too long, didn’t read

VOLT will be the only stablecoin whose users can veto unwanted changes to their protocol

okay, i’ll read it

Smart contracts are closest thing to an absolute guarantee of property rights ever produced by human ingenuity — unlike laws, there is no room for interpretation, only literal execution.

Yet, almost every decentralized financial application so far devised is structured like a shareholder corporation, where the governance token holders depend on a limited body of experts for practical decision making, and depositors have no say whatever in how the system is run.

Volt Protocol will be different by combining two principles:

• market governance, which means that wherever possible, system parameter changes should be responsive to market behaviors, not by vote
• checks and balances, such that when changes are made to the system by vote, all stakeholders have an ability to dissent or protect their own rights

This article is focused on the latter. Volt Protocol is developing a veto module that will allow VOLT stablecoin holders, or their delegates, to veto changes proposed by governance.

If VCON holders propose a selfish action like lowering the minimum surplus buffer size or onboarding a risky but high yield venue, VOLT holders will be able to reject this change.

VCON holders will also have a separate veto module, so that to pass a change, not only is a majority of VCON required, but that neither too many VCON or VOLT holders object.

Veto rights do create risk of deadlock, in which a hostile minority prevents necessary changes. Since the VOLT supply is capped in the early period, the quorum threshold can be set high enough to prevent this concern.

In a future version, an escalation process will be added such that if a proposal is initially vetoed, it can be submitted to a slower timelock with a higher veto threshold. For example:

• a fast timelock might have three days until proposals can be executed and require a quorum of 5% of the VOLT supply to veto
• a slow timelock might take two weeks until proposals can be exeucted and require 20% of the VOLT supply to veto

Attention is a scarce resource, and it’s unrealistic that most stablecoin holders will participate directly in governance. The goal of the veto module is that a minority who are paying attention and guarding their interests will benefit all VOLT users.

To support this goal, Volt Protocol is planning an incentivized VOLT delegate program. The program will likely begin after the initial veto module is complete. If this interests you, stop by our Discord or the community forum to discuss and keep track of updates.

We hope to see a general easing of the boundary between owner and user in cryptocapital systems over time. Read a closely related discussion in the LIDO forums for more on bicameral or dual governance in DeFi.

Except by Consent of the Governed was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The total amount of VOLT that can be minted is limited by the size of the system surplus, which exists to absorb any losses before VOLT holders and provide reliable liquidity. In the final version of Volt Protocol supply cap adjustments will be purely algorithmic based on the growth of the surplus buffer.

Most stablecoins today have a small surplus, and some are running at a deficit. This puts holders at great risk if a meaningful portion of the backing should encounter a liquidity crisis, or if any lending loss should occur. Volt Protocol seeks to maintain a surplus of between 5 and 20 percent. This will allow the protocol to safely and productively allocate funds while managing its liquidity.

The starting supply cap is fixed at about 4,619,960. This means the surplus, which is currently about 300k in stablecoins, will not fall below 6% of the face value of all circulating VOLT. While this cap is potentially alterable by governance, it is unlikely to be changed until VCON auctions are enabled.

In the market governance system, when the surplus is below 5% or other target as defined by governance, VCON token auctions will be triggered to allow further VOLT supply growth, and new VOLT minting will be blocked. When the surplus is above 20%, VCON holders will be able to redeem their pro rata share, allowing excess capital to leave.

For more information about the VOLT backing and current PCV allocations, take a look at our Dune Analytics dashboard.

VOLT Supply & Demand was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Code is law” makes better money possible

The Ethereum network is a substrate where we can build new digital currencies superior to old forms like physical cash or checkable bank deposits. Each of these forms has its strengths and weaknesses.

Cash is difficult to censor or confiscate. It can be exchanged peer to peer any time without requiring electricity or the approval of an outside authority. It is a physical item vulnerable to theft or damage, so sending it any distance entails risk and cost. To make matters worse, there is the continual erosion of value due to inflation.

Bank deposits are yield bearing and allow sending funds safely over long distances. With a bank card (prior to that, a checkbook), consumers can safely access much larger balances than they would comfortably carry around in cash, and readily perform online payments, automate bill payment, and other conveniences. However, they are easy to censor and lack privacy. Bank middlemen generally take a large spread, meaning depositors have limited yield opportunities.

