As we become the dollar of crypto gaming, there’s no stopping Ubiquity! We’re excited to host a kick-off event with the launch of our gamified yield farm.

Our launch event is designed with DeFi Natives and blue-chip NFT holders in mind. The design work on our NFT is complete, and we’ll even be sprinkling in a few rare keys that will provide even better rewards — so we’re now just finalizing some additional perks, and then we’ll be announcing its official release date, as well as running giveaways in our Discord & Twitter leading up to launch.

Only 1024 of our NFTs will be created, and holders will continue to receive perks in the Ubiquity ecosystem long after our launch event. We’re looking to add rewards/APY boosters, reduced/eliminated fees, and maybe even boosted governance emissions for Ubiquity Dollar LPs just for holding this NFT in your wallet.

To make it more exciting, we have talked to several friendlies and decided to share the mana. If you’re a blue-chip NFT holder of Cool Cats or BAYC, this gets you a golden ticket to join the Launch Party as well. We are expanding this list in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Want to see certain perks added to holding our NFT? Is your bluechip NFT not listed? Are you a BAYC/Cool Cat holder interested in promoting this in your community?

Let us know by hopping into our Discord or tweeting us!

Looking for something more? We just have the thing. If you want to engage with the community and help us reach our goal, we are rewarding community members who will assist with the promotion of this event. Ubiquity DAO will be running daily giveaways for our NFT drop leading up to launch. How to join? Nothing fancy. Just a simple like, retweet, and follow will earn you entry. You can also tag Cool Cat / BAYC holders to increase your odds of winning!

That’s all for now — once again make sure you join our Discord and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date on our launch announcement, and to be the first in line for our whitelist!

Hey all!

It’s been a month since our last major update. We have shipped out the Ubiquity Proxy Yield Aggregator, one of our major products. The PYA allows users to automatically invest in high yield products without needing to monitor hundreds of DeFi protocols. Users simply deposit USDC tokens to earn up to 40% APR.

There are many more in store for us, but we’re still keeping them under wraps while we iron out the details. (Alpha leak available on our Go-to-Market Strategy page if you’re keen to do your due diligence, or just take our word for it.)

What we wanted to let you know, however is that finally, we can let the cat out of the bag. It has been hush hush for a while while we lay down the Ubiquity foundation and build the ecosystem. After a successful fair launch, deployment of our tokens, and the release of our first product, we are now getting down to the metaverse path.

This is an exciting time for us as we drive mass adoption of the Ubiquity Dollar thru solidifying ourselves as the stablecoin of crypto gaming and the metaverse. The Ubiquity team is finetuning our mission and vision for the great reveal, and we’d like to make it official. This serves as your official invite to the launch of definitely-(not)a-ponzi-so-get-in-early party. The metaverse party is just getting started, and for now, we’re focusing on shaking the meta crypto gaming industry.

Why crypto gaming?

While a handful of centralized stablecoins exist in this sector, there are currently no decentralized stablecoins solely focused on serving the crypto gaming space and their communities. Fixing this issue is our first priority.

How can Ubiquity DAO help crypto games?

Whether it be interoperability between games/ecosystems, community rewards, branded stablecoins, payment processing/settlement, or even item creation — we hold a unique advantage with our upgradeable design and unique debt system to be flexible in our partnerships, to both directly and indirectly incentivize companies to partner with us.

What’s in it for Ubiquity DAO?

Gaming is a high-growth sector that we love, and if we want to be in the thick of things just for the pure adrenaline. We want to assist in helping it grow in the metaverse and be the gamer's ally in creating a decentralized economy where they are in control and have actual ownership of their in-game assets.

An additional benefit we took into consideration is the resulting long-term impact on community and protocol trust. Crypto gaming will be an inception point for the next wave of users into crypto, and being one of the first tokens they ever hold in their wallet will help us build lasting trust in the Ubiquity Dollar.

As always, if you have questions and concerns, Discord is where it’s at.

Ubiquity DAO is now stepping on the Metaverse was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey @everyone!

It was probably a slow week for the Ubiquity team, or not. We barreled on like there’s no tomorrow!

Here are the notes and updates for our last Ubiquity Community Meeting in case you weren’t able to catch it.

Operations

✔️@Doctor, who is working on our capital raising has had some vendor issues but it’s all sorted now and the enterprise is changing its policy on working with the blockchain industry. Wow! The Pitch deck is being worked on full speed with Alex. After a lot of iteration, they have settled on the approach and are making headway for the past few days despite @Doctor having a bout with Covid. We hope for your full recovery @Doctor!

