Wen $ATAT: A Token Launch Update

The original Asteria (V1) roadmap planned that $ATAT, Asteria Finance Lab’s utility and governance token, would launch in Q2 of 2022.

Since then and the launch of Asteria’s testnet and Beaver Finance, our first incubated project — the team has been hard at work making improvements to the protocol. We’ve spent thousands of hours deep research, battle testing, designing, and reviewing the architecture required to bring a composable, capital-efficient, dynamic option-based ecosystem to DeFi.

Our observation led us to a strategic and robust conclusion — Asteria’s infrastructure needed to mature even further and adapt to the pace of our innovation and market needs.

Faced with observation, we had two options:

Option A: continue the launch process as planned.

Which meant launching the $ATAT token according to the originally planned timeline. Doing this would have released the token in a not-so-optimistic setting and in a bearish market. This would have caused a misalignment between the $ATAT token and the future roadmap, hampering potential and promoting a highly diluted market positioning.

Historically, launching a token in conditions like the current market often leads to centralized ownerships — as a disproportionate number of tokens accumulate in the hands of a small percentage of holders instead of reaching the bags of long-term supporters and community members of Asteria Finance Labs.

Option B: reprioritize our plans to align infrastructure development with the token launch

This decision also allows us to strategically time the token launch to when market conditions have stabilized, which would bring in the right incentives that naturally harvest long-term holders and highly valuable community/team members.

After careful consideration and lengthy conversations with leaders through the space, we chose option B.

And hence, we have decided to temporarily delay the launch of the $ATAT token as we bake the infrastructure to maturity.

During this temporary delay, Asteria devs will prioritize engineering and community efforts towards the new roadmap — which gives a major upgrade to the Asteria Finance Lab’s infrastructure that will allow us to beckon the future of DeFi — one that is based on quantitatively driven techniques. This contrarian approach is what brings us to the forefront of what we call DeFi 3.0

Roadmap Q3 — Q4 2022

What is in this new infrastructure that we are talking about? In updates since, we have leaked a few crumbs of alfa on the new infrastructure we’re building. Today we’re sharing the key agendas that have led to this temporary delay which also are fundamental to the new Asteria infrastructure:

Asteria Protocol’s rebranding into Asteria Finance Lab:

Asteria Protocol, a peer-to-protocol-based options trading platform, will rebrand and expand into Asteria Finance Lab — a multi-layer infrastructure.

At the protocol layer, Asteria Options Trading Protocol defines and implements the functionalities of three core components- Pricing, Trading, and Hedging.

At the template/API layer, Web 3 dApps could build on top of the Asteria template or integrate pluggable API to reduce computation cost, maximize efficiency, and speed development.

At the application & incubation layer, we are nurturing a new decentralized finance ecosystem. Asteria is on the mission to focus on the following 3 areas:

• Research of the underlying financial options-based theories and technology
• Build novel in-house options-based products
• Work with the best of DeFi projects together to serve the Asteria community, a diverse and flourishing ecosystem built on a new and better-decentralized foundation.

Injecting Quantitative models into Asteria’s infrastructure:

• To optimally support the high-performing infrastructure as Asteria Finance Lab scales.
• Robust tooling for DAO treasuries to scale, diversify and grow.
• Risk-controlled tooling and dynamic strategies for DeFi users to achieve high, undiluted base yields.
• Asteria decentralized option vaults

Killer Product — Dual Asset Financing Manager

• Turn volatility into your best ally to capture double-digit annualized yields.
• Can be applied with multiple strategies:
• Limited Order with interests, improvement of DeFi 1.0 Trading DEXes
• Liquidity Mining with easy hedgeable against liner loss, improvement of DeFi 2.0 Aggregators/Mining platforms

Scaling Beaver Finance

• Quantitatively driven hedging for limited risk exposure and adding CTA strategies for market prediction for competitive yields with highly competitive insurance fees (far lower than market standards)
• Capital injected into the hedging algorithm generated additional yields
• New functionality — Leveraged Mining

Multi-chain

• Deployment on several enterprising networks
• Positive network effects
• Gas efficiency

Road Ahead

We hope for the $ATAT token launch to be an exciting and optimistic moment for our community, and we are planning several activities to explore and discover the new Asteria Finance Lab.

As we work through the roadmap towards the $ATAT token launch, we sincerely hope that you will join the conversation and share your feedback through our Telegram.

The road towards delivering this vision has been long and winding, with its share of ups and downs. But with the prevailing winds behind us will stay the course and stay true to our vision with the support of our amazing community!