“The contributors at Yearn and Akropolis join forces to capitalize on each other’s strengths and to enable each team to specialize further and focus on what they do best. Yearn will continue to develop best-in-class Vault and Lending protocol solutions. Akropolis becomes the exclusive front-of-house institutional service provider of these, offering bespoke access to their network of clients, with investment strategies tailored specifically to them.”
Similarly to the precedent with Pickle, this does not require token-holder governance approval as it is two open-source networks combining their efforts.
Key Highlights
Mergers in DeFi space are a bit of a misnomer. Below are the key highlights of how both teams see this collaboration:
- Both teams merge development resources.
- AKRO and ADEL tokens remain.
- Akropolis name, team and website remain.
- Akropolis to create a DevFund to incentivise external contributors.
Synergies:
- Akropolis gets access to Yearn, Pickle, and Cream products, and can integrate its DCA solutions with these.
- Yearn gets access to new investment strategies and products created by Akropolis.
- Yearn accesses Akropolis business development expertise and exposure to its institutional client network.
- Both teams work towards a shared product vision of non-custodial open-source alternatives to savings and high-yield accounts.
The New Akropolis
We wanted to take the time since the hack — year to date the DeFi ecosystem has suffered over US$200mn of them — to develop the best long-term plan for Akropolis and its token-holders.
The close collaboration with the talented Yearn crew allows us to narrow down our development focus only to synthetic high-yield accounts and superior UX/UI. Thus far, the following roadmap decisions have been made:
- Narrowed down product focus: AkropolisOS and Sparta to be deprecated and moved into the Open Source development resources section for simpler, streamlined product offering;
- New vaults: Akropolis adopts the code of Yearn v2 vaults and its users become eligible to earn Pickle through the forthcoming Pickle Gauge, and leveraged through the forthcoming Cream v2 lending protocol;
- New strategies. The Akropolis contributors will write strategies for the new vaults and earn performance fees;
- New yield-generating products: currently under development by the Akropolis team, will draw on the expertise and contributions of the yEarn team for the benefit of the entire ecosystem;
- New institutional app. Akropolis to become the exclusive institutional front-end to the combined Yearn & Akropolis yield-generating product suite, and will be contributing their strengths to the broader yEarn ecosystem.
Hack Compensation
Retroactive Measures
- Token to track exploit losses. A new IOU token (iouAKRO) will be introduced that tracks the losses incurred by the victims in the recent Akropolis exploit. It will be distributed proportionally through a snapshot.
- The IOU reserve is intended to be capitalised through a combination of protocol fees and a voluntary Akropolis treasury contribution. More details on that later;
- If and when the exploit funds are returned or recovered, they will be added to the IOU reserve and any excess funds above the $2.0mn mark will be remitted to a DevFund (to be set up).
Forward-Looking Measures
- Embedded Insurance Fund: Our users were heavily under-insured. To remove the UX friction that has likely led to under-insurance, we will be introducing an embedded insurance pool to charge users a fee deducted from the yield;
- Insurance pool will be purchasing cover automatically and will be capitalised through a combination of protocol fee income and staked AKRO. The team and insurance pool have aligned incentives by virtue of being ranked pari passu.
We are excited at the prospect of close collaboration with the yEarn team and look forward to jointly creating much-needed synthetic yield products for the low-to-negative interest rate world.
We’re sure you have lots of questions, so feel free to submit them here and we will hold an AMA over the next few days.
Yours,
The Akropolis Team
