August 2020: Akropolis Monthly Update, Part 1 of N

Acknowledgements and many thanks for valuable feedback: Daryl Lau (Coingecko), Jason Choi (Spartan Group), Andre Cronje, amazing Akropolis Community

Summary of Part 1: Testnet Launch Announcement

• Recap
• Delphi Origin Story
• Delphi Value Proposition: What Problem does it Solve?
• Delphi governance token explained
• Token utility
• How to earn it
• Benefits for AKRO tokenholders
• Liquidity Mining intro — more detailed post to follow on Wed

Recap

Our original vision was to build an experimental distributed savings/pensions fund, without dependency on a banking system and resilient to fiat economic shocks. The startup journey is never linear, so to enable us to deliver on this vision we had to build the underlying framework first. Thus, we have shipped a modular highly customizable OS to quickly spin up for-profit govern-able capital pools (DAOs) in minutes, whilst segregating smart contract risk and maintaining full developer freedom.

In the spirit of dogfooding, we first launched two capital pools:

1. Sparta “Lending”: a DeFi community bank, providing undercollateralised lending and automated treasury management.

Current status: UI updated today, DeFi module audit completed by CertiK. Due to internal dependencies, we will be able to update shortly after Aug 20.

2. Delphi “Savings & Investments”: Rinkeby live here and Invision prototype here (click to test drive the future UX/UI)

Current status: Rinkeby is feature-limited, we intend to push updates daily

• Pre-audit controlled mainnet release ($50,000 TVL cap): Aug 8–12
• Balancer and Uniswap added: Aug 10–12
• Full mainnet release following Certik audit: Aug 20–24

Delphi Origin Story: Why we built it and why we are giving it away

Given the rise of yield farming, we have recognized a need for less tech-savvy and less active investors to participate in yield-farming and yield-generating opportunities with as little friction as possible. Getting started in DeFi can be confusing, but teams like Argent have proven what advanced DeFi can be made available to more of our community with a better UX/UI.

Despite the incredible pace of innovation in DeFi on Ethereum, one popular investment strategy from the world of personal finance and the greater crypto community that has yet to translate over to DeFi is dollar-cost averaging (DCA).

The Bitcoin community made DCA popular among exchanges like Coinbase with automated, periodic purchases, commonly referred to as “stacking sats.” Regardless of the asset, the DCA strategy has always been to invest periodically (weekly, monthly, etc) in an effort to reduce the impact of volatility on the overall purchase. The purchases occur regardless of the price and at regular intervals. DCA effectively removes much of the detailed work of attempting to time the market in order to make purchases of equities at the best prices.

Delphi would have been impossible without the encouragement and input of our community, we responded by moving from a concept presented at the IDEO Colab Product Validation Day on June 18th to a Mainnet launch in two months!

Delphi Product Vision: Adoption through better UX/UI

Delphi is an easy one-stop curated access to DeFi yield options, gas-saving and superior UX/UI for users. We are currently prioritising the development and launch of Delphi, a DeFi yield farming aggregator that offers synthetic savings and high yield “accounts” aimed at DeFi-curious users that may not have deep technical knowledge or understanding of Ethereum and crypto.

What problem does it solve? Lack of easy UX/UI options for a new wave of DeFi-curious users, and therefore a major obstacle to onboarding of new capital and adoption.

As most protocols vary their LM incentives and introduce new ones almost on a daily basis, Akropolis Delphi offers a convenient UX and cost-saving strategy by allowing users to reallocate funds from one stablecoin pool to another in one transaction inside our UI.

Screen 1 “My Summary”

Contents: this section offers tracking of all your pools, APYs & harvest in one place

Features:

• Portfolio graph which you can watch obsessively to see how much you’ve farmed
• Breakdown of your balances depending on the pools you chose
• Track your harvest balances in one place
• Overall APYs for each yield source — savings, investment, DCA, harvest

Benefits:

Simple dashboard for tracking all your needs in one place. Transaction history is also on the way!

Screen 2 “Savings”

Contents: this section offers a selection of the best stablecoin pools

Features:

• Select what pool to add liquidity into
• Add liquidity in all selected pools in a single transaction
• Rebalance between pools in a single transaction
• [pending] Get notified when you need to rebalance

Benefits:

Simple allocation and rebalancing between different pools depending on your needs — all in one transaction.