Marketing/PR/Partnerships

✔️Instadapp has finished building out support for ERC-1155 on their platform and @XAQ has completed the integration with the InstaDapp platform. This means that //we can now build an application on top of Instadapp with maximum security and composability.//

✔️To pursue our commitment with a truly decentralized finance and create a new culture of work, we have also integrated with Sablier Finance which will enable the Ubiquity DAO to automatically “stream” money to our contributors for their work.

✔️We were just published on Hackernoon for Defi and The Rise of Stablecoins. It discusses stablecoins and where uAD fits the market as well as where our difference lies in comparison with other stablecoins.

✔️Our first Community Meeting POAPs (Proof of Attendance Protocol is here! Every week, attendees of our Community Meeting will be given a link to one as a way of thanking attendees for their time. We also just announced our Purple Heart POAPs which will be issued to our Top

25 initial investors who Aped when we listed on Uniswap. They got REKT and only got a POAP for their trouble. So these are super special and will only be minted for these Apes. Listen in to Alex as he relates the story of the famed Apes Purple Heart here!

✔️And finally, we are excited to announce our uAD Transfer Hooks for Targeted Incentivization. uAD Transfer hooks. It basically incentivizes any movement of uAD, for example, reward a user who just transferred a uAD to a new wallet, which we believe is better suited to the Ubiquity protocol than the traditional airdrop and unsustainable yield model. Alex, our co-founder explains it in further detail in our last Community Meeting here.

Development

✔️Our Proxy Yield Aggregator (announced last week!) which not only provides a sustainable way for farmers to earn yields but also allows us to collateralize our uAD dollar, is continuing to take shape and this sprint is targeted to finish this week. @Zgo, who built the PYA smart contract is moving to testing this week and @chriswudev is decking out the prototype. The entire team is targeting the end of this month to make it live on our dashboard as well as on the Instadapp platform.

Here’s the edited Youtube video recording if you wanna watch/listen to the update instead!

uAD Transfer Hook Announcement, Partnerships, Integrations, and Other Development News was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Bitcoin dominance has been unrivaled for the past decade. It continues to define the cryptocurrency market in a way that no other currency or token has done. It has reached as high as 86% dominance of the entire cryptocurrency market for the past decade. Beyond being the first to market, it remains the gateway crypto to own for most new crypto holders.

But in the last few years, Bitcoin has had an unexpected competitor — stablecoins. Unexpected because the cryptoverse has always been a battle of technology. While people were betting on alternative technologies that could best deliver the promises of Bitcoin, Tether (USDT) was quietly launched in late 2014 by a group called Tether Limited.

#The Birth of Stablecoins

When Tether was introduced, it was a relatively simple concept for creating a crypto asset that maintained a stable price of 1:1 to the dollar. The idea is not new and has existed pre-Bitcoin. But Tether was the first to be successful at launching it on the crypto-verse. Stablecoins are designed to have low volatility and work because of their reserve mechanism. For every USDT issued, the Tether Foundation keeps $1 equivalent in reserve. Most stablecoins are pegged to relatively solid assets with low volatility, like the US dollar or other fiat or precious metals like gold. It’s just like having a digital version of something that exists in the real world. It’s technically a digital wrapper for a dollar-valued asset.

Tether (USDT) started to take off when Bitcoin’s price began to rise in 2017, and Tether generated 1M for the first time in January 2016. By January 2017, it was a little under 10M. By January 2018, as Bitcoin’s price peaked at close to $20K, the Tether supply had grown to over 1.4B.

The rise of Tether is surprising because the entire crypto market is fueled by speculative investment, and stablecoins are just the opposite of volatility. Tether functioned as a gateway for the bull run and allowed for a more effortless transfer of money between Bitcoin and the dollar.

While Tether was cementing its foothold on the blockchain (launching on Ethereum and Tron), other stablecoins followed. The USD Coin (USDC) (managed by a group called Centre, which includes Coinbase Exchange and Circle) was launched as well as the Gemini Dollar (GUSD) stable coin (operated by Gemini Exchange). Paxos Standard Token (PAX), managed by Paxos, which had previously launched Singapore-based itBit exchange, also opened its doors. Binance launched its stablecoin Binance USD (BUSD), which is used heavily on their exchange. Soon after, Huobi launched Huobi USD (HUSD). As most observers comment, stablecoins became the playground of exchanges and have been at the center of controversies since Tether began.

#The Rise Of Stablecoins

Despite the controversies, stablecoins have rapidly risen following the March 2020 crypto crash as investors discovered another significant use of the stablecoins. It allowed them to seek shelter from Bitcoin’s volatility and the host of altcoins that dropped along with Bitcoin at the time. Although the supply grew for many stablecoins, Tether supply grew more than all other stablecoins combined.

