Yearly Recap — 2020 (pandemic edition)
2020 was definitely a hell of a year, not only for Jarvis alone but for the DeFi as a whole. In this article, we wanted to summarise our journey for the past 12 months.
Margineum
Starting point
Our original project was to build a trustless and non-custodial trading platform to trade CFD (on Forex, Stocks, Indexes etc.) with DAI. After launching a testnet in august 2019, and after penetrations tests led by Amitas, the MVP was launched on the mainnet in a closed-beta in February 2020 and generated $50M of volume last year.
A new beginning
To go from an MVP, which required trust and was custodial, to a fully trustless platform, we hired two developers who immediately started working on increasing the trustlessness and safeness of Margineum.
Roadblock
Unfortunately, in May, we had to refocus our resources elsewhere! We split our team: while one dev (Asim) kept working on a new backend infrastructure for a few months, increasing its scalability and security, the other one (Alessandro), our Blockchain engineer had to move to work on Synthereum.
Eventually, in September, a shift of priority led us to put all the dev power towards Synthereum, stopping all the work on Margineum.
Margineum never became trustless nor non-custodial, and therefore we kept it away from the public. That does not mean it will stay like that. We started building it in 2019 when L2 solutions were a mere dream… it is not the case anymore…
Synthereum (Synthetic Protocol)
A fortunate accident
“Can we trade with EUR or CHF instead of DAI?”
This was first feedback from our European beta testers trying Margineum. This led us to start working on a side-project, a protocol to mint EUR, which turned later into something bigger: the Synthereum protocol.
We had a dream
While Synthereum was not our original project, it helped us to deliver the vision we initially sold to our very first supporters in 2017!
We envisioned that Blockchain could enable the trading of any assets within the same ledger, and could make these assets usable, interoperable, composable…
“Pay your meal with your McDonalds tokenized stocks”… “trade Forex with a DAI collateral”… “borrow CHF with a collateral in tokenized oil”… were the first words of our former website(s) and whitepaper(s).
Of course, back then, the technology, our knowledge and our experience prevented us from working on such value proposition, until synthetic assets on Ethereum became a thing, led by Maker and Synthetix.
A bigger upside
While Margineum allows trading derivatives with leverage — a huge addressable and competitive market — Synthereum can prosper in an underrated and under-addressed niche and can become one of the most essential building blocks of DeFi, upon which many protocols and Dapps will be built on.
The dream come true
After drafting a whitepaper explaining how our synthetic assets, coined “SynFiat”, and later rebranded for jSynths, we launched a first version on the testnet using Chainlink and UMA V1 in February 2020.
This first version was supposed to be launched on the mainnet after several audits, but at the same time, UMA delivered their new priceless framework months before we thought they would, and we decided not to launch but to start building on their new solution.
Honestly, this was a mistake. We should have launched our first version with Chainlink and UMA v1 (we would have had to fork their protocol since they depreciated it), but at least we would have launched way before! We were wrongly thinking that transitionning from their v1 to their v2 was a matter of weeks.
Roadblocks
In May, we had to say goodbye to William, our contractor developer who worked with us on Synthereum since day 1, and who contributed to it like we would have never dreamed of. Will was an excellent developer, but also a giga-brain who came up with many solutions to the problems we faced while developing the protocol. Will had to focus 100% on his own project, APY.finance, leaving us with an orphan.
This is when we asked Alessandro, our in-house Blockchain engineer, to take over his work. This changed a lot our plans since the latter was working on Margineum, and was supposed to work on our DAO. He had to spend time learning about UMA and Will’s code, which unfortunately made us lose a lot of time.
Price feed roundabout.
The most sensitive part of a synthetic asset protocol is the price feed.
Initially, we were using on-chain price feed delivered by the industry-leader Chainlink! But, due to the design of Synthereum, liquidity providers were facing front-running issue, which we solved by removing the on-chain price feed for an off-chain matching engine ala 0x with meta-signature. This solution is scalable, gas-efficient and allows real-time price feed, but requires trust and can be shut-down, downgrading our protocol from pure DeFi to a grey area between CeFi and DeFi.
