Delphi General Update: 3 of N, September 23

A re-cap:

• The Delphi idea was born in June 2020 (~3 months ago), when we were invited to the IDEO Product Validation Day. In less than a week we prepared the first prototype — a pool aggregator with a unique dollar-cost averaging feature.
• Since Delphi’s initial inception, we got a lot of positive feedback — so we decided to give Delphi a “go” and continue building it out.
• We have expanded functionality as per community feedback to include the ability to yield farm,dollar-cost averaging (DCA) into liquidity pools instead of individual assets, allocating to pools in one click, etc.
• Due to the positive reaction and highly engaged early community, we decided to give away the product to the community and let the users have an active say in its development, fees, integrations, feature requests.
• On August 3rd (less than 2 months since the initial idea was born) we launched Delphi on testnet, the mainnet launch followed shortly thereafter. At the same time as the testnet launch, we announced ADEL — the product-level governance token to be used for solely Delphi governance.

Stats since Delphi launch on mainnet on August 14th, with the following milestones afterwards:

• August 14th — Closed Beta launch: 100 users, $50k cap on total value locked, caps on individual deposits.
• August 24th — Open Beta launch: ~ 650 users, $5M cap on total value locked, caps on individual deposits. Reached the cap in a couple of hours.
• August 31th — Open Beta: ~1,500 users, $20M cap on total value locked, caps on individual deposits. 70% of the cap was reached in less than a day.
• Sep 9th — until now: ~3,200 users, $49M cap on total value locked, caps only on saving pools.

As you can see, these results are outstanding for a product which is not even released in full functionality & has caps on TVL/deposits. Moreover, our user base has grown 30x since launch a month ago, TVL has grown more than 10x, and all caps were filling faster than we could have imagined.

Development since initial launch (a month ago):

• Created the Delphi UI with users in mind and are constantly improving it based on feedback.
• Implemented mobile-adaptive version of the dApp (yes, Delphi is now fully available on mobile).
• Integrated Compound, Curve & Aave pools. renBTC pool is also launched and is under internal testing.
• Implemented allocation to different pools with one click.
• Optimised UI & fixed some bugs/issues along the way.
• Passed initial audit with another audit in progress and more scheduled for the future.

Governance update

Following the discussion around governance in the DeFi space and taking in mind current gas fluctuations, we will launch initial governance through the Snapshot tool built by the Balancer team.

Current status:

• Our Snapshot Governance implementation is pending review.
• We are planning to add a Governance tab & FAQ to Delphi Governance shortly after we launch Snapshot-based governance.

The initial workflow will be as follows:

• Initial proposals valid for governance will be posted by Akropolis team on Snapshot page after thorough review and discussion on Delphi forum.
• Members of AKRO & ADEL staking pools will be able to vote, with different weights given to AKRO or ADEL.
• These weights will be initially decided by revenue share and are subject to change via governance.
• After a vote is completed in favour of the proposal, we will add it to the development pipeline for further implementation.

More updates will come as soon as it’s live. This is an initial governance solution which will allow signalling for different proposals, and further work is done behind the scenes on the full on-chain solution using xDAI.

Main priorities for the coming weeks are:

• Initial Governance launch through signalling via SnapShot, giving the opportunity for AKRO & ADEL token-holders interested in the long-term success of the project to vote. Further work is done behind the scenes for a formal on-chain solution.
• Strategies and Vaults launch. In the coming weeks we will be introducing simple strategies where users will be able to choose how to earn yield — e.g. whether they want increased CRV rewards through the Curve governance boost or if they want to liquidate CRV tokens upon accrual to increase stablecoin yield. As mentioned previously, we are not increasing caps & not opening whitelisted pools because we are planning on including them in a new Strategies & Vaults category on Delphi.
• Pooling. We will be adding “scheduled” deposits & withdrawals, as well as implementing other pooling strategies to reduce gas costs associated with calling smart contracts for users.
• Dollar-cost averaging feature and integration of DeFi trading strategies. Following the initial idea for Delphi, we’re working on an easily accessible DCA feature — starting with simple DCA into assets/pools, with the following “DCA out” featured in the pipeline (per third party oracle development).
• Integrating fiat on- and off-ramp solutions. We want to make our product more accessible to a wide range of users — most of which come from the traditional space, requiring the deposit of funds from cards/banks/etc. Fiat on & off-ramp is a critical tool to help onboard these users, as well as give crypto-native users a thought-free strategy to increase holdings on a recurrent basis.