Tether’s trading volume surpassed Bitcoin’s for the first time in April 2020 and has remained on a high level ever since then. Today, Tether has a trading volume of about $120 billion per day, which is more than half of Bitcoin’s trading volume, according to CoinMarketCap data. A 2021 Q1 report by Messari, a crypto research firm, said that the stablecoin monetary base had reached over $65 billion in Q1 of 2021. It continues to rise at an accelerating pace up to now. Stablecoins also generated a whopping $1 trillion in transaction volume, more than the previous four quarters combined.

#The Birth of DeFi

While most stablecoins are backed by USD reserves, innovation caught up with the relatively simple stablecoin technology, and different stablecoin models emerged. Stablecoins allowed for the reimagining of traditional finance into decentralized finance.

In December 2017, MakerDAO turned the world of finance on its head when it launched its decentralized stablecoin called Dai, essentially giving birth to the decentralized finance (DeFi) we now know today. Like USDT, DAI is designed to be pegged to 1 USD. But unlike USDT, USDC, and PAX, DAI is not backed by a reserve of USD controlled by a single organization. Instead, DAI is collateralized by other crypto-assets like ETH.

Anyone can mint a new DAI, which they can later redeem to reclaim the original collateral. They achieve stability through the use of “smart contracts.” These smart contracts became the heart of the decentralized finance system because they work based on code without an intermediary or third party and allow DeFi protocols to work independently. The marriage of stablecoins and smart contracts became so powerful that these became the backbone of the DeFi ecosystem.

#What is DeFi?

Traditional finance has always been controlled by a few big hands, long criticized as closed and lacking transparency. DeFi stands for decentralized finance, and it aims to make existing financial products and services accessible on the blockchain by using decentralized applications.

Technically, Bitcoin started the age of decentralized finance in 2009 because it allowed people to transfer funds over the internet in a decentralized, peer-to-peer manner. But what we now know as DeFi today are decentralized applications (dapps) that replicate traditional financial services.

Dapps have no gatekeeper, and anyone with an internet connection can use and access basic financial services online — such as borrowing, lending, and investing — without needing a financial intermediary. Dapps allow users worldwide to gain access to a global financial marketplace that provides all the decentralized services that only traditional financial institutions offer.

In theory, a woman running a market stall in the Philippines can borrow funds at a competitive rate from a decentralized lending protocol using just her smartphone. Conversely, a merchant in Argentina who is worried and affected by inflation could ideally put their money into a yield-generating protocol that earns higher interest than Argentina’s current inflation rate.

Some of the features that we dreamt of seeing in the future are actually already possible thanks to market-leading applications in Defi such as Aave, Compound, Yearn Finance, and more.

#The Role of Stablecoins in DeFi

While Bitcoin still dreams of an open financial system, decentralized finance has already been delivered. And it did so by curbing the volatility that has so far plagued cryptocurrencies and yet allows investors to earn at a much higher rate than traditional savings accounts.

Stablecoins are often used for decentralized finance activities like lending and borrowing and providing liquidity and farming, investing in baskets of digital assets, trading digital assets on margin, hedging digital asset exposure, taking out an insurance policy, or betting on trustless prediction markets. The stablecoins have expanded so rapidly in the blockchain that as of Friday, the market cap of stablecoins stood at roughly US$125 billion, according to industry data site CoinMarketCap.

The creation of yield-generation savings protocols with Compound Protocol as the frontrunner gave way to numerous new lending and borrowing applications and new types of decentralized financial applications that primarily use stablecoins.

For example, a risk-averse individual can avoid speculative crypto trading by depositing stablecoins on decentralized liquidity pools. While crypto, such as BTC or ETH, presents a possibility of a higher gain, it also can offset all gains, leaving the investor with a loss. By providing stablecoin liquidity in liquidity pools, they earn interest or generate yield safely.

This is called Yield Farming. Yield farming generally is defined as putting your capital to work, providing utility elsewhere in the DeFi ecosystem, and earning fees for doing so. Yield farming can have various forms, depositing funds in high-yielding lending protocols being the most common.

What’s even more exciting is the concept of composability. For example, when you provide liquidity in a market, you are granted liquidity provider (LP) tokens. These act as a receipt or proof that you have provided liquidity and are necessary to reclaim your original deposit. Some protocols add incentives for you to provide liquidity in certain markets. For example, you can now deposit your LP tokens in another protocol’s smart contracts, and they can provide you with additional rewards (generally in their own tokens) as an incentive to continue to provide liquidity.