Decentralizing this solution could be done, but will require a lot of time, effort, money and resources. We, therefore, decided to move back with Chainlink.
That does not mean we will give away our innovative solution. We will keep working on decentralizing it, but more as a research and development product.
UMA limitations
For Synthereum, UMA is both a helper and a blocker. It is a helper because it provides a near-perfect framework to build synthetic assets. Any project willing to build synthetic assets should definitely use them.
Yet, for Synthereum it is a blocker because it is not a malleable framework. Synthereum was designed leveraging from the way the first version of UMA worked; the priceless framework of UMA and their new set of contracts required a lot of additional code on our end to work around some limitations.
For example, UMA did not provide perpetual contracts, while our assets are perpetual; their contracts were permissionless while we needed them to be permissioned (only our contract should be able to mint synthetics); they could not support interest-bearing token as collateral while we were using cDAI and aDAI to back our assets; etc.
UMA to the rescue
We spent days brainstorming on these issues, ending up finding solutions for each of them, writing technical requirements and almost hiring an external team to help us resolve them. We estimated that it would have required at least 3 months of work.
But, UMA came to our rescue! They added support for interest-bearing token and invited us to modify their contract to fit our needs and to propose them to their governance.
Synthereum v1 on kovan
Thanks to the UMA help, we caught up with the delay we suffered from Will’s departure and successfully launched on the Kovan testnet in October!
Live test on Kovan
During the testnet we decided to experiment arbitrages between Jarvis Dex and Uniswap to keep the jSynths on-the-peg! We listed all our jSynths against USDC on Uniswap and asked our community to undertake arbitrage to showcase one of the key features of Synthereum: anyone can sell a jSynth back to Synthereum for its exact value in USDC.
Long live USDC
With the rise of farming and several issues with Maker, it was decided to switch from DAI to USDC.
USDC carries centralized risk which outweighs systemic and technical risks associated with DAI.
$JRT
Initiation
JRT had a crazy ride this year. We listed it on Uniswap in January at $0.1 and our public ICO bounty participants were in a hurry to sell their tokens in a low-liquid market, immediately dragging the price all the way to the $0.001, from where it bounced and ranged from 0.004 to 0.008 for few months.
First milestones
Inspired by Synthetix, we decided to start our own liquidity mining program on Uniswap with 10k JRT per day for the LPs. Within a day the liquidity grew from $400 to $1k, then to $10k, and eventually to $40k within three months. By March, JRT liquidity reached $80k which was a huge amount for us back then.
Lucky strike
We started doing AMA sessions to spread the word about Jarvis in May. Some gem hunters may have spotted us at this time and started speaking about it in /biz. Those posts were highly inaccurate but made our token pump to 0.024 before the inevitable dump... back to 0.01, $JRT bounced back and started an insane uptrend which ended at $0.3 after the listing on Bitmax.
These movements attracted both desired and undesired attention! It allowed us to raise much-needed funds but completely killed our “stealth-mode dev” mode.
Aftermath
Coinciding with DeFi bubble burst, our article about the token release schedule scared the market which pushed back the price of JRT below the $0.1 mark.
Listings
JRT was listed on several exchanges. We got listed on Bitmax (a tier-2 centralized exchange), IDEX and Switcheo (semi-decentralized exchange) as well as on few 3-tier centralized exchange who listed our token on their own will (hotbit, bilaxy, hoo, etc).
$JRT was of course listed on various AMMs like Uniswap v1 and v2, Bancor v1 and v2, Balancer and Sushiswap, as well as on Dex aggregators such as Paraswap.io, 1inch.exchange, Matcha.xyz or and dex.ag.
Results
$JRT finished the year at the $0.07 mark.
As a team, generally, we do not pay attention to the price. Yet, we cannot deny the fact that it is quite inspiring and motivating to see all the attention and the ever-increasing number of holders.
Jarvis exchange
As we switched our focus to Synthereum we needed a Uniswap-like dead-simple Dex to buy, sell and exchange synthetic assets. We hired two contracts to work on it.
