capabilities. In this post, we focus on youves, the tool. Once youves is live, you will see that we spent quite some time on making youves and all its layers easily accessible.
The landing page
The landing page on www.youves.com will be your entrance to youves and it will be fully accessible to everyone on July 13, 2021. The site will explain our first three use-cases: minting uUSD, saving and staking. Let’s talk about those now and come back to the landing page once it is live.
The youves platform
This is the place where you can start building on youves. Connect your Tezos wallet and the journey begins. You will be able to mint, save and stake.
Minting
Let’s start with minting. Lock your tez for a loan in uUSD for a low interest rate and continue to earn baking rewards. With your newly minted uUSD, you can buy new tez on Quipuswap to leverage your tez holdings. As a minter, you will earn YOU, the governance token of youves. Every week 40’000 YOU are issued that minters can claim. This number will halve periodically and hence there is a limited supply of YOU. With fewer minters in the beginning, more YOU will be allocated to the first movers. Finally in case the uUSD trades significantly below the USD, you have a right to convert your uUSD to tez. Conversion rights are not cheap but they protect you from prices that are no longer stable and allow you to access the tez collateral which is backing the uUSD.
Saving
The second case is saving. Minters create uUSD and you can buy them on Quipuswap. This allows you to diversify your crypto holdings on-chain and it also pays an interest or lending fee. For that, you have to lock your uUSD into a savings contract on youves and you will receive the borrowing rate minus a platform fee. The savings contracts are systemically relevant, they are functioning as the pool of uUSD that will be used for the conversion rights for minters. The allocation of interest follows an incentive curve that reduces the yield with an increasing number of uUSD locked — again, first movers get more. Minters eventually have to buy back uUSD to close their vaults. To protect them from exorbitant prices of uUSD, minters have the right to buy back uUSD at a fixed price. Only the uUSD which are put into the savings pool are available for conversion via the minter conversion right.
Staking YOU
The last case is staking YOU. YOU is the governance token of youves and you can either earn them as a minter or buy them on Quipuswap. YOU tokens are limited in supply and allow holders to govern the youves platform (refer to the governance section above). YOU also provides access to platform revenues. There are two revenue types: minting fees and a spread on the interest. All revenues are collected by a smart contract and distributed to YOU holders. If you decide to stake YOU on youves, you will receive your portion of the platform’s revenues in uUSD. And similar to the savings contract, youves applies incentives that treat early movers preferencially.
The future of youves
There are short-term and longer term targets and we will talk more about those in a separate post that focuses on the roadmap of youves. Short-term targets include stabletoken with different reference values. The uUSD stabletoken is built with an approach that uses conversion rights and interest rates to stabilise the price. This is one interpretation of an engine and we would like to see model choices for builders on youves in the future. We have also looked into options.
Also, more assets that can be locked in vaults for collateral will be added. There is an incredible amount of new and exciting FA1.2 or FA2 assets on Tezos and we all know that diversification mitigates risks. This would facilitate basked-type products too. Other targets include further development of our governance mechanism and our documentation.
We look forward to welcoming you as youves tester on July 13, 2021. We will go more in depth in this series about minting, saving and staking and talk more about our roadmap. So stay tuned and let others know about youves. Have a great day!