The newly launched Ubiquity DAO, for example, incentivizes users to deposit dollars into their stablecoin’s market, deepening its liquidity by minting new tokens. It also incentives users to leave their liquidity in for a long period of time by also including lockup time with a rewards multiplier for the longer a user locks up their LP tokens.

Another interesting offshoot of using stablecoins in Defi projects is Yield Aggregators. Through yield aggregators, people can continuously find the highest yield lending and borrowing markets, and these aggregators move their investments accordingly. Thus, always returning the best yield available.

Ubiquity has created a “Proxy” Yield Aggregator, which deploys a user’s capital across the highest yield across multiple yield aggregators, with the added benefit of doubling yield on top in Ubiquity’s own dollar’s “debt” tokens. This allows users to redeem for more Ubiquity Dollars when the protocol needs to print more.

#A New Generation of Stablecoins

As the DeFi market grows, more protocols are created to answer new market needs and build new innovative models for financial agreements. In 2021, digital dollar stablecoins are becoming increasingly relevant assets, and there’s no sign that innovation in stablecoins is stopping yet.

The past year saw the birth of a new genre of stablecoins dubbed “algorithmic.” Unlike the earlier permutations of stablecoins, algorithmic stablecoins rely on increasing capital efficiency and being undercollateralized. They use algorithms in their smart contracts to calculate what the supply should be to peg to any price. AMPL, FRAX, UST, ESD, and uAD are examples of algorithmic stablecoins.

For algorithmic tokens, for example, if a token’s price increases to $1.20, new tokens will be minted to bring the price down to $1. Although, there’s a risk associated with relying on an algorithm. For example, YAM Finance rebased their token, but the project failed when a bug caused the currency to inflate the supply.

Already, iterations are being made to correct this mistake. By design, Ubiquity’s uAD is the world’s first polymorphic stablecoin. In simple terms, polymorphic means adaptable. Earlier attempts at algorithmic stablecoins like YAM set their stabilization strategies in stone. As a result, when the dynamics of the economy change or when exploitative actors attack the system, their re-stabilization mechanics can no longer achieve the original design objectives. Or in the particular case of YAMS, once the bug was discovered, they could not fix the issue. Ubiquity designed the uAD stablecoin with a highly flexible architecture to maximize the options of enhancing stabilization mechanisms.

According to the semi-anon founder Alex, “We originally intended to design uAD to have no collateral but realized that the algorithmic stablecoins that remained on-peg all had some form of collateralization. We are adding in a 1:20 collateralization to the protocol in Q4 2021.” Its Proxy Yield Farming is used to fund the reserves. The fractional reserve fund collects a 10% fee on any deposit and all yield in stablecoins generated by the deployment of the funds. To offset this, the protocol compensates the users with debt tokens to an amount greater than the collected yield and upfront fee.

The key takeaway of the Proxy Yield Aggregator is that it can potentially offer double the yield to your stablecoins compared to its underlying yield aggregator in a sustainable way. Once a fringe tool for cryptocurrency traders, stablecoins have the potential to become the answer to supporting critical infrastructure for payments, banking, and credit cards.

DeFi and the Rise of Stablecoins was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the DeFi boom continues throughout 2021, the space has seen new and exciting innovations as it’s quickly adapting to new inventions. While still evolving, yield aggregators are emerging as a strong trend in the crypto and blockchain industry.

Compound started the trend by popularizing the yield farming ecosystem by using its government token to maximize investing. They did this by providing liquidity to new protocols using staking. However, Compound wasn’t the only protocol that distributed its governance token this way. Protocols such as Balancer distributed 65% of its governance token BAL through its own liquidity mining campaign. Curve also has a long-term liquidity mining program to distribute its governance token CRV to depositors in its liquidity pools.

What are Yield Aggregators?

With all these protocols rewarding governance tokens for using their protocols, maximizing these earnings is becoming increasingly complex. Simply put, it’s quite hard for a single investor to spot and keep track of various opportunities across the entire market to execute the most profitable ones at the right time. The returns vary, and opportunities can disappear within seconds. Manual monitoring is tiring, tedious, costly, and requires you to constantly move from one platform to another. Isn’t there a better way?

Fortunately, the industry quickly reacted to this need, and yield aggregators (not to be confused with replicators) have emerged to help maximize profit by shifting funds between multiple platforms with the highest yield. Not only do these aggregators offer higher yields and a better user experience for investors, but they also minimize gas fees. According to Alex, founder of Ubiquity.io, it’s a win-win solution to the growing gas-guzzling on the Ethereum network.

