Apologies for being quiet lately, Gro DAO has been busy building and will be releasing regular, exciting announcements on Medium in the weeks and months to come.
Introducing G2
Gro DAO unveils G2 — an upgrade to Gro Protocol that comes with lower risk, easier-to-farm fixed yields, no withdrawal fee, and better composability.
Let’s explore its features, and understand how you can use and build on top of G2 today!
Increased Security
Protocol security has been improved through greater simplicity, modularity and additional smart contract audits
DeFi is still early. There’s no silver bullet that provides 100% certainty that a protocol has zero vulnerabilities. It takes thousands of collective steps to build a product that is as secure as possible, starting with the architecture design.
Gro DAO successfully implemented a simplified and revamped architecture for G2 — which modularises each of its vault strategies, tranching, and asset pricing components. Each module is designed to function independently, reducing dependencies and potential unintended consequences. Accordingly, this “less is more” approach significantly improves protocol security.
Smart contract audits are essential to any protocol launch. Gro DAO recognised this importance and accordingly underwent 3 rounds of smart contract auditing on G2, prior to release (this is on top of the 3 audits conducted on the original Gro Protocol!). The Groda Product Pod diligently addressed the recommendations provided in these audits to enhance its code base. You can review these audit reports from Fixed Point Solutions (Kurt Barry), Trail of Bits and yAcademy.
Ensuring G2’s security is not a one-off effort — it requires upkeep from the wider Gro DAO community. Accordingly, Gro Protocol’s $1,000,000 bug bounty on Immunefi will continue to function and cover G2. Hop over to the bug bounty page and check out the new G2 smart contracts to see if you can find any bugs!
PWRD now with Fixed Yield and No Withdrawal Fees
G2 removes all withdrawal fees and provides a fixed yield for the low-risk (PWRD) tranche
The Groda Product Pod performed dozens of interviews with DAO members to understand their requirements. During these interactions, several users expressed concerns about using products that locked up their liquidity with withdrawal fees. This prevented them from flexibly moving their liquidity around whenever they wanted to chase new sources of yield.
Following the G2 upgrade, the protocol no longer has any withdrawal fees for either PWRD or Vault. Users can now deposit and withdraw whenever they want — allowing PWRD to be an easy place to park liquidity while thinking about where to go next, OR a place to store liquidity indefinitely and generate yield from the Curve strategies… all the while being protected. The user decides!
Some users appreciated the simplicity of PWRD’s value proposition but thought that yield volatility added unnecessary complexity. In response to this, PWRD’s value proposition has been further simplified and now offers a governance-controlled fixed APY. The rate is set at a DAO-determined rate of 2% (excluding GRO incentives) and can be adjusted through DAO governance.
These enhancements have made the Gro Protocol more user-friendly, predictable, and cost-effective for users.
Increased Composability
Anyone can now build their own tranches on top of G2!
The DeFi ecosystem has always been founded on the principle of composability, which permits people and protocols to build on top of one another, like a carefully crafted stack of building blocks.
G2 is designed to enable any ERC-4626 standard vault token (a standard to optimise and unify the technical parameters of yield-bearing tokens) to leverage its infrastructure, thereby allowing anyone to easily use G2 to tranche any tokenised vault. Accordingly, vault tokens built with the ERC-4626 standard from other DeFi protocols, such as Frax and Balancer, are automatically composable with G2! Therefore, builders now have the ability to specify the basket of assets that are being tranched, effectively enabling them to deploy their own tranches. As such, the app.gro.xyz dApp is just a reference implementation of G2’s tranching mechanisms that uses a set of Convex/Curve strategies to generate yield. This reference implementation uses the 3CRV (DAI, USDC, USDT) token as its base for an ERC-4626 vault… but to reiterate, G2 can be deployed for any base token with an accompanying ERC-4626 vault.
Furthermore, G2 will not have any smart contract block. In the first version of Gro protocol, a smart contract block was put in place as a safety mechanism to protect against flash loan attacks, which required whitelisting of other protocols to allow transactions. With G2's improved security model, this blocker is no longer needed, so all wallets are now free to transact with G2’s smart contracts (including smart contract wallets like Safe — hello DAO treasuries!).
You can start building on top of G2 today. With the launch of Gro Protocol’s new architecture, its GitHub is also open for all to explore. Check out the GitHub repository to get familiar with its code base and suggest changes you’d like to make for Gro to grow further!
Getting Involved
You can contribute to the development of Gro Protocol today!
The new architecture of Gro DAO’s yield and risk tranching protocol has laid the foundation for it to become a building block for builders to tranche whatever yield token they want. As the space matures, it needs tools for empowering more users to find and even build their own products in DeFi.
Gro DAO aims to continue filling the gaps in DeFi. You can join this decentralised organisation in its journey of innovating and building more tools for different users and use cases. Reach out to the DAO on Discord to learn more about how you can help build right away!
This article is for informational purposes only. It is not legal, tax, financial, or other advice. All of the products mentioned are speculative and involve risks. Refrain from taking action solely based on the information in this article. Please do your own research, make your own financial decisions, and/or seek independent financial advice from a licensed person. None of the information included in this article is an endorsement of the strategies mentioned.
All software developed by Gro DAO are tools that can be used to access and/or operate various DeFi protocols. Accordingly, users of Gro DAO products continue to be in control of their assets and decide how to manage them with the help of these tools.
