Community Update: December 2020

Towards the end of an eventful year, we want to recap past events and achievements and give an outlook about what is to come in 2021.

DIA Core Team

Published in

DIA Insights

7 min readDec 23, 2020

Overview

Since our last community update in October, both the DeFi market and the DIA project have seen fast-paced developments that we want to summarise for you.

The most notable events include a series of product updates and partnerships with new and established projects, the start of applications for DIA Labs, new team additions, the integration into the Polkadot ecosystem, the first DIA DAO vote, extension of the team’s token vesting schedule, updates to DIA’s security infrastructure and a resolution of the KuCoin incident.

KuCoin Buybacks

To start off, we give an update to the developments surrounding the KuCoin hack. After the malicious hack which led to the theft of a total of an estimated $200M worth of digital assets from the Hong Kong based exchange, the situation is close to resolution. While the hacker has reportedly been arrested and is facing charges, DIA’s commitment to decentralisation has proven to be the right decision.

Avoiding the surrender of our commitment to decentralisation as well as a huge cost to our community and the project through a forking (and thus a zombie DIA token), we have finally arrived at an optimal outcome for our project. KuCoin finally reopened withdrawals and deposits for all affected projects, including DIA. At the same time, KuCoin has committed to repurchasing DIA tokens from the market and begun to do so.

As promised, the DIA team will compensate the community for the adverse effects of the hack.

DIA Token 💎

Market and price development

During the second bull run of the general crypto and DeFi markets in the second half of 2020, DIA has seen strong fluctuations. Scratching a maximum price of almost $2 on 23.11.2020, we generally remain in the band between $1.20 and $1.60, 20–60% above the all-time low which is in line with the DeFi market bounce of 20%+

Security measures

In light of the recent uptake of security breaches at partnering exchanges, and more frequent and sophisticated hacking attempts on DIA infrastructure and core management personnel, we are implementing new security measures for a range of DIA company infrastructure as well as wallets. The core aim of these security measures is guarantee business continuity and rigid asset access security. This will entail the ongoing segregation and ring fencing of company token assets like the ecosystem wallets into a range of cold and hot storage wallet distributions.

Tokenomics update

We are happy to announce that we have come to an agreement for a prolonged vesting schedule with one of our key investors, Outlier Ventures. This key investor has agreed to increase the vesting schedule from originally 12 months to 24 months. This will release 500K DIA tokens per month vs. originally 1.2 M DIA tokens. This ongoing commitment to the long-term vision of DIA by key investors, alongside a prolonged team vesting scheme, is a further manifestation of the sustainable growth potential seen in the Oracle space by the investment community.

Additionally, the DIA team have announced an extension of their token vesting schedule to a total of 36 months, demonstrating the long term commitment to DIA’s vision of delivering a democratic, transparent and open-source infrastructure of financial data and information.

Lastly, the first DIA DAO vote has resulted in a decision to burn 50% of the planned yearly treasury release of 4.575 M DIA tokens, to be executed before the end of this year. Find more details on the DAO vote below.

Transparency update

Based on the community’s feedback we are providing a graph that shows the distribution of tokens for all individual groups in a comprehensive and easily accessible format. A detailed update of the transparency report details will be provided in the coming days.

DAO Vote 🗳

DIA’s first DAO vote took place in early December, as planned. We were happy to see that the majority of the participants voted in favor of the team’s proposal to burn 50% of next year’s treasury release and allocate 50% of it to strategic uses. The token burn will be executed on December 29.

We continue to develop a tailored implementation of DAO infrastructure for upcoming votes that enables better participation and a more structured process from proposal discovery to voting.

Product / Tech ⚙️

We continue to add categories as well as individual data feeds to the DIA platform. Here is an overview of the most notable feeds available:

New category: “Guest quotations”

Protocol Scrapers

CEX Price Source

Partnerships 🤝

Intensifying business development efforts, we have integrated DIA oracles into a wide range of dApps and will announce more exciting collabs in the near future. Here is who has joined the DIA ecosystem since end of November:

Injective Protocol: Injective aims to bring fast, secure and fully decentralised cross-chain derivatives trading to the rapidly growing DeFi ecosystem.
Polkadot: Polkadot, the project born out of a need for more efficiency and scalability in blockchain, aims to solve many of the issues that have so far held back implementation of Web3 technology on a massive scale. Most notably, it addresses connection between blockchains, scalability, and strong network security from day one for new parachains, along with governance, and developer experience.
Matic: Matic Network builds a decentralized platform using an adapted version of the Plasma framework that provides a solution for faster and extremely low-cost transactions with finality on the main chain.
Acala Network: A decentralized financial hub of Polkadot delivering a set of DeFi primitives, like a “stablecoin protocol” to enable stable value transfer across all blockchains that are connected to it, and a “trustless liquid staking protocol” to unleash liquidity and opening new possibilities for interoperable open financial applications.
ZeroSwap: sets out to develop the ambitious vision of a platform that aggregates DEXs which, by design, allows its users gasless transactions and zero-fee trade.
PlasmaPay: An all in one DeFi platform aggregator and management interface that includes a global cryptocurrency wallet and digital payments DApp (decentralized application) which provides fiat on/off ramp services for a range of investors.

DIA Labs 🧪

The application phase for DIA Labs is in full swing. Having received well over 30 applications, we have deep dived into a good 10 projects. We expect to announce the first active participants in January / February 2021.

Team 👥

The DIA team continues to grow. We are excited to announce additions to the communications, business development and engineering teams:

Mikel Garcia Zabala — With a background in business development, marketing, communication and design, Mikel will help the team to push and deliver effectively DIA’s message across different channels and platforms. Mikel holds a double bachelor degree by Spanish and German universities in business management and marketing and landed in the Berlin blockchain scene in early 2019 to join DIA’s founders in their side project, BlockState. Welcome on board, Mikel!

Alexandre Wolff — Great background in the development field, including deep knowledge of Go, Solidity, Docker, Redis, InfluxDB, Kafka languages making Alexandre a true asset to our team! Welcome, Alexandre!

We continue to look out for talent, especially to join our tech team:

Events 🎙

As the global economy has moved towards remote conferencing and digital events, our team has been invited to talk at a number of conferences, panels and talks, sharing our opinions and presenting DIA

‘DeFi insecurities & layer-2 migration’ — Panel at Sperax ‘Behind The Chain’ event featuring DIA’s CTO, Samuel Brack, David Truong from AAVE & Serge Lubkin from Hedget.
DIA Core team AMA ‘first DAO vote’ — featuring DIA’s Founder, Michael Weber & Cofounder, Paul Claudius.

Press 📰

The media has shown wide interest in the doings of DIA, resulting in several articles about DIA, our vision and our team.

Upcoming 👀

The team’s priorities remain unchanged: While we bolster security and prepare for the execution of DAO decisions, we continue to develop core infrastructure, enlarge our data offering, build partnerships and integrate into the Defi ecosystem. Here is an overview of upcoming topics:

Team development
DAO driven token burn
DAO infrastructure development and testing
Further cross-chain implementations beyond Ethereum and Polkadot
Onboarding first DIA Labs applicants

About DIA

DIA (Decentralised Information Asset) is an open-source, financial information platform that utilises crypto economic incentives to source and validate data. Market actors can supply, share and use financial and digital asset data.