Earlier in July, we kicked off the Cronos Ecosystem Spotlight Series — a series of interview articles covering projects that are building on the Cronos Chain.
Today, we are excited to feature Mimas Finance, one of the earliest money market projects that launched on Cronos with an exciting product roadmap incorporating DeFi, NFTs, and Gaming.
1. Gm Mimas team! Please share more about Mimas and the origin story of your project.
Mimas Finance is an algorithmic money market native to Cronos. It allows users to supply and borrow assets while receiving or paying interest in a completely permissionless and decentralized way. Borrowing and lending interest are set based on market demand, and loans are over-collateralized to ensure solvency.
I think our first brainstorming session, where Mimas started to take shape, was about a year ago. This was a few months after we launched Tranquil Finance, also a lending market, but on the Harmony chain. At the time, there were a lot of new L1 chains being launched, and there was a narrative that all L1 chains needed at least two DeFi primitives: DEX and a lending market.
Back then our brainstorming meetings were very chaotic (which in hindsight I think was a good thing for creativity), and we very rarely reached a consensus and never came up with anything remotely resembling a plan. But that one meeting was the one exception: we decided to expand to Cronos, and I had an immediate action item to come up with a name for this new project…
2. Mimas was one of the earliest projects on Cronos, can you share with us how the experience has been? (growth, partnerships, performance metrics, etc.)
Building on Cronos has been a great experience overall, I definitely think we made the right decision on that early brainstorming meeting!
From the very beginning, we got a lot of support from Cronos Labs, which was instrumental for us to build a great Cronos-native experience. We were also able to quickly establish strong partnerships with other Cronos projects (e.g. MM Finance). But above everything else, we got a lot of support from the Cronos community, people that believed in our project from Day 1.
I think in terms of growth we had a pretty good trajectory since our launch, consistently being one of the top DeFi applications on Cronos, and steadily adding new users. Of course, like everyone else in DeFi, our TVL was heavily impacted by the Luna crash and subsequent bear market. But bear market or not, we are here to stay, and I believe that with our recent Defira launch, we will soon surpass our previous all-time high TVL!
3. Can you share with us the background of the founding team behind Mimas?
Well, we are obviously all Dragon Ball Z fans…
Now, seriously, we are 3 OG founding members: me (0xGoten), 0xYamcha, and 0xKrillin. We are all software engineers that have known each other for quite some time now, and some of us worked together for a few years. We all have more than 10 years of experience working as software engineers, tech leads, and managers at FAAMG.
We worked on different areas ranging from cryptography to machine learning, but none of us directly worked with blockchain or web3 when we started. It started as a side project, turned into a passion project, and finally became an obsession to fully realize web3 potential.
4. Your team has decided to expand Defira to Cronos. Please tell us more about Defira and why did you choose to expand to Cronos?
Defira is a blockchain metaverse — the Defiraverse. It is a fusion of DeFi and GameFi, harnessing the synergies of both models to create a DeFi “super app” inside a fantasy game world, which hosts novel and engaging gameplay experiences that fully take advantage of the unique strengths of the blockchain medium.
We started working on Defira around 8 months ago, and since the very beginning, our vision for Defira was for it to support more than one chain. Cronos was a natural choice for us, as we already had a strong (Mimas) community here, and the reasons that made us choose it for Mimas in the first place are still true (solid ecosystem, strong user base, growth potential).
We launched Defira on Cronos less than a week ago, and we are already the top GameFi app on Cronos (according to dappradar). Our game token, $FIRA, is consistently among the top-3 traded tokens in VVS. I’m really excited about the overall community reception, and I can’t wait to launch our full new features on Cronos.
5. What are the upcoming roadmap updates for Mimas and Defira that the Cronos community can look forward to?
Defira’s gameplay systems will revolve around our main Hero NFTs: Defira is a land inhabited by heroes of many races and classes. They are not only great warriors and masters of magic, but they also perform the vital jobs that make the world prosperous.
The Genesis Hero mint has started since Sept 11, 2022 — these are very special heroes that can perform the “wishing ritual” unlimited times to summon new heroes, they are the “seeds” to bootstrap the whole ecosystem.
Immediately (1–2 weeks) after the Genesis Hero mint, we will be releasing a slew of features to bring utility to heroes including:
- Hero Marketplace — trade heroes between players
- Wishing Ritual — summon new heroes with 2 existing heroes
- Soulbinding & Ascension Ritual — burn heroes into soul gems and use them to upgrade your existing heroes
- Hero Jobs — send your Hero to perform jobs around the city to earn Fira and other rewards
Longer term, we are developing interactive gameplay features starring these Hero NFTs. Our flagship game vision is a Massive Multiplayer 4x (MMO4x) game experience, where players build an empire through conquest and alliances. Heroes will lead armies in this game mode to help conquer and defend territory. We think this genre will work very well as a blockchain game especially putting the resource system on-chain and being powered by DeFi protocols like AMM and lending.
The Mimas lending market will also be merged into the Mimasia Bank in the Defiraverse. This is a step toward our longer-term vision of creating an engaging gamified one-stop shop for DeFi on Cronos. Other DeFi-related features that fit this vision include DEX and Yield aggregator.
About Cronos
Cronos (cronos.org) is the first EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain network built on the Cosmos SDK, supported by Crypto.com, Crypto.org, and more than 300+ app developers and partners. Cronos is building an open ecosystem where developers can create their own DeFi and GameFi applications, targeting a base of 50+ million users globally. Earlier this year, Cronos Labs launched a $100M Accelerator program to help developers build new projects and the future of Web3 within the Cronos ecosystem.
When developers build on Cronos, they can leverage all Ethereum developer tools (i.e. Solidity, Truffle, Hardhat, OpenZeppelin, Web3.js, ethers.js, ChainSafe Gaming SDK); leading crypto wallets (i.e. MetaMask, Crypto.com Defi Wallet, Trust Wallet); wrapped versions of the world’s top 50 cryptocurrencies; Cronos Play, a suite of developer tools for Unity, C++ and Unreal engine; and inter-blockchain communication (IBC) cross-chain connectivity to Cosmos chains; and as well as a rich ecosystem of composable DeFi and GameFi dApps.
Cronos is supported by Cronos Labs, the ecosystem grant fund, Web3 start-up accelerator, and incubator of Cronos chain.