Screen 3 “Investing”

Contents: this section focuses on non-stablecoin pools: you can get all-in or DCA into (and out of*). Higher risk-reward pools with higher volatility — higher potential capital gains and losses.

Features:

• Schedule a dollar-cost-average (weekly for now, due to gas costs) automatic investment into select pools
• [pending] DCA out of selected pools
• [pending] GSN integration
• Stablecoin balance is earning APY in Curve, invested balance is earning APY + capital gains/losses from BTC and ETH and other tokens performance
• Default currency USDC

Benefits:

Reduces number of high-yield pools to add liquidity into, removes inconvenience (high waiting time, gas costs, poor UX) of re-allocating funds from one pool to another, as protocol LMs incentives change -> search for better yield farming economics made cheaper.

ADEL: A No-Sale Product Governance Token

Note: ADEL token has no intrinsic value or set price, and is created entirely to facilitate community governance by active Delphi users.

Delphi has been built as a response to community requests. To continue iterating and tightening its product-market fit, the ability to incentivise user input and to give the community a genuine sense of ownership and fair distribution is key. Therefore, we propose a launch of the product-specific token, ADEL (Akropolis Delphi Token), inspired by and taking into account learnings from $YFI: there is no-sale for ADEL, it can only be earnt through liquidity provision of stablecoins, AKRO and other selected tokens and active governance participation.

Motivation:

• AKRO governance token was launched in July 2019, before governance tokens were all the rage. It was designed to govern the under-collateralized lending and savings pool now known as Sparta.
• Targeted incentivisation: our original AKRO distribution: 50% of the current circulating supply and ca.21% of TTS (Total Token Supply) are on CEXes. Therefore, it is extremely challenging to unequivocally target our Delphi users with AKRO, given AKRO’s historical token distribution.
• User Rewards vs Dilution: In order to keep AKRO as the main token capable to provide adequate/comparable rewards to its user base, given our market capitalization on the day of writing, we would not only have to introduce substantial inflation and thus dramatically change our fixed supply (ref. AAVE very reasonable 20%).

Assumptions:

We see the initial user base comprising three main groups:

• Initial ADEL contributors will be predominantly AKRO tokenholders;
• Stablecoin LPs moving from existing platforms;
• New DeFi-curious users;

Guiding Principles:

• We cannot prejudice AKRO tokenholders vis-a-vis ADEL
• ADEL distribution has to be as fair & wide as possible
• Combination of short-term and long-term incentives to create a sustainable community.

Token Parameters:

Note: Please note that all token details are subject to change before the mainnet launch and can be changed by governance thereafter. We welcome your constructive feedback and will be seeding a community governance forum very soon!

• Not just a governance token — ADEL will have a shared claim on any future fees of Delphi (exit/entry fees, performance fees, exchange referral fees, etc.)
• 60,000,000 ADEL will be minted as fixed supply and distributed linearly over 6 months. Community governance will be able to amend ADEL monetary policy to introduce inflation/deflation/elasticity of supply.
• 95% goes to active users/LPs incl. community rewards [unlocked from week 2]
• 5% development, maintenance and audit [locked for 3 months, 3 months vesting thereafter]
• A product governance DAO will be created before or shortly after full mainnet launch

What’s Next for Delphi?

1. FAQ, bug bounty & liquidity mining details: next few days
2. UI completed: by August 20, with daily updates throughout
3. Balancer & Uniswap pools added to Delphi by 10–12 August
4. Controlled Mainnet with LTV and per-user cap, scheduled by 10–15 August
5. Governance and Forum Launch:

• AragonDAO will be created for Delphi users [limitation: no vote delegation]
• Delphi governance will comprise Technical and Product Council. Product Council application is open to active community members who are willing to make their identity known and can be completed here.
• Community will be able to vote on the following development vectors:

— Further incentives for Delphi users

— Product development

— Adding / removing pools for savings, investments and DCA

— Adding / removing protocols for integration

Information above is provided for illustrative purposes only. This article contains forward looking statements, i.e. statements related to future events, and we cannot guarantee that any such forward looking statements will correlate with the actual future facts or results. You should not construe any information provided above as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in this article constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to make an investment or to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments in any jurisdiction. We reserve the right to amend or update this article and any information provided above.