Smart contracts make it possible for digital currencies to have property rights built into them, rather than relying on an external enforcer. They can match the convenience of bank deposits while retaining much of the virtue of cash. While they may not be usable when the power is out, nor as private as cash (we hope to see this change in the future), they are difficult to confiscate and can be used peer to peer instantly across jurisdictions.

Beyond Token Governance

Centralized stablecoins like USDC can directly censor holders before they have a chance to react. Decentralized stablecoins like DAI are governed by formal token voting processes, which give holders a chance to exit if they don’t like what’s being done. There are also immutable systems like LUSD. Since they cannot change they cannot be censored, but a system that can never change will struggle to reach and maintain scale.

Formal procedures for changes and time delays permitting exit are a good start, but insuffient. They don’t get rid of incentive misalignment between the governors and the governed, and place the burden of noticing and reacting to malfeasance on the general body of currency holders. See here for more on the flaws of tokenholder governance. We can go further by giving currency holders the right of dissent. The Volt Protocol team is working to implement an upgrade known as the “Nope DAO”. Under this system VOLT holders will be able to veto governance changes proposed by the core contributor team, or by holders of the VCON governance token once it is live. If VCON holders propose a new yield venue and VOLT holders see it as adding excessive risk, they can block this change. In this way, only an informed minority is needed to protect the rights of all VOLT holders.

Market Governance

Volt Protocol relies on the principle that markets produce more efficient outcomes than committees or public opinion. We believe that a truly neutral global store of value and medium of exchange must be self-regulated based on the behavior of actors in the open marketplace. Market governance is a term for any system of smart contracts in which the key parameters are regulated based on the market behaviors of actors as observed on chain.

Volt Protocol market governance alters the normal token governance framework, in which gov token holders are decision makers and stablecoin holders merely users. We understand VOLT holders as lenders, and VCON governance token holders as borrowers. VCON holders will be able to nominate yield venues for the protocol, subject to veto by VOLT holders. VCON governors can then allocate protocol value among approved venues with skin in the game, earning a portion of the returns they generate and subjecting themselves to liquidation in the event of losses. VCON holders gain or lose according to their individual performance, VOLT holders earn based on the aggregate performance of the VCON allocators.

Since VCON holders are borrowers, a mechanism exists to prevent excessive leverage that would induce them to take on too much risk. Volt Protocol targets a certain collateralization ratio (CR) between the circulating VOLT and the system surplus. With a CR of 120%, there would be 1.20 VOLT of protocol controlled value for every circulating VOLT. When the CR is too low, VCON tokens may be auctioned off to grow the system surplus. When the CR is too high, VCON tokens may be redeemable for a share of the surplus. The surplus is used to protect VOLT holders from losses that individual VCON holders may suffer in market governance.

The VOLT rate holders earn will be based on the trailing average system yield and the distance from target CR. Above the target ratio, all of the system profit is passed on to VOLT holders. Below the target ratio, some of the yield is retained in the surplus buffer. Reducing the yield paid to holders when the system is highly leveraged helps maintain incentive alignment for VCON holders, and allows the surplus buffer to grow faster when demand is high.

The full market governance specification will be released in the coming weeks. The core contributor team is working to implement a prototype version of market governance, as well as adding an initial menu of yield venues. Keep an eye out for the first of these, Volt Protocol’s deposit into Compound Finance. This process included extensive security review which will set the standard for future venue onboarding. The VOLT rate will soon adjust toward an optimized cDAI/cUSDC rate, as the protocol will follow a strategy of reallocating between the two in pursuit of optimized yield. The starting venue set is likely to include other major lending markets that support the core PCV stablecoins DAI and USDC. Once market governance is live, VCON holders will be able to individually choose the denomination and venue where capital is deployed.

VOLT and the Future of Money was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

VOLT Protocol has concluded its week-long internal audit on Compound! Both internal and external engineers participated in this security review, which serves as proof of concept for the VOLT yield venue onboarding process. Reviewers checked for known patterns such as check-effects-interaction, reentrancy, share price manipulation, economic exploits, and other threat models. Compound is one of the core DeFi primitives, and some of the smart contracts reviewed were over three and a half years old. After this review, the VOLT Protocol team feels that Compound maintains a strong security posture. Its strong Lindy effect gives it a high level of security against attack.