Jarvis Wallet
A short life
Jarvis Wallet was outsourced to Unilogin and was launched on mainnet by the end of 2019; facing several difficulties the company seized all operations leaving us with an incomplete wallet.
But an exciting one
Although we had to put this project on hold, the MVP served as a fiat onramp for our community, thanks to the integration with Ramp Network. We facilitated around $70k of crypto purchase through our wallet! And with 0 fees!
To finance such an endeavor we created an incentive program, where people redirect their interest from stablecoins deposited on Aave to us.
What’s next?
We had several discussions with the Tor.us team, to use their white-label solution to re-launch the Jarvis wallet. We will be working on it later next year.
Treasury
Jarvis started 2020 with very limited capital left from the $290k it raised during public fundraising which took place during crypto winter. We started to raise funds in March with the goal of raising at least $200k.
JRT craze
From March to May, we successfully raised around $100k. Finally, thanks to the unexpected fame caused by the $JRT price pump, the private sale was oversubscribed: we are proud to have raised $1.3M USD among our loyal community, individuals, crypto whales, well-known DeFi personalities, and some crypto-funds.
DeFi Summer
The farming-craze, DeFi-bubble and retroactive airdrops have allowed us to grow our treasury to over $2.5M (75% stablecoins, 25% DeFi tokens, Ether and Bitcoin).
Farming and various investments are currently generating more revenues than our burning rate. Somehow, the Jarvis company is self-sustainable for now.
Team
We started 2020 severally understaffed with a single in-house developer; Margineum MVP, and Jarvis Wallet were developed by external teams. The priority of 2020 was to hire, but due to monetary constraints, we limited ourselves and could not hire more than two developers.
Hiring process
After our successful fundraising, we worked with a couple of head-hunter companies and posted advertisements on several websites. We did not receive interesting candidates through the summer, and had to wait until September to start having an influx of candidates.
Yet, it was not productive. We finally decided to change our strategy and to hire two contractors who are currently working on the front-end.
At the end of the year, we finally hired an in-house full-stack developper. Yet we could not find a Blockchain developer.
DeFi meet-ups
Education is the key acquisition strategy for us!
As part of the funding members of the French-speaking DeFi group “DeFi-France”, Pascal animated and participated to several DeFi meetups. This helped him being seen as one of the figures of DeFi in France, leading him to raise the awareness about Jarvis within the french crypto community.
Incentive programs
Throughout the year we launched 2 incentive programs: a Liquidity provision program started in January with Uniswap and Bancor, and followed by Balancer in June, and a Sponsoring one with Aave.
In August it was decided to gradually reduce the incentives to limit the inflation.
Statistics
Overall, Jarvis gave out almost 9M $JRT through these reward programs. 6,949,375 JRT went to the liquidity providers on Uniswap, Bancor, and Balancer, and 2,019,000 JRT were given to the Aave sponsoring pool participants.
The sponsoring pool managed to collect $24,903 this year, $4,177 of which will be given to those in need through various charities, which leaves us with $20,726 to finance our future 0-fee fiat gateway (as of today we can finance up to $1,184,373 of crypto purchase).
Vsevolod.
The possibilities are limitless
Join us in Discord
Find out more on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Discuss on our Bitcointalk
Stalk us on Instagram
And visit us at jarvis.network
⛔ Risk Warning: Investing in digital financial assets involves a high degree of risk and volatility and is not suitable for all investors; do not risk more money than you can afford to lose. Please consult an independent professional financial or legal advisor to make sure the product is right for you.
⛔ Disclaimer: This article contains text, data, graphics, photographs, illustrations and information (“Information”) connected with Jarvis International and/or other entities part of the Jarvis group ( “Jarvis”). Jarvis attempts to ensure Information is accurate, however, Information is provided “AS IS” and on an “AS AVAILABLE” basis and may not be accurate or up to date. The publication of this article does not represent solicitation by Jarvis of buying the token “Jarvis Reward Token” and is not to be considered as a recommendation by Jarvis as to the suitability of any investment, if any, herein described. No action should be taken or omitted to be taken in reliance upon Information in this document. Jarvis accepts no liability for the results of any action taken on the basis of the Information.
