The Ones in the Arena: yAxis
“The DeFi space needs to put security ahead of generating revenue or attracting TVL.” — Bobby, Project Lead, yAxis
A recent installment of Anthony Sassano’s Daily Gwei reminded us that “we’re all early”— that is, from a big-picture standpoint, crypto and DeFi are still in their infancy, and we’ve got a long way to go before adoption of these technologies can be considered mainstream. (With no disrespect intended to Reese Witherspoon.)
Many roads lead to wider adoption, but as we’ve been hearing from Code4rena’s contest sponsors, improving user experience and lowering the barriers to investing in DeFi are certainly critical components to growing the user base.
Enter yAxis, a DAO-directed yield portfolio that promises to give both retail and institutional investors greater flexibility in terms of investment strategies — and ultimately hopes to democratize access to financial management tools.
We spoke with Bobby, yAxis’s Project Lead, to learn more about where yAxis is headed next, his views on DeFi security, and what else he geeks out about.
What are you building, and what sets it apart from similar offerings in the space?
A DAO-directed yield portfolio that makes investing in DeFi easy and accessible whilst delivering attractive long-term growth.
What’s your vision for your project? What are you building towards in the longer view?
Our vision is to reduce the friction needed to enter the DeFi space.
Through a seamless user experience, we enable users to earn passive income and grow their capital by smoothly transitioning between multiple, DAO-approved, DeFi yield generating strategies.
yAxis aims to reduce the time, worry, and expense required to generate optimal yield on digital assets such as BTC, LINK and ETH. With our unique approach to DeFi, we are building towards a future that makes DeFi accessible to both retail and institutional users.
“We embrace the findings from our audits, as it allows the project to transparently improve code and garner trust amongst users.”
What’s the most innovative idea in your protocol?
Our core innovation is a strategy-agnostic DeFi abstraction layer that allows us to deploy user funds across any DeFi yield strategy. yAxis sits top of the stack, enabling the protocol to stay nimble and optimize yield on behalf of users.
We also have an innovative approach to protecting user funds against malicious governance takeovers. Our in-house designed “Halt Flag” essentially locks down all funds. We’ll share more about this feature soon.
It takes courage to undergo a public audit by a swarm of anonymous security researchers. It also says a lot about how much you prioritize security. What advice would you give to those on the fence?
Finding weaknesses in code prior to deploying on mainnet is a responsibility that all projects have to their users. It’s important to find those weaknesses before they become exploits. We embrace the findings from our audits, as it allows the project to transparently improve code and garner trust amongst users. Our advice would be to embrace audits as both a technical and marketing milestone.
“DeFi allows us to democratize access to efficient financial tools that are otherwise used to widen the inequality gap.”
Security has become an increasingly vital topic in DeFi. How do you think the ecosystem needs to evolve in order to rise to the challenge?
Ongoing public review of code — and engage white hats to continually search for security vulnerabilities.
Overall, the DeFi space needs to put security ahead of generating revenue or attracting TVL.
yAxis takes a multifaceted approach to protocol security: we have a security-focused dev team that includes security-first developers like TransferAndCall and GetGouda; and we run multiple layers of audits including crowdsourced and centralized audits, an ongoing ImmuneFi Bug Bounty, and participate in ImmuneFi’s War Room Alpha, along with this Code4rena contest. IMO, all protocols should take this kind of layered approach in order to maximize protection.
We’ve also got a novel security solution we’ve been building in-house that we’ll be revealing in the lead-up to our V3 launch — we call it the “Halt Flag” — so stay tuned for that.
What gets you most excited about DeFi?
Passive income. DeFi allows us to democratize access to efficient financial tools that are otherwise used to widen the inequality gap.
Complete the following sentence: “I wish more DeFi projects would…”
…focus on mobile and educational content.
What DeFi project name do you wish you’d thought of first?
Harvest, and their FARM token is good branding.
What do you geek out about, beyond DeFi?
Digital Identity is another great use case of blockchain technology. Verifiable Credentials and DIDs are still nascent but have a lot of government-level support to evolve and prepare them for mainstream use.
Learn more about yAxis:
- Twitter: @yaxis_project
- Medium: yAxis Project
- Discord: discord.gg/yaxis-project
- Governance forum: yaxis.discourse.group
yAxis’s $60K security audit contest opens September 9, 2021, and runs for one week. Details at code4rena.com.
The Ones in the Arena spotlights emerging and established DeFi projects and their founders, with an eye to celebrating and learning from them. The series’ name is inspired in part by Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, which has a central place in Code4rena’s philosophy.