DeFi gives super powers to developers and engineers, allowing them to stack functionality and compose many primitives into complex financial products. However, this complexity and composability is a double edged sword, as the users of your product are now exposed to the smart contract risk of your platform, as well as all of the protocols you are built on top of. The weakest link in the composability stack has the potential to undermine an entire protocol even if it isn’t your protocol’s code that is vulnerable. VOLT thinks about security from first principles, and any new external yield venue requires an internal audit of the entire codebase to ensure there are no bugs in the code users are being exposed to. Taking a careful and methodical approach to security will ensure that VOLT is the safest place to deposit dollar denominated liquidity in pursuit of optimized yield.

Volt Protocol’s audit reports will be available for the benefit of the public, with any issues discovered in external protocols first disclosed to the relevant parties through appropriate channels. The Compound audit report will be released after a week long period for review and feedback. Based on the deeper understanding gained in the review process, Volt Protocol will incorporate additional safety measures on top of venues to guard against known failure modes that are endemic to market types (for example, liquidation failure during extreme market conditions system wide) as opposed to unintentional vulnerabilities which would be disclosed and mitigated.

Internal Auditing Program

VOLT Protocol is pleased to announce its internal audit program is now open to top DeFi auditors in the space. If you are interested in auditing smart contract changes to the VOLT system and other top smart contract projects where PCV will be deployed, please fill out this form.

Thinking from first principles about security allows VOLT to crowdsource its audits to many top smart contract engineers, similar to the Code4rena model. This ensures that each change receives as many eyes on the code as possible. Auditors review code independently and in pairs with Volt Protocol engineers. They are compensated for their time and earn bounties for vulnerabilities found in Volt Protocol code.

Compound Integration and Audit was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Volt Protocol core contributor team are delighted to share that Tom Waite has accepted a formal role in protocol development as a Technical Advisor. As an advisor, Tom will participate in design and specification work, as well as perform security reviews of completed code.

Tom’s work with Optimistic Governance pods inspires us as we strive to push the boundaries of scalability and decentralization. The “NopeDAO” which allows stakeholders to veto undesired changes without requiring them to rubber stamp every uncontroversial proposal is a key building block for governance. We are excited to work with Tom to include optimistic governance patterns plus associated checks and balances in the next iteration of the Volt system.

Join us this Friday for our community call or listen to the recording to learn more about what’s next for Volt Protocol.

Some Friendly Advice was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Consider a tale of two stablecoins. Coin A is backed exclusively by overcollateralized ETH debt positions, while Coin B is redeemable on demand for underlying dollars which it simply deposits in a bank account. Coin A is immutable code, while Coin B is run by a corporation that is contractually bound to exchange Coin B for dollars so long as the counterparty can pass KYC/AML. Coins A and B are otherwise identical, neither having any transfer restrictions, upgradeability, or ability to censor individual accounts.

For a user Jimmy living in the nation of Coinlandia, which of these will provide a stable dollar value across all market and political circumstances? In reality, there is no stablecoin capable of doing so, though we strive to be as close as possible.

There are three major failure modes for these coins:

Censorship by Coinlandia

Coinlandia is deeply in debt to the world bank, which applies political pressure, offering to reduce interest rates so long as Coinlandia takes a strong stance against cryptocurrency. As a result, Coinlandia bans all forms of fiat<->crypto exchange domestically, such as centralized exchanges or the operation of stablecoins like Coin B.

In this scenario, neither Coin A nor Coin B can be readily exchanged for $1 in fiat. Coin B is forced to wind down operations in Coinlandia, while there is no exchange left in operation that would allow Jimmy to buy or sell Coin A.

If Coin B’s issuer holds real world asset backing inside Coinlandia, it is vulnerable to censorship and seizure, unlike Coin A. However, if it is centered outside Coinlandia, prohibitions on direct minting or redemptions by Coinlandians will not control the price at which it can be exchanged on chain.

From Jimmy’s perspective, if censorship by the government of Coinlandia is his primary concern, he should prefer Coin A to Coin B only if Coin B’s underlying assets are within Coinlandia. If the majority of Coin B’s value is stored outside Coinlandia, they are equally resilient to Coinlandian censorship.

Market volatility

A plummeting ETH price leads minters of Coin A to seek to repay their debt. In this contractionary event, Coin A goes above peg. This creates a tricky scenario where new Coin A buyers risk losses if the coin returns to its peg, while borrowers pay an unexpectedly high amount to close positions.