So what exactly do Yield Aggregators do?

If you’re hunting for the best yield, you have to monitor DeFi platforms regularly. New protocols introduce functions to automate this process, and it leverages DeFi platforms and the yield they offer to maximize profit for a user. In finding the best deals, yield aggregators also simplify and improve user experience. Besides shifting funds between various DeFi platforms with the highest yield, an aggregator navigates the best returns with the shortest commitment and the lowest Ethereum network gas costs. As a result, DeFi yield farming becomes easier to manage through yield aggregators and saves on gas fees.

The ideal yield aggregator offers investors a careful and unique risk management strategy based on their chosen personal risk tolerance profile. Yield aggregators can help investors find the best and the safest yield strategies through the automatic allocation of funds without manual work.

Ubiquity and Yield Aggregators

To fund the reserves, Ubiquity’s ecosystem will offer a Proxy Yield Farming program to its users, where they will be able to deposit stablecoins in the protocol for Yield Farming. Those stablecoins will then be re-deployed in other smart contracts with low-risk protocols (AAVE, Compound, and Curve) or low-risk yield aggregators (Rari Capital, Yearn.finance).

We’re currently researching what stablecoin yield aggregator would be best to build our proxy yield aggregator on top of. Larry the Cucumber has been an active member of the Ubiquity community and has an amazing collection of yield aggregators over at pickle.finance!

How it works

The fractional reserve fund collects a 10% fee on any deposit as well as all yield in stablecoins generated by the deployment of the funds.

To offset this, the protocol compensates the users with non-expiring debt (uAR) to an amount greater than the collected yield and upfront fee.

The team is still finalizing some of the economic parameters and functionalities, but to start off, we’re aiming for a 2x yield in uAR.

For example:

1. Rari offers a 20% APY interest rate on stablecoins, so we pass the user’s funds to this aggregator
2. User farms for one year
3. User withdraws and receives 40% yield paid in debt tokens
4. User redeems debt tokens when the time-weighted average price (TWAP) is above 1.00 (or trades them on secondary markets)

The key takeaways being:

• We can offer double the yield compared to other stablecoin yield aggregators
• The Dollar protocol builds reserves to protect against downswings
• When the protocol needs to print more money, these users will be first in line (before seigniorage rewards for farmers) to redeem their tokens at full value

We’re excited about this product. It will be the first of its kind in the industry, serving users by providing double the stablecoin yields while simultaneously building up collateral for the Ubiquity Dollar.

DeFi 101: What is a Yield Aggregator was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Farming UBQ is one of the best ways to begin interacting with Ubiquity. While we have a lot of products in-store, we have prioritized the launching of the UBQ for farming to provide liquidity for uAD.

Before beginning with the process, please DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL METAMASK

1. Buy uAD to provide liquidity

To begin your journey with Ubiquity, you will need to provide liquidity to the system. We use a Curve Metapool for our primary market. When you provide liquidity, you will be issued liquidity provider (LP) tokens that serve as the proof of your investment.

💡

Before you start, make sure you have some Ether in your Metamask wallet to cover your “gas” fees -the fee to conduct any transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. You can send crypto to your wallet through exchanges like Coinbase or Binance. Nowadays, you can also buy ETH directly on MetaMask using Wyre, a financial payment service.

Head to the Ubiquity Dollar dashboard and click DEPOSIT for uAD. This will take you directly to Curve Metapool’s user interface. You may also go to crv.to directly and search for uAD.

Connect your Metamask wallet to the Curve Dapp. Once that is done, you can click the blue droplet (see below) to add liquidity to the uAD pool. You can use either DAI, USDT, or USDC. Add in your amount and click add liquidity. Approve your transaction on Metamask.

Congratulations! You are now a liquidity provider and will receive LP tokens. It will show up as “uAD3CRV-f” in your Metamask.

When sending or receiving on any network, be patient, as it may take a while to show up in your account. It will eventually show up on here after the transaction has gone through sufficient amounts of confirmations on the blockchain.

2. Begin farming UBQ

Providing liquidity for uAD gets you rewards (see Notes). In addition, you can also get rewards for staking your LP tokens. This reward is in the form of Ubiquity Governance tokens (UBQ). Once you have your LP tokens, you can go back to the Ubiquity dashboard to stake your LP tokens.

You can choose a minimum of 1 week to a max of 208 weeks, or 4 years. The longer you stake, the higher the amplification of your rewards. See the details of this in the “Example Multipliers” table here.

Once again, make sure that your MetaMask wallet is connected, this time to the staking dashboard of Ubiquity. It will automatically compute the gas fee, approve it, and stake your LP tokens in the smart contract.

Once your transaction is confirmed on the Ethereum blockchain, your UBQ dashboard will show your staked amount under the pool ownership. As always, it is important to keep your cool and be patient. You’ll have to wait quite a bit. Then, after several minutes, refresh the page again, and it will typically show up. Usually, it does not take very long, but when the network is congested, it will take a while for everything to go through. Get some coffee while you wait!

If you’re feeling antsy and worried, you can verify your transactions using Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain explorer.

Withdrawing your liquidity

Should you decide to withdraw your liquidity, you can do so when your lockup period is complete. Follow these steps to add the uAD token on Metamask:

1. Open the Metamask extension and add the token under Assets.
2. Select Custom Token. You can then enter the Token Contract Address to add the token to your wallet.
3. Please use the token contract address from the website to make sure you have the correct token. It will automatically display the name of the token (uAD) under “name” and “18” under decimals. Click “Save” and you’re good to go!
4. You can go back to Curve to withdraw your liquidity.

💡

uAD Contact Address: 0x0f644658510c95cb46955e55d7ba9dda9e9fbec6

Notes:

• UBQ rewards are liquid, meaning that you can swap them at any time via Sushi.
• uAD is added to your share of the pool when new uAD is minted (and all debt holders are paid out) so when you withdraw at the end you should have more uAD.
• uDEBT is if you burn uAD when the time-weighted average price (TWAP) is below 1.00.

Yield farming is a new DeFi term that has recently gained traction in the crypto industry. In simple terms, it means staking or locking up cryptocurrencies within a blockchain protocol to “farm” reward tokens. The practice began around 2020 when Compound, a decentralized lending platform launched their governance token COMP. Most DeFi tokens follow this model, helping to establish the decentralized nature of the platform.

Many decentralized finance (DeFi) projects rely on yield farming to incentivize users to contribute to the network’s liquidity and stability since these projects do not rely on a centralized market maker.

Much of the hype in yield farming comes from the idea of depositing tokens across several and different DeFi apps to maximize earnings. With the recent DeFi explosion, yield farming and LP tokens are slowly fusing into being used together. In many cases, users may deposit a token, borrow against it, swap for the original deposit token, and then re-deposit. This process “compounds” the rewards as a user may deposit and then borrow many times, maximizing the “farming rate” of a governance token.

For example, we can look at the steps of farming UBQ tokens on the Curve protocol using USDC.

• Deposit USDC to Ubiquity’s crypto liquidity pool
• Receive LP tokens
• Deposit received LP tokens to the Ubiquity staking pool
• Farm the UBQ token

In this scenario, your USDC would earn interest and fees in Curve’s crypto liquidity pool. In addition, your LP tokens from the liquidity pool also earn you UBQ tokens as a reward for staking. Thus, by using LP tokens, your liquidity works double-time — earning fees and farming yields.

What are LP Tokens

Liquidity is a crucial factor in DeFi. It is a fundamental concept which means to easily convert an asset without causing sharp changes in the asset’s price. If you add a token to a crypto liquidity pool, the platform (in this case, the Curve platform) generates a receipt that shows you have a share in the pool. This receipt is your liquidity provider (LP) token. This LP token is the magic behind DeFi and allows owners to use it for a lot of functions, whether in its own platform or other DeFi apps.

The liquidity available in the DeFi ecosystem is effectively multiplied. Before the invention of liquidity tokens, assets on the Ethereum ecosystem were locked when in use or staked. Like in Ethereum 2.0’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism, your ETH is locked up for it to be validated and for new blocks to be added to Ethereum’s blockchain. In these cases, there is less liquidity in the system.

In DeFi, the creation of readily convertible derivative assets such as LP tokens has solved the problem of locked crypto liquidity. It’s like an indirect form of staking where you prove you own the tokens, with the LPs acting as receipt, which you can then use instead of staking the tokens themselves.

DeFi 101 : Yield Farming and Liquidity was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From its inception to its implementation, Ubiquity has always been a fair launch decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A fair launch is a publicly announced DAO without founder allocation, early access, or pre-mine.

Evidently, this is quite revolutionary for a finance organization. Thus, fair launches became an idea to aspire to, especially in the DeFi community, where decentralization takes the uppermost value. In hindsight, Bitcoin and the older top 10 crypto assets are credited for being the original template for fair launches.

But what is a fair launch really, and why should DAOs aim for one? Beyond the heroic and admittedly good intentions, is there any real use for it? Also, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room, is there really such a thing as fair?