From Jimmy’s perspective, he should prefer Coin B to Coin A if peg stability is his primary concern.

Malfeasance by counterparty

The one area where Coin A clearly wins out — as an immutable contract, there’s no way that a counterparty can introduce risk. In the case of Coin B, it’s possible that funds could be deposited in a bank that takes excessive risk and loses customer funds. It’s also possible that the officers of Coin B’s company could censor the protocol by refusing to honor redemptions, necessitating a court process.

There are clear security reasons to favor Coin A and practical reasons to favor Coin B. Either of these pure forms is vulnerable to failure — the decentralized Coin A inevitably depegs under certain market conditions, while the centralized Coin B is subject to censorship or misbehavior of the custodians. Neither can offer a total defense against state level censorship. This cannot be considered a realistic objective for a stablecoin and depends more on the properties of the underlying Ethereum network.

Notably, none of the stablecoins described above exists. The closest to Coin A is $LUSD, but it cannot be considered fully immutable due to its dependency on Chainlink price feeds which are vulnerable to censorship.

The closest to Coin B are the fiatcoins $USDC, $USDT, etc, with the notable exception that these fiatcoins have the ability to directly censor individual user accounts. This lever creates significant additional risk compared to the danger of the underlying funds being seized or mismanaged.

Now let’s throw a curveball — what if we combined Coins A and B? By adding Coin B as collateral to mint Coin A, we can fully solve peg instability without accepting the risk of 100% of holder funds being censored.

The amount of Coin B needed to secure the peg of Coin A depends on the total amount of demand to borrow against ETH vs the total demand to hold Coin A. The tail risk that Coin A holders accept in the process is proportional to the total backing that is in Coin B.

Having read the above, you can understand why MakerDAO decided to include USDC as backing for Multi-Collateral DAI. It brings tremendous improvement to peg stability, while increasing risk since Circle could possibly censor the DAO. The value proposition becomes clear in that the blacklisting risk borne by an individual USDC holder is much greater than that borne by a DAI holder. If Circle were to freeze the USDC backing $DAI, what would actually happen? Inevitably suits and settlement would occur, as they cannot simply steal >$1b deposited by counterparties all over the world. While the $DAI price would suffer a discount, it would not be for the full value of the frozen $USDC, and would still be tradeable. If valueless UST can trade at $1 for months, the illiquid frozen USDC portion of the DAI backing will not be marked down to zero. An individual USDC holder with frozen funds, on the other hand, must personally take recourse. The expense and difficulty of this are much greater, and there is no possibility of selling at a loss to those willing to speculate on eventual redemption.

The risk of protocol-level asset freeze can thus reasonably be said to outweigh the large risk of depeg making the core product unusable. Moving forward, the goal should be (and is) ending reliance on any single RWA counterparty. Cutting out $USDC by pursuing real world asset initiatives allows MakerDAO to come closer to a pure hybrid of Coins A and B, with no single entity capable of inflicting large scale censorship on the protocol, even if individual RWA loans do entail counterparty risk. If most of B’s backing is spread around the world, it is much less vulnerable to censorship by Coinlandia.

Stablecoins backed purely by crypto collateral cannot remain sufficiently stable at scale to satisfy demand. Existing fiatcoins include excessive levers for censorship, and over reliance on a small number of providers increases risks. The way forward is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to create less centralized and more resilient structures for RWA exposure.

Volt Protocol supports both USDC and DAI as PCV stablecoins, and will minimize censorship risk by keeping the vast majority of protocol USDC deposited into large pools such as Compound or Aave. In the long term, Volt Protocol will support a wide diversity of on and off chain yield strategies to allow the system to expand and contract smoothly regardless of market conditions.

Dollars, Ethers, and Bears, oh my! was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The original Volt Scaling Price Oracle adjusted the VOLT price to track inflation. A fixed interest rate means a variable level of risk — when the inflation rate is 8% for a few months, the protocol must deploy capital in higher risk venues to outperform. If the risk outweighs the greater return, this harms rather than helps VOLT holders.

The new floating rate allows for VOLT holders and VCON market governors to reach a supply and demand equilibrium for yield and risk. In the future market governance will dynamically adjust rates based on the actual yield earned by the protocol in underlying venues, the utilization rate, and the current size of the system surplus. This will require keeping track on chain of how much PCV the system has and the yield it has accrued, similar to the concept of “time weighted average price” in a Uniswap pool.

Market governance is a complex system under active development (stay tuned for the Volt Whitepaper 2.0 release in the coming weeks). Since it will take several months to implement and thoroughly secure market governance, the Volt Protocol team implemented a placeholder oracle update to take the pressure of a fixed rate off of the system in the meantime.

The temporary system includes an immutable contract and a pass-through that can be pointed to a new oracle by governance. Until the market governance system with dynamic yield oracle is complete, governance can periodically adjust the rate (similar to MakerDAO rate adjustments). The initial rate (prior to Volt depositing PCV in a yield venue) is set to 0.6% APR, the trailing one month Aave DAI deposit rate. After the first month, the rate based on the actual yield earned by Volt Protocol in the underlying venues as calculated using a one month trailing average.

This update fixes the currently too-low VOLT price on Arbitrum, replacing the old and mispriced Arbitrum CPI oracle with the new rate and price in sync with mainnet VOLT. Redemptions were always available on Arbitrum, while VOLT minting was disabled to prevent users from minting at a discount. Both minting and redemption can proceed at the correct target price following this update. The Arbitrum PSM will be “refilled” with mintable VOLT by Friday, stay tuned for Discord and Twitter announcements.

This upgrade served as a proof of concept for Volt Protocol’s new audit and code security framework. The core of this system is a network of auditors who are called upon to conduct extensive reviews of the Volt Protocol codebase whenever changes to the system are made. Five external developers across three organizations participated in auditing the oracle update. In scope were the code changes associated with the oracle and a governance update of Volt’s system roles. Access audit reports here:

• Report by Kyle Trusler
• Report by bookland.eth

No issues of medium security or above were discovered in the code in scope for the audit, including the oracle. During the review process, auditors discovered a potential issue in previously audited, live code that was also fixed.

The Volt Protocol software development process consists of internal specification, external review of specifications, implementation of software, tests, governance proposals, as well as internal reviews and external team audits. If any issue, regardless of severity is found, the entire review process is repeated. Along with line by line pair programming review of all relevant code by auditors, the security process included differential testing with Forge, reimplementation of the LERP algorithm and verification of all inputs and outputs across 6000 periods, and fuzz testing in mainnet and arbitrum integration tests to ensure correct functioning before and after the upgrade.

As we work toward implementing a complex system like market governance, Volt Protocol seeks to build the strongest security culture in the industry. If you are a Solidity developer or security specialist, consider participating in the Volt Protocol audit network, where you will be paid for your time as well as receive bounties for discovered vulnerabilities.

VOLT Floating Rate Update was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Volt Protocol’s goal is a neutral stable value currency that works for everyone.

Volt 1.0 tracks the US CPI-U, an inflation measurement focused on expenses of urban consumers. The danger of a fixed rate is that under certain market conditions, it forces the protocol to either take excessive risk or run at a loss.

One of the motivating principles behind Volt is market governance — as much as possible about the system should be determined by market forces rather than arbitrary human decision making. This means that the ones who should decide on VOLT’s yield target are its users. High inflation doesn’t mean that VOLT holders want to be exposed to higher risk.

The Volt Protocol core contributors are working on a floating rate update, which will adjust Volt’s yield rate based on utilization, liquidity needs, and the yield available within whitelisted venues. For example, the rate might go down when VOLT is close to the supply ceiling to allow the system reserves to accumulate faster and allow further expansion. Alternatively, it might go up when the protocol’s liquid backing is below target to encourage more users to mint. Currently all of VOLT’s PCV is in liquid venues, but this will be important for the protocol to access less liquid yield sources in the future. These might include fixed rate term lending, real world assets, or minting of VOLT through lending markets instead of by the PSM.

It is estimated that the floating rate update will take two months to complete development and audit cycles. Some other updates will likely come through at the same time (more on this soon! hint: stablecoin holders deserve a say in governance).

A temporary fixed rate patch will go into effect on July 15 [edit: the patch will go into effect no earlier than July 15, most likely within a week of that date] to constrain Volt’s yield rate to that actually available in the underlying venues. The rate will depend on which yield venues pass the final review process. Aave, Compound, Euler, Centrifuge, Liquity, and other protocols are being evaluated for Volt PCV deposit whitelisting. The list of whitelisted yield venues and the new rate that will last until the floating rate update takes effect will be announced next week.