Let’s go through the basics of free launch again. First, there’s no such thing as free lunch in a fair launch. Everyone has to work, and proof of work (PoW) must be provided to earn tokens. In Ubiquity’s case, the founders’ Proof of Work set the tone and momentum for the fair launch.

Liquidity mining is also recognized as PoW, where rewards are given for providing liquidity to lending protocols, like Compound, or exchanges, such as Curve and Uniswap.

But here is where things get complicated. How fair is it? Everyone has their own idea of what fairness means. But in this case, fair means that access to the token or asset is open to everyone upon launch. The primary goal is to give everyone the chance to get the tokens with a specific set of rules other than directly purchasing them. This ensures that participants have an equal opportunity to acquire tokens. Think of it as Filecoin or Tezos launching without an ICO from day 1. It’s fair because everyone can participate in a permissionless and transparent system. Founder privileges become a nonissue, as the founders are playing along with everyone else.

It’s also fair because price equality is added to the equation. An article from as early as 2019, written by Arjun Balaji and Hasu, defined a fair launch as one that has an extended length of issuance for the sake of price discovery and equality — where there’s no discount.

When yEarn launched its token without going through an ICO or pre-mine and only used liquidity mining for getting their token to pave the way for price discovery, it set the path for DeFi projects doing their own fair launch. Judging by the data that Messari, a crypto data aggregator, revealed in the early part of 2021, it looks like investors like the idea, as Fair Launch tokens are outperforming most projects released through centralized token distribution events.

Still, it’s not a perfect system yet. The debate continues whether fair launches are genuinely fair, because crypto whales can earn a significant share of tokens, being able to provide far more liquidity than the average Joe. KYF is one answer to this issue. In the end, we believe that DeFi and fair launches still have a long way to go. Nevertheless, fair launches mean influence in a DAO is to be earned, not bought. Ubiquity believes that this approach stays more faithful to the essence of DeFi.

Fair Launch As The Essence Of DeFi was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Traditional finance sucks. It operates on trust, which unfortunately isn’t always rewarded. Central authorities such as governments, banks, and institutions have been given power and control over the entire system. So far, they have only managed to destroy what little trust was left for them. Currencies that are supposed to underpin economies are either under or overregulated.

As we continue to hand over control of our money, we end up being controlled ourselves. Central authorities continuously gain power as more people place their trust in them. Yet, as investors, we don’t have any form of control or say over how these businesses manage our investments. Nor do we have any say over how our governments manage the economy. Corporate transparency has a long way to go and is not a priority for most traditional organizations.

And so, from the bowels of centralized finance, DeFi was born. More precisely, cryptocurrency was born as a response to centralized finance. DeFi is a response to both. DeFi is crypto 2.0.

DeFi is an abbreviation of decentralized finance, which typically refers to the digital assets, financial smart contracts, protocols, and decentralized applications (DApps) built on the Ethereum blockchain. It runs nodes and services around the world without a central service exercising control over the entire system.

Simply put, decentralized finance allows people to use financial systems without submitting verification documents such as IDs, social security numbers, or proof of address. If that isn’t revolutionary enough, it relies on software written on the blockchain to allow those involved in the market, such as buyers and sellers, to interact peer-to-peer without going through intermediaries, such as banks or brokers. These software require very little human intervention. Instead, smart contracts execute upon meeting their directives.

DeFi has many defining characteristics: it’s permissionless, interoperable, and transparent. It also allows for quick and efficient exchange of information, coordination, collective learning, and collective resolution. Suppose the main goal of cryptocurrency is to put power and control of money into the holders’ hands. In that case, DeFi aims to bring this to a macro level of institutions and organizations.

While DeFi shares many characteristics with cryptocurrencies, one of the most striking differences is its composability. Its open-source code allows developers to make Dapps on top of other applications. This doesn’t just accelerate innovation, but the interoperability allows for new products and services to be created through mixing and matching existing DeFi tools, so-called Money Legos.

Ironically, the most challenging characteristic to meet for many DeFi organizations is decentralization. As DeFi platforms are built to be managed by a community of users and not centrally controlled, the users become owners of their financial applications. They have control over every major decision, can propose changes, and benefit from the organization’s success. Conversely, the developers, founders, or any centralized party have neither control over the funds nor can they suddenly change the rules of the game.