Along with the fixed rate patch, mint fees for VOLT will be eliminated on Ethereum mainnet.

There will be an audit contest of the fixed rate patch code prior to release — stay tuned for announcement and we look forward to your participation or help spreading the word.

Please join us in Discord for our community call today Friday July 1 at 3PM PST, or any time to ask questions about these changes and the direction for Volt Protocol.

VOLT July Update was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

gm

Last Sunday was my first proper day off in — well, let’s not dwell on that part. It felt great to rest in the sunshine and read a book. I managed to devour George Selgin’s Less than Zero between family time, gardening, and walking my dog.

Tldr on the book —

The current debate among mainstream economists is basically about whether there ought to be a constant low inflation rate (1–4%) or no inflation at all. As we find ourselves with more than 8% inflation and the Fed working to ratchet us back down to “normalcy”, it’s a good time to consider what the proper goal should be.

Most of us in crypto agree that persistently declining value isn’t a good property for money to have.

Selgin argues that rather than targeting zero inflation, the proper target is a “productivity norm” in which deflation occurs in proportion to real improvements in productivity (that portion of economic growth which is not due to a growing population). This would mean deflation of 1–3% per year instead of the steady inflation that has occurred in fact.

My thoughts —

Strongly agreed! The gains of technological improvement can be distributed to all through steady reductions in cost for goods and services.

We chose to define VOLT as a zero inflation unit of account which is fully liquid. VOLT can be considered analogous to a gold coin. The full supply of VOLT can be redeemed for its backing, like melting the coins back to bullion.

The next step to this could be the creation of ibVOLT, a deflationary unit of account which is mostly liquid. ibVOLT can be considered analogous to a deposit receipt for gold currency which bears interest. ibVOLT could be redeemed for VOLT, but within limits — the “bank” doesn’t keep all of the gold in reserve, some is lent out elsewhere. There is a determined rate at which the ibVOLT supply can be redeemed, and it would remain fully backed. This would be transparent and auditable in real time on chain, making it much better than the real world banking system.

It’s exciting to think about stablecoins as the proving ground for centuries of debate about monetary policy.

There have been a couple changes in the launch process —

Initially, the plan was to allow issuance of 30m VOLT through Fuse (debt issuance in which users deposit collateral and borrow VOLT) and 10m VOLT through the Peg Stability Module (PSM), in which users swap with the protocol using stablecoins, during the guarded launch.

Volt Protocol is going through the TRIBE DAO governance process to receive a loan of 10m FEI. This will serve as a liquidity backstop as VOLT builds up its own surplus buffer. Until the 10m FEI is deposited, it won’t be safe to issue VOLT outside of the PSM, as liquidity is not guaranteed if there is more circulating VOLT than available FEI for redemption. Volt Protocol mandates that a surplus of at least 20% exists in the system to ensure VOLT liquidity.

As a result, there will be no VOLT issuance in Fuse on launch day. The governance process will complete next week, and VOLT will then become available to borrow in the FeiRari DAO Fuse Pool #8.

On launch, the only method of VOLT issuance will be the PSM, where users can swap FEI for VOLT or vice versa. The fee on the PSM will be 0.15% for VOLT minting and 0 fee for redemption. This means that if you hold VOLT, you can redeem it for the “face value”, with the only cost being gas expenses.

To back the initial supply of 10m VOLT, the Volt Protocol DAO will also seed 500k FEI into the PSM to back VOLT in the early period. With 10m circulating VOLT, this is equal to ~7 months of yield runway at current inflation rate.

Once the further 10m FEI is deposited by the TRIBE DAO, issuance on Fuse will be activated and the PSM debt ceiling can be raised.

It can cost over $100 to mint or redeem VOLT on Ethereum mainnet through the PSM. To facilitate access to a wider audience, Volt Protocol DAO will seed $500k in VOLT liquidity on Uniswap v3. While we hope to provide access on L2 in the future, this is an additional technical lift and won’t be possible until a few weeks after the launch.

Thank you for your interest and participation in VOLT. Please be aware of the risks that come with involvement in any smart contract system, despite the best efforts of its creators, as we “boldly go where no man has gone before”.

This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisors as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any product managed by the Volt Protocol DAO. Any investments or companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by the Volt Protocol DAO, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results.

Launch Details Update was originally published in Volt Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.