MakerDAO, one of the earliest DeFi organizations, founded in 2015, recently announced it’s finally beginning its decentralization process this July. Giving up control over the smart contracts related to a project can put an organization in a hard place should there be any problems with the protocol that they need to fix unilaterally without going through an approval process from the community. This is particularly hard for protocols still developing their applications. In these cases, teams will often maintain some degree of control over their protocols. As a decentralized autonomous organization, Ubiquity plans for a fully decentralized government rollout as early as Q4 of this year. While not all DeFi apps are at the most decentralized end, they are working on getting there, with teams gradually relinquishing control over their protocols.

As we move towards a decentralized society, more and more DeFi apps with compelling use cases will sprout. There will be more demand for DeFi Dapps in the future, where decentralized applications will set the new standard for the economy. Consequently, the global economy could receive a considerable upgrade as individuals are taking a more proactive stance in controlling their finances. But, for now, decentralized finance gives the world a glimpse of a more open and transparent financial system.

A Glimpse of A More Open Finance System was originally published in Ubiquity DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NYC, NY — Since recently launching Coinvest, a non-custodial wallet and derivatives trading market and Coinvest Plus, a secure exchange for digital assets, Coinvest has spent the past month iterating and improving their products based on the user feedback.

Fees

One of the most important announcements is the change in its fee structure. While other exchanges are moving towards higher fees for the small and irregular traders, Coinvest has announced that they will now have a uniform flat-fee of only $0.99 per transaction on all Coinvest products. Unlike all current trading platforms and exchanges that offer a percentage-based fee, their $0.99 flat-rate ensures transparency in a fee schedule that is simple, predictable and requires no math.

According to Nam, “This move is in keeping with our commitment to making technology serve the needs of the masses while providing access to financial opportunities that have historically been limited within the domain of the technical or elite.”

Token Support

Only a month since launch, the Coinvest ecosystem is also ready to welcome new partners to the family. The company has announced that they will be adding over 200+ digital assets to the Coinvest platform and smart contracts in the coming weeks. By simply using $COIN, you can now invest in hundreds of different individual assets or combine them into one personal index for $0.99.

For the Coinvest Plus platform, they are happy to announce that the following assets are now available for exchange:

• XRP ($XRP)
• Bitcoin Cash ($BCH)
• Monero ($XMR)
• Dash ($DASH)
• Zcash ($ZEC)
• Qtum ($QTUM)
• Holochain ($HOT)
• Nexo ($NEXO)
• GoChain ($GO)
• Dentacoin ($DCN)
• Daps ($DAPS)
• Loki ($LOKI)

This is in addition to their launching assets, Coin ($COIN), Bitcoin ($BTC), Ethereum ($ETH), LiteCoin ($LTC), Basic Attention Token ($BAT), and Gemini Dollar ($GUSD). Each new asset will have a specific trading market alongside $COIN, $BTC, $ETH, and $GUSD.

Security, Features, and UX

At the request of user feedback and to greatly enhance the overall user experience, the team has made a number of updates on the design and user interfaces for both Coinvest Wallet and Coinvest Plus to greatly enhance the overall user experience. Layouts have been optimized while additional tools have been added to help facilitate user investment decisions. Collectively, these updates help reduce confusion and friction for quick trading. Enhancements and optimizations were also made for the security of their users, such as 2-Factor Authentication for Coinvest Plus to help protect traders and the overall platform.

Additional no-cost features mark the company’s commitment to becoming a one-stop shop with the prominent addition of lending facilities brought by their partnership with Celsius Network.

Through this partnership, they are offering their users the ability to lend and earn interest on their assets. Through this extra value added service, users will not incur origination or closing fees, penalties, early termination, and default fees.

Damon Nam, Founder, and CEO of Coinvest, states “we continue to seek more ways in pushing boundaries to increase adoption and access to digital assets for the overall blockchain industry. We are maniacally focused on continually improving our products and services to best suit our user’s needs. Additionally, as a U.S. SEC, FINCEN and FINRA registered company, we are also committed to providing the utmost compliance for our products so anyone can take advantage of our services without worrying about the safety of their investments. Our long term stake on the success of the industry as a whole and the Coinvest ecosystem, in particular, makes Coinvest the brand of choice for people looking for transparency, simplicity, security, affordability, and compliance.”

About Coinvest
Coinvest is a technology company that develops solutions to empower the world to execute financial transactions with freedom and simplicity. The company’s mission is to democratize finance and bring the power of financial services into the hands of the consumer.

Coinvest is lead by a team of Microsoft alumni and prominent advisors Tony Scott, former CIO of the US Government, VMWare, and Microsoft, Alex Mashinsky, Founder and CEO of Celsius Network, as well as Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable. Coinvest is one of the few blockchain companies in the world registered with the United States SEC, FINRA, and FinCEN. For more information about Coinvest, please visit: https://coinve